Thoughts from Mass: Feast of Corpus Christi

I remember when I was looking into the Catholic Church and on my way to becoming Catholic, sitting in the Church one afternoon alone and thinking about the formula "body, blood, soul, and divinity," and thinking that, with all the questions I had had in my life about what's real, here is the one thing at least acknowledging all the different levels of reality to be coped with.

Today at Mass of the Feast of Corpus Christi, I had a new thought. Some have trouble accepting transubstantiation because it's not visible, not empirically verifiable (a bedrock, bottom-line, no-negotiation verification). But maybe that very aspect is what makes it so gripping and makes it hook on for us. There is nothing in this life that IS entirely empirically verifiable, and the more meaningful a thing is, the less subject it is to verification ... like love. If love is concern for the other person, truly caring about them and wishing whatever is truly good for them, the second you turn around and try to verify that you have been loving, you have stopped loving, since you're looking at yourself instead of at them.

It's a bit of what Terry Pratchett masterfully encapsulated in the term "write only memory" in The Hogfather when he has Death trying to explain belief to Hex, the ant-farm computer at Unseen University (because somebody has figured out how to kill the Hogfather, the discworld version of Father Christmas, by killing belief in him ... and if Hogfather dies, according to Death, the sun won't rise tomorrow: a ball of superheated gasses will rise above a terrestrial plane, but that's not the same as what sunrise means to us) ... Hex finally gets it, but in order to get it, Hex says to Death "hold on, I have to open a space of write-only memory." It's a brilliant phrase because it's paradoxical in the Chestertonian sense. We usually think of "memory" as things of the past, and all you can really do is verify them. The phrase is obviously a riff only "read only memory" in technology, and really that is the only logical definition of "memory" in our modern sense. The ancient sense is a little different because the Latin memoria has an aspect in it of sense of self (the sense of who you were that set in motion current events to achieve a desired end in the future; they're wrapped up more tightly in the ancient concept) ... which I do think connects here in that, to have love, you have to be somebody doing the loving and you have to remember who you are in relation to this person, but the point is not scientific verification; the point is in the doing. Even in computers, ROM is the real form of memory in the scientific sense of the word. RAM (random access memory) is for working on things and manipulating them so that you can then put a new version in the ROM to pull out and find info or use info from it etc. The idea of "write ONLY memory" is a complete paradox. But it is what is needed for love.

People talk a lot in religious circles about the evil/danger of agnosticism, but usually it is on the level of the question of whether God exists etc. But I have always thought there is a deeper and more damaging agnosticism ... The Cure's "How Beautiful":

You want to know why I hate you?
Well I'll try and explain
You remember that day in Paris
When we wandered through the rain
And promised to each other
That we'd always think the same
And dreamed that dream
To be two souls as one

And then it tells the story of walking in the rain with his girlfriend, the "you" in the song, and encountering a poor old man with a child on his back and a young boy with him. And he has this epiphany moment about how much real beauty there is hidden in the lives of him and his girlfriend because of how the three stare at them: The father's eyes said "Beautiful! How beautiful you are!"
The boy's eyes said "How beautiful! She shimmers like a star!" The child's eyes uttered nothing
but a mute and utter joy." But this is how the song ends:

I turned to look at you
To read my thought upon your face
And gazed so deep into your eyes
So beautiful and strange
Until you spoke
And showed me understanding is a dream
"I hate these people staring
Make them go away from me!"

And this is why I hate you
And how I understand
That no-one ever knows or loves another
Or loves another

So, to return to the Eucharist, which is often called "the sacrament of love," perhaps this empirically unverifiable concept of the "body, blood, soul, and divinity" of Christ, God incarnate, being there although thoroughly hidden by the appearances of bread and wine (all the appearances, including causal power, like getting one drunk or interacting with wheat allergies), is precisely the symbol that appeals to us in our need to believe in love.


Postscript on "truth" in the scientific sense in the real contemporary 

The contrast with "empirical truth" can be seen in the thing that a necessity for love but equally as non-verifiable, the free will (love is defined as an act of the will). The "free will," which is necessary for any type of ethics whatsoever (the slightest concept of an ethical "should"), is the same sort of unverifiable thing. Where is this thing called the free will? If we can come up with possible logical explanations from self-interest for any action (which I think we can ... even if the webs of causes are intricate, I think logical extrapolations of what is observed can be made that fill in lacunae and give rough but satisfactory lim to determinist explanations for everything we call "love" or "doing the right thing" ... or the wrong thing) and we also can't see this thing called "the will" under a microscope, then saying you believe in a thing inside the human being that can make any undetermined choice at all, let alone an altruistic one, is just as hard to believe as transubstantiation.

The whole point of noting all this is not to go all philosophical/apologetic. The point is for those situations that we all have in which we're not sure whether or not to trust somebody else's motives. We know it's possible that they are completely self-motivated, and experience of a shit world definitely weighs in on the side of assuming that they are so. But maybe a belief in the the appearance of bread and wine actually being the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ can be a source of faith in others. I'm the most suspicious person I know, but even I can see that if there isn't going to be trust (belief in the possibility of charity), then you might as well lay down and die.

For that matter, the older you get, especially if you have lived with mental health issues, the more you begin to understand the tense ambiguity in the lines from Johnny's Cash's cover of Nick Cave's "Mercyseat": "And anyway, I told the truth, but I think I might have lied." If accurate self knowledge were easy, there never would have been a need for the oracle of Delphi to exhort "know thyself." For some people, belief in their own possibility of goodness is a problem; and for others, feeling like there even is some centered and solid "you" to be good is even difficult. And maybe belief that the appearances of bread and wine can actually be the physical presence of God-made-man can help with coping with that.

Sorry to burst the bubble of the Star Trek minded, but with all the technological advances we have made, we have not found the "warp drive" that leads to the elimination of even hunger and physical poverty, let alone things like despair and bigotry. We have found ways to create inhumane gasses in WWI and how to split the atom and level whole cities with a single bomb in WWII ... but not a single sign yet of that magical warp drive (WWI was especially ironic ... "the advance of science" had become pretty much its own new mythology and religion: it was going to save everything ... and then we found out some of the other things that could be done with it; not only did it not prevent evil; it provided the means to make evil hurt even more). We can't even prove most of the time that anybody really wants to help each other (I certainly have a harder time believing it after the 2016 US presidential election), no real evidence that people are actually really concerned with helping other and not just addicted to an image of themselves as helping, a little idol they can see of themselves being good. To those who roll the eyes exasperatedly and ask "how can you believe in that magical miracle stuff," in light of human experience, I think it is every bit as much of a stretch to believe in love ... the weight of evidence is much more on the side of the Cure: "that no one ever knows or loves another."