Book part one (andre7):Layout 1
11/16/09
8:42 AM
Page 27
But I want to start with the second part of this and return, for a bit, to the Real Presence in the Eucharistic wafer and the origins of my interest in it at the convent school I attended. This was the Convent of the Holy Family comprised largely of Irish and Polish nuns and situated in a magnificent Victorian building on Oxford Road in Johannesburg. Attached to the convent was a chapel and a retirement wing for older nuns no longer teaching or serving the community in other ways. These nuns were a source of many stories both about their favourite saints and about their own, often deeply touching, life histories. Some of them had been in the convent since their early teens, more or less abandoned by their parents and they still wore the traditional black and white habits with highly starched veils and hoods. Others who joined as adults had been disappointed in love, one having lost a fiancé in