The Deacon

In a recent poll, not many Catholics said they believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. That’s why the bishops of the United States declared three years of Eucharistic renewal, to help us return to our faith in what happens at Mass. That’s why Pope Francis issued an apostolic letter on the Eucharist, Desiderio Desideravi, which opens with the words “I have earnestly desired.”

As deacons, we are uniquely situated to join in this work. Hence, I propose that we help people renew their sense of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and help them to see the real presence of Christ in their lives.

Last fall, I taught a class in the parish on the poetry of the great Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and one day a woman in the class made an important comment. She loved the way Hopkins celebrates the presence of God in nature — in hawks and stars and ordinary things. But growing up, she was taught something different, she said. She was taught that we worship God only inside a church when we’re down on our knees.

That someone so faithful and intelligent could say such a thing shows how deeply embedded this misconception is. And it is a misconception. The Church doesn’t teach that God is present only in the Church. Our Lord doesn’t teach that — Our Lord, who roamed the hills and fields, urges us to observe the birds of the air and the flowers of the field (cf. Mt 6:25-34). This isn’t what the Scriptures teach us, from Genesis to the Psalms to the prophets. This isn’t what’s celebrated in the great creation hymn in Colossians, which says that in Christ “were created all things in heaven and on earth” and that in him “all things hold together” (Col 1:16, 17).

This is not what we profess together every Sunday in the Nicene Creed, this canonical summary of all that the Church teaches. We don’t profess that nature is evil. We don’t profess that our lives are void of grace. We profess our faith in the “one God, / the Father almighty, / maker of heaven and earth, / of all things visible and invisible.”

All things. In heaven and on earth.

Through Christ, God created the world, and the world was good, and through Christ, in the Incarnation, the world is redeemed and brought to fulfillment. “All fullness” resides in him, Colossians proclaims (cf. 1:19), which is to say, if Christ came into the world and “charged it” with his “grandeur” — to paraphrase Hopkins’s great sonnet, “God’s Grandeur” — how can the world be anything other than sacramental?

Prayers of the Mass

This is not to say that the Mass is, therefore, secondary or merely symbolic, that we don’t need it, because we do. In the Mass, the Incarnation is fulfilled and enacted and brought into being anew. The liturgy, Lumen Gentium tells us, is “the source and summit” of our faith (cf. No. 11), the preeminent mode of presence. The Eucharist is preeminent. It gathers everything in the world into its creative actions, as when the deacon receives the gifts of the bread and the wine — the work of our hands, the fruit of the earth — and carries them to the altar to be transformed, and elevated and revealed.

The language of the Mass itself makes this point with both lyricism and force. In the third Eucharistic prayer, for example, the priest says: “You are indeed Holy, O Lord, and all you have created rightly gives you praise, for through your Son our Lord Jesus Christ, by the power and working of the Holy Spirit, you give life to all things and make them holy.”

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How the Divine Meets Us

Deacon Chris Anderson shares in poetry how the divine meets us in the real world in his book “Love Calls Us Here” (Wildhouse Publishing, $19.99), released in the summer of 2024. The collection of poems invites readers into the mystery of when, in everyday moments, something stirs within them, a reality that cannot be put into words. Deacon Anderson’s poetry helps us taste the mystery hidden in our lives and invites us to trust it.

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We often don’t pay enough attention to the Eucharistic prayers, and we should because this is where the dogma is, in the Mass. It’s all there: through Christ “all things” are “made holy.”

And then the prayer goes on to make an even further point. It makes clear the saving logic,

“Therefore, O Lord, we humbly implore you: by the same Spirit graciously make holy these gifts we have brought to you for consecration, that they become for us the Body and Blood of your Son our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The “therefore” is the key, as is the phrase that follows it, by the same Spirit, because this Spirit is the same Spirit that charges our lives with grandeur. In other words, it’s exactly because the Spirit is present in nature and in all things that we are inspired to go further, to ask the Spirit to transform the bread and wine in this fuller, extraordinary way.

And there’s even more, as in the prayer after Communion on the Twenty-Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time: “Grant us, almighty God, that we may be refreshed and nourished by the Sacrament which have received, so as to be transformed into what we consume.”

“Transformed into what we consume.” How can we doubt that our ordinary lives are full of grace when through grace we ourselves become the Body of Christ — when, at the end of each Mass, we are dismissed (again by the deacon!) to “go in peace” into the world, to let the Lord charge the world with his grandeur through us and our actions?

Isn’t this what we as deacons are called to, uniquely, in our ordination — as people who serve both at the altar and in the secular world, in our jobs and in our families, who are called to bring the world to the Eucharist and the Eucharist to the world?

Summit and Source

The Mass is not just the summit. It’s also the source. Through its language and actions, it teaches us to see all the bread and wine in our lives. “Everything gives God some glory,” Hopkins writes in a notebook entry: “To lift up our hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give him glory too.” And when Hopkins says this, he’s being absolutely orthodox. He’s speaking both from his heart and from the heart of the tradition.

This is how we as deacons can teach the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist: By teaching the real presence of Christ in the dungfork, in the slop pail, in the hawk hovering above the morning field. By encouraging the people we serve to see the world in more imaginative and creative ways. By insisting that the Eucharist is a poem, not a formula — an experience, not an object. By celebrating in all our preaching and teaching what Hopkins so ecstatically proclaims in “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” “For Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”

DEACON CHRIS ANDERSON is a poet, an emeritus professor of English at Oregon State University and for 26 years a deacon in the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon. His new book of poems, “Love Calls Us Here,” is available from Wildhouse Publishing, $19.99. Visit his website at deaconchrisanderson.com.