The Gate of Heaven and the Door to the Eucharist
Those who pray the Litany of Loreto know that Gate of Heaven is one of Mary’s titles. Gate is a sturdy word signifying a reality recognized in every time and in every place. Whether a steel barrier secured by a lock and key or a shepherd lying in the opening of an enclosure, his body the gate between the flock and its predators, all people everywhere know of gates and their functions. Mary will be the means of egress, the way by which Jesus leaves her womb and goes into the world to call it to the Father. Through her faithful witness on earth and her prayers before the throne of God in heaven, Mary became the entrance into life with Christ. And, like the poorest shepherd, Mary’s body will be the gate. In the infancy narratives of Luke’s Gospel, Mary’s body as the gate is recognized by angelic and mortal beings alike. The angel Gabriel recognizes Mary as the Gate of Heaven when he tells her that she will conceive and bear a son, who,
Will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. (Luke 1:32-33).
Elizabeth recognizes Mary as the Gate of Heaven when she cries out to her cousin, “And how does it happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:43) Even John, Elizabeth’s unborn child, recognizes Mary as the Gate of Heaven. When he hears Mary’s voice, John leaps in his mother’s womb. From Mary will come forth the promise, the restoration, the salvation of the world.
Door is another sturdy word. Yet, doors have a mystery which gates lack. Entrance and egress give way to the boundaries between one reality and another. We can never be sure what we will find when we open a door. It is, after all, a closet door, that most ordinary of doors, in an old man’s house which opens onto the kingdom of Narnia for the young Peter, Susan, Lucy, and Edmund in C.S. Lewis’s classic tale. “Who is there?” we ask when we hear a knock at the door. We ask before we open because the very act of opening the door poses questions: What is waiting for me there? Who is on the other side? Where might this lead? There is a reason doors figure prominently in tales of suspense and horror. Who, or what, is standing behind the door? What lies beyond? Doors speak of openings onto—onto mystery, onto revelation, onto vistas unknown.
And if you have ever helped prepare a child to receive First Holy Communion, you know children are beckoned onto a mysterious door. You are asking them, inviting them, to receive the Body and Blood of Christ into their own bodies, to eat and drink, as Jesus bids his disciples in Matthew’s Gospel:
While they were eating, Jesus took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and giving it to his disciples said, “Take and eat; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which shall be shed on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt 26:26-28).
The only eating of bodies and drinking of blood most second graders have heard whispered under the covers late at night involves zombies. Those children know the wisdom victims in horror movies never seem to learn, “Don’t open that door!” Which is why catechists and parents should be prepared for the objection as it has been shyly posed to me again and again, “I don’t think I want to eat Jesus’ body.” Though the children would not use the word, cannibalism is their concern. We need to show them Mary, the Door to the Eucharist. We need to welcome them to Mary, the Door to the Eucharist, and bid them walk through.
The fear of the Eucharist as cannibalism, fear stoked by stories of ritual gatherings in which human flesh is consumed and human blood drunk, is not a new concern, having been leveled against the Church since the first century. Cannibalism, along with atheism and incest, was one of the three main accusations brought against the early Christian church.
In the second or early third century the Roman lawyer and Christian convert, Marcus Minucius Felix, wrote Octavius, an imagined dialogue held by the shore of Ostia between Octavius, a Roman convert to Christianity, and Caecilius, a pagan. Caecilius gives a speech laying out his objections to Christian practice and Octavius replies. Here is Caecilius on what he calls “this depraved way of life”:
The notoriety of the stories told of the initiation of new recruits is matched by their ghastly horror. A young baby is covered over with flour, the object being to deceive the unwary. It is then served before the person to be admitted into their rites. The recruit is urged to inflict blows onto it—they appear to be harmless because of the covering of flour. Thus the baby is killed with wounds that remain unseen and concealed. It is the blood of this infant—I shudder to mention it—it is this blood that they lick with thirsty lips; these are the limbs they distribute eagerly; this is the victim by which they seal their covenant; it is by complicity in this crime that they are pledged to mutual silence. These are their rites, more foul than all sacrileges combined.
