It should change everything, what we do here.

Today we celebrate Corpus Christi, this great feast of Christ’s body and Christ’s blood. The culmination, in a liturgical sense, of all the feasts we’ve kept before—ever since Christmas—Corpus Christi whispers to us how close the Christ of all these feasts is. Christ born for us; Christ baptized for us, suffered and died for us, risen for us: Corpus Christi whispers the truth that he is on this altar, that he gives himself to you. None of this is just a story; you may consume this Christ of the Trinity, this God from God, this light from light. He is also food, body and blood. Which is why it should change everything. For types and shadows have had their ending; the newer rite is here, and hopefully, the new us too. That is, if the Eucharist has changed us. If we’ve allowed it to change us.

It’s a strange truth, no doubt, but ancient, older than other truths, newer too, resting quietly in this noisy world. That’s what we celebrate today—this miracle of God. God has always fed his people: mystically on the mountain, on a table in the wilderness, in a new covenant.[1] And, of course, it’s an intimate thing, feeding each person, touching each heart—uniquely, like the touch and communion of lovers. It is a beautiful thing; you adorers of the Blessed Sacrament know this. Saint John Paul II said of the Eucharist that it was “the merciful and redeeming transformation of the world in the human heart.”[2] This is how it begins—the changing of everything—in the taste of the sacrament, the silence of adoration, the strange spiritual warmth of God’s nearness. If you know, you know. If you don’t, well, quiet yourself and seek it. Because, as I said, it’s beautiful. It’ll change you.

But, to be sure, it’s more than that. It’s also liberation and communion, that is, justice and charity. This too is what it looks like when finally everything is changed—that is, if God has anything to do with it. Otherwise it’s a fraud, manmade, destined to fail. Not only did God feed the elders upon the mountain, showing himself to them mysteriously, God also liberated them by that Passover food.[3] “This is how you are to eat it,” God said to them, “like those who are in flight.”[4] That is, not only is the food God gives his people intimate and mystical, divine food just for you, it’s also always food for freedom; it’s food that always liberates—not just on occasion, always; not just you, everyone. Sometimes it’s so small, this freedom, it’s hard to see, hard to believe. Like in Graham Greene’s great novel, The Power and the Glory, when the whiskey priest preaches to those Mexican peasants—“Heaven is here,” the priest says to them—one could easily call the priest a fool.[5] But what if he isn’t? What if he’s preaching liberation to those who will be free? What if all preaching should be like that? What if every celebration of the Eucharist should be like that—always the proclamation of the freedom God gives us?

And what if we realized that the Eucharist should also always create communion and not division? I can’t help but wonder if we’ve never really learned the Corinthian lesson, never learned what Paul was trying to teach Christians in Corinth when he pleaded with them to “wait for one another.”[6] In Corinth the rich didn’t wait for the poor, you see; they celebrated the Eucharist, not caring that their poorer brothers and sisters couldn’t be there. They claimed to be one in Christ, but Paul called them out on it; they most certainly weren’t one in Christ, Paul said—clearly, by the way they acted, by not waiting for each other. The distinctions of the world had infected the Church, he said. Christians in Corinth had failed to “discern the body,” that is, they had failed to realize the reality of the communion they had in Christ.[7] Therefore, Paul said that when they gathered, “it is not to eat the Lord’s supper.”[8] The Eucharist wasn’t failing them; rather, they were failing the Eucharist. And it had become dangerous for them, Paul said. Because they didn’t see how the Eucharist was supposed to change everything; they were too singularly enamored with the Eucharist as mere devotion, you see, thinking it something only personal and not also revolutionarily communal.

And so, these are the questions: What are we doing? What has the Eucharist changed? What hasn’t the Eucharist changed? Today, of course, is Father’s day, so happy Father’s Day. It’s also Juneteenth. Now a federal holiday, that should make Texans proud. Juneteenth commemorates General Order No. 3, given by Major General Gordon Granger on June 19, 1865 informing enslaved African Americans they were no longer enslaved. Days before Granger even landed at Galveston, Black men working on the docks watched the horizon, singing and shouting in joyful anticipation. Celebrated—especially in churches—throughout Texas and the South for more than a century, today it’s a federal holiday; and that’s a good thing.[9]

But also—I don’t know—thinking about Juneteenth causes me to put these questions, these eucharistic questions, to my own world, my own country, my own community. Now, brothers and sisters, I know this is sensitive and difficult—issues of race and racism—so please know how much I love you all and respect you all and that I speak with no agenda. It’s just I think in relation to race and racism in America and among us, we must ask these questions, painful and probing as they may be: What has the Eucharist changed? What hasn’t the Eucharist changed?

