Learning words: understanding Eucharist

Monday, April 3rd, 2023

How did we learn to read?

We might remember putting sounds to the letters of the alphabet and then trying to make those sounds into words.

We struggled.

We made mistakes.

Then what happened?

One day it all came together.

We could read, but we didn’t know how it happened.

Those words held hands with each other to give us information.

Reading was like talking without noise.

I’ve spoken with many people about the way words seemed to suddenly come together to make meaning None of us knows how this happens.

We share the same childhood experience: we were struggling to understand words, and then suddenly, we could read books.

Maybe that’s a good analogy or spiritual awareness.

For some of us, there is a time when we participate in the Mass, like children reciting the alphabet.

We know what to say.

We know what to do.

In between, we smile at the people around us, note that dear old Alf has shaved off his beard, and see that the family in the third pew have another child.

These observations happen while we recite words that are as familiar as our phone number and address.

However, Holy Communion is different.

That’s the time when everything goes still.

Bread and wine come alive within us.

Somehow, they turn to light and that light is like a steady candle flame.

Then that moment is over.

There is movement. Announcements. The last hymn. Conversations on the way to the door. Hello and goodbye.

We go home with a collection of experiences, some big, some small. They rattle around in the mind.

One day it happens.

It all comes together.

We sit between prayer-soaked walls, hearing the words of the Mass with our hearts.

There is a sense of Oneness.

Our priest, our people, our children, our prayers and hymns, are all inside us.

They too, are all part of Holy Communion.

Everything has come together and the feeling of Oneness is so big, we don’t want to name it.

But it feels like the ‘Is-ness’of Jesus the Word made Flesh.

We take the feeling home with us, knowing it is gift.

And the gift will happen again.

We have learned to read the Mass.

Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator. Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.