Octavius answers Caecilius, “There is a man I should now like to address, and that is the one who claims, or believes, that our initiations take place by means of the slaughter and blood of a baby.” He turns the accusation on his opponent, reminding him that it is the Roman, and not the Christian practice, “to expose your very own children to birds and wild beasts, or at times to smother and strangle them, . . . and there are women who swallow drugs to stifle in their own wombs the beginnings of a man to be.” He goes on to accuse the gods of Rome, naming Saturn as one who devoured his own children and whose followers sacrifice their children to him. He defends the Church against the charge of child murder, but he never discusses or defends the eucharistic practices. He never answers the question of what distinguishes consuming the Body of Christ and drinking the Blood of Christ from cannibalism.
Around 176 A.D. a Greek philosopher and convert to Christianity named Athenagoras writes a letter addressed to “the Emperors Marcus Aurelius Anoninus and Lucius Aurelius Commodus.” He writes them as “conquerors of Armenia and Sarmatia, and more than all, philosophers.” He means to present a convincing argument, “to lay a statement of our case before you,” as to why Christians should “cease to be assailed.”
Most of the letter addresses the charge of atheism. Athenagoras writes:
But to us, who distinguish God from matter, and teach that matter is one thing and God another, and that they are separated by a wide interval (for that the Deity is uncreated and eternal, to be beheld by the understanding and reason alone, while matter is created and perishable), is it not absurd to apply the name of atheism?
He then turns to the charge of incest, what he calls “Edipodean intercourse.” Again, his answer is direct:
According to age, we recognize some as sons and daughters, others we regard as brothers and sisters, and to the more advanced in life we give the honor due to fathers and mothers. On behalf of those, then, to whom we apply the names of brothers and sisters . . . we exercise the greatest care that their bodies should remain undefiled and uncorrupted.
But what can Athenagoras say to the charge of Christians participating in “Thyestean feasts,” “impious feasts,” that is, cannibalism? He cannot say that Christians do not consume the Body and Blood of Christ. He would be rejecting the very faith of the Church. Where Athenagoras takes direct aim at the charges of atheism and incest, he sidesteps the question of cannibalism, choosing to argue that Christians are not murderers. He writes, “We cannot eat human flesh till we have killed someone.” He continues, “We cannot endure even to see a man put to death, though justly.” Christians cannot enjoy the spectacle of killing as either ritual or entertainment. He asks, “Who does not reckon among things of greatest interest the contests of gladiators and wild beasts, especially those given by you? But we, deeming that to see a man put to death is much the same as killing him, have abjured such spectacles.” In that way it may be said he responds to the accounts like those of Caecilius, stories of infants covered in flour, murdered and consumed. But, like Marcus Minuscius Felix, he never even mentions, to accurately either describe or defend, the eucharistic meal—the reception and consumption of Christ’s Body and Blood—at the heart of his faith and life.
I am interested by these defenses, but unsatisfied. Marcus Minuscius Felix and Athenagoras argue Christians do not murder and so cannot be cannibals, but they do not address how Christians can nevertheless take and receive into their bodies the flesh and blood of the crucified Christ. The objection, whether by second century Romans or second grade Catholic children, is pretty much the same: “We’re going to eat Jesus’ Body and drink his Blood? That seems kind of gross.”
When I get that question, I speak of Mary, the Mother of God. I speak of pregnant Mary, and her unborn child, Jesus. I speak of the mothers of the children before me. I speak of their lives within their mothers’ wombs. And I ask: How were you fed before you were born? How was Jesus fed?
Mary is the door opening onto the mystery of the Eucharist. Mary is also the answer to the charge of cannibalism, whether brought by the ancient Romans or twenty-first-century seven- and eight-year-olds. Because it was Mary who fed Christ that Christ might feed us.
How was Jesus fed and nurtured through the nine months from his conception to his birth? Babies—all babies, Jesus included—receive their necessary nutrition from their mothers through the umbilical cord and the blood, the mother’s blood, which connects the baby and its mother. A baby is literally fed by, and on and in and from, the flesh and blood of its mother.