Because I think we must take the words of James Baldwin seriously. For about the history and reality of racism in our country, about our part in it, too many of us simply “do not know it and do not want to know it.”[10] Like so many things in our life together as a nation, we don’t want to talk about it; we’re not good at talking about it. We don’t know and don’t want to know, and we start shouting at each other too quickly, villainizing each other, not listening to each other at all. We say it has nothing to do with us, but that misses the mystical truth, the truth Wendell Berry discovered, meditating on those enslaved by his great-grandfather: “I am owned by the blood of all of them/ who ever were owned by my blood. We cannot be free of each other.”[11] Indeed, we’re all in this together whether we like it or not. But we don’t want to talk about it. I really had thought—since at least George Floyd’s murder—that maybe we could have some genuine conversations about race in America, without any sort of name-calling or hatred—just conversation. I tried to start a conversation or two here, but failed. It all got too politicized, I guess. For me, at least, it’s been profoundly depressing how little we’ve learned, how little we want to learn or even talk about. I mean, I haven’t even said anything yet, and already I’m sure I’ve made some people mad; already, I’m sure I’ll hear it from one or two of you. But again, I can’t help but think of James Baldwin, his haunting words about why he finally left the church; because it seemed to him, he wrote, that “the transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door.” “When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that that meant everybody,” he said.[12] But it didn’t seem true. What the followers of Christ said of themselves didn’t ring true in the way they lived their lives, it seemed to him. Now again, I love you all, and I’m mostly talking about myself. But this haunts me, and I think it should haunt each of us a little; these questions should haunt us. Regarding racism in America: What has the Eucharist changed? What hasn’t the Eucharist changed? We should ask these questions here too. That is, if any of it’s real.

In this city, very early in the previous century, we Catholics were hated by many. The Klan (incredibly powerful in Dallas) hated us; many of our Protestant brothers and sisters hated us too. One reason is that Catholics in Dallas were often progressive about matters of race. At the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, when the diocese established St. Peter’s, a parish for Blacks in the State-Thomas district, and when the Ursuline Sisters helped Mary and Valentine Jordan, both Baptists and former slaves, establish a school for Black children—called St. Peter’s Academy—many in this city thought it was the end of the world, thinking it would bring about an “invasion” of Black priests “to help kill white Americanism.” A few decades later many would lose their minds again when some nuns opened up a clinic for Mexican migrants and also a kindergarten for their children, offering free breakfast. The Klan in Dallas thought Catholics were fostering an “alien menace.”[13] Thinking of our own parish’s history, I’ve often wondered what people thought of Clarence and Ann Laws. Some of you will remember them. Clarence was for many years the NAACP field director here in Dallas. He organized and marched with Dr. King in Washington and Selma; he was also on the commission to integrate Dallas schools. In Dallas he was known as “Mr. Civil Rights.” Ann, his wife, was a Catholic school teacher, also a member of the NAACP, an activist in her own right. And they were also St. Rita parishioners.[14] And I’m sure they made some of us uncomfortable, but I’m also sure they made us a better parish.

Now, I bring all this up simply to bring forward a little of our history—very human history, of course, imperfect—in order to suggest to you that this belongs to what it means to ask how the Eucharist should change us. In Dallas, in this parish, this is how it changed us: by making us the sorts of people who risked creating the sorts of communities that transcended divisions—not perfectly, as I said, but which at least were a start. And the point is that what Catholics did in this city a century ago was, of course, a matter of justice but also a matter of Eucharist. They understood what the Eucharist meant, that all should be loved and cared for and respected—Blacks, Whites, Mexicans, Africans, Lebanese. You see what I’m saying? That’s my point. The Eucharist must be brought to bear upon the questions that haunt us today, many of them the same questions our ancestors struggled either to answer or ignore—questions of race and racism, questions about poverty and hatred. Believe it or not, the Eucharist matters to these issues, desperately in fact. That’s my point, that we, as eucharistic people, should lean into these questions rather than avoid them. I don’t know. I love how the Church is starting to talk about “National Eucharistic Revival”—I think that’s great. I just think it needs to mean more than perhaps what we think it does. I just think such revival should change everything—not just what we do in here, but in the world too. Everything. If, that is, we really believe it. Amen.

[1][1] Exodus 24:1-11; Psalm 23:5; Luke 22:20

[2] Pope Saint Paul II, Dominicae Cenae 7

[3] Exodus 24:9-11; Exodus 12:1-20

[4] Exodus 12:11

[5] Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory, 69-70

[6] 1 Corinthians 11:33

[7] 1 Corinthians 11:29

[8] 1 Corinthians 11:20

[9] Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth, 124, 134

[10] James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 5

[11] Wendell Berry, “My Great-Grandfather’s Slaves,” New Collected Poems, 62

[12] Ibid., 39-40

[13] Michael Phillips, White Metropolis, 93-94

[14] See: https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/laws-clarence-alvert

© 2022 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield