Through ritual and imagination, the Eucharist transformed Eric's life, marking him forever and leading him to encounter Jesus in a profound, personal way.
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I'm not sure I can recall a single moment when my life changed. But there is no doubt that it happened from the first time I visited Saint Martin, the poorest church outside of Cincinnati. As a college student, my imagination was triggered. What was this strange ritual? Especially as it was placed in dialogue with Black religious culture? From those early days, I was motivated, maybe even compelled, to try to understand why I was attracted to that which was ancient and new, foreign and familiar, profoundly specific, yet unexpectedly universal.
These rituals began to shape my thoughts and feelings about everything. Their rhythms and cycles, their calls and responses, their lamentations and jubilation evoked wonder. Connections fired off: the self and the community, justice and truth, artistic expression, ritual play and social identity, goodness, beauty, and truth. But the circle was not complete. I could participate, but not partake. I could contemplate, but not consummate.
The truest host of that banquet may have been asking, "Eric, what do I mean to you? How much do you want to share in this meal?" So late one night during the Easter vigil, a priest poured a copious amount of strong-smelling oil atop my head. Chrism ran into my dreadlocks and reached my scalp, an aroma that stayed with me for weeks.
I was marked for life. The Eucharist had already become my source and summit of all things—a window into perceiving the world differently, filled with promise. The risen Lord met me by the seashore, ready to break bread and eat fish, asking me, his friend, "Do you love me?"
Scholar William Lynch says this about the imagination: It is not a single or special faculty. It is all the resources of the human person, all his faculties, his whole story, or her whole heritage—all brought to bear on the concrete world outside of himself, to form images of the world, and thus to find it, cope with it, shape it, even make it. The task of the imagination is to imagine the real Jesus.
The Lord entered into the human story, into the human imagination, smuggled in and undercover in the darkness of a woman's womb. Nursed by his mother's breast to find himself among women and men who needed a sign of hope. Eucharist is a practice, and real presence is a way of encountering a friend, a master, a lover. Eucharist is hearing God's voice and saying yes in mind and body.
Eucharist, as Jesuit Father Jim Pierce says, is eating God up and drinking God down—together.
