To See the Divine in a Grain of Wheat: Corpus Christi and the Vision of God

Today is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ--Corpus Christi, the last Sunday in a long series of Sundays that tail Easter in the small season called Trinity, or Pentecost. The Church of Rome has stopped making it a season altogether and calls this Ordinary Time. It is as if, having gone through the long Lent and the longer Easter, the Church ties on a few more celebrations to keep the whole business going. Much like Trinity Sunday, Corpus Christi is not a Sunday about the life of Jesus, but rather a feast created in the Middle Ages to celebrate a doctrine of the Church, namely the Hidden Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

So why in the world are we talking about Corpus Christi on a page devoted to the Craft? Well, for one because I grew up with it, still celebrate it, and one important work of the Craft is to look deeper into the things you do rather than turn away from them. The next reason is because we all practice a Chalice and Bread, Cakes and Ale ritual, and this is mine. The fact that I use the ritual of Eucharist at the heart of my Craft had a definite effect on my worship and Workings. The last reason we are talking about Corpus Christi is because this is the last Sunday in which Young Tradition and I walk beside the Church for some time. While a Craft or Druidic year spreads out across the solar or lunar year, a Church year is top heavy. It begins in December and wraps up with Corpus Christi sometime in June. Like a pair of pants that doesn’t quite fit a big belly—I experienced this recently—it leaves a large part of June, July, August, September, October and November out of it.

Corpus Christi is wrapped in mystery and even contradiction. Without going into the history, which can easily be Wikied, the central event was a priest in a small Italian town, who had ceased to believe in his priesthood raising the Eucharistic Host during Mass and regaining his faith when it bled in his hand. The Church calls this a miracle one is not required to believe, but invited to. I love the idea of being invited into belief rather than being cajoled. The priest losing his faith was not asking a simple theological question. He was not simply wondering if God was in the bread and wine, but if was in him and in his people, if God was with us at all? This is the central question of Corpus Christi. Corpus Christi is, of course, Latin for Body of Christ. The church, the gathering of people offering themselves up in a service, lifting up bread and wine and their own hearts, is called the Body of Christ. That priest was not only asking if the bread was sacred, but if the people he stood with were as well. He wanted to know if God was present. For him, the miracle answered yes.  To me Corpus Christi is especially potent because this is the very question we are asking everyday. Is what we are doing true? Or is it in vain? Are we in a sacred work, or are we just fooling ourselves. Corpus Christi says, your circle is the sacred circle. Your workings are not private and vain. God is present in them.

Thomas Aquinas wrote the Corpus Christi hymn with these verses among others:

Adoro te devote, latens deitas,

Quæ sub his figuris vere latitas;

Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit,

Quia te contemplans totum deficit.

I devoutly adore you, hidden deity,

Who are truly hidden beneath these appearances.

My whole heart submits to You,

And in contemplating You, it surrenders itself completely.

The first reading for Corpus Christi is Moses reminding the people of how God guided them through the desert for forty years, and the parallels between the burning desert and this life are not lost. As God was a pillar of cloud by day a pillar of fire by night, as he was carried in the Ark among the people and placed in the Tabernacle in their midst, so he is now with us. But we are not the Israelites. We are something different, no longer surrounding the Tabernacle, but become the Tabernacle. We are the column of fire, the pillar of Cloud, the Ark of the Covenant, and in Corpus Christi God does not simply travel in the midst of the people, but in the midst of each person. Such terrible intimacy is at the heart of Corpus Christi and at the heart of all altar Working. Learning to see God in a bit of Bread, may we have eyes to see the Holy in the most unlikely of places.