Is this cannibalism? Cannibalism is when one human devours another. A cannibal eats another up. A life is destroyed. Only one person survives cannibalism. But the mother is not consumed by the baby. She is not diminished. In a healthy pregnancy, that is, most pregnancies, she flourishes and gains weight and lives. Indeed, what is most often said about a pregnant woman is that she is glowing. The relationship between the mother and her unborn child is one of unity, a unity of two distinct beings—distinct in ways as significant as a male child in a female body or a child with a blood type different from her mother’s—distinct and, still, bound as one. In the case of Mary and Jesus, the unity of two distinct beings is even more astonishing, the divine child carried, sheltered, and protected, within a human womb. It is in every case a union of feeding and being fed, a sharing that neither diminishes nor destroys. Rather this sharing gives life, strengthens life, alone makes life possible.
In that relationship of distinction and diversity held in unity, the relationship Mary and the unborn Christ knew, we have a glimpse of the life within the Divine Godhead of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For what is the essential mark of that relationship? It is complete and total sharing. Jesus says, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:7-9). Does that mean the Father is diminished, lessened, because we see him fully in the Son? Jesus says this of the Holy Spirit, “The advocate, the Holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name—he will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you” (John 14:26). Does that mean Jesus has not taught us everything? That Jesus has not revealed the fullness of God? No.
On the contrary, it means that there is a complete and total sharing without decrease or diminishment. The Father is full and complete. The Son is full and complete. The Spirit is full and complete. And so is their sharing.
St. Hilary of Poitiers, fourth-century bishop an doctor of the Church, wrote in On the Trinity, “This unity has no diversity, nor does it matter from whom the thing is received, since that which is given by the Father is counted also as given by the Son.”
I consider those words when I consider my prayer. What name do I call out when I cry out in need? When I praise? Sometimes I call to the Father, other times to the Son and other times to the Spirit. Is a prayer to the Father not heard by the Son and the Holy Spirit? Is a prayer to Jesus not heard by the Father and the Holy Spirit? Is the cry, “Come, Holy Spirit,” not heard by the Father and the Son? Is a prayer to the Father a dismissal of the Son and the Spirit? Is a prayer to the Son a denial of the divinity of the Father and the Spirit? Does a prayer to the Spirit reduce or lessen the authority of the Father and the Son?
No, because they are one. “This unity has no diversity, nor does it matter from whom the thing is received,” Hilary writes, and, I dare to add, does it matter to which member of the Divine Godhead the prayer is addressed—since, as he reminds us, “that which is given by the Father is counted as also given by the Son.” And that which is given by the Father must also be counted as having been given by the Spirit, the amor unitivus duorum, as St. Thomas Aquinas puts it, the love that unites the two.
But it is always hard to imagine life within the Trinity, within the Divine Household of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They are immortal; we are mortal. They are all-powerful; we are weak. Our experiences are earthly and domestic. Here, again, human Mary, Mother Mary, is our guide and our gift. She shows us how the life she shared on earth with her son, Jesus, lifts the veil on the mystery of the heavenly life the Son shares with the Father and the Spirit. And she shows us how that sharing, in which there is neither diminishment nor decrease, never death, but only life and more life, allows us, the children of the living God, to receive and consume, as from our mother, the Body and Blood of Christ.
Mary leads us to the Eucharist, to that place where heaven and earth are joined. She opens the door to the place where Jesus first dwelled, Mary herself the bearer of the promise made to Israel. The unborn Christ found refuge and protection under her flesh, within her womb. The infant Christ found refuge and protection under her cloak, at her breast. In her womb, at her breast, there, every need was met. And we, like Jesus, find refuge in Mary, the Mother of God, and our mother. We, like Jesus, are under her protection. The Door to the Eucharist, Mary fed Christ from her mortal body and blood. And Christ, the Eternal, Immortal and Ever-living God, feeds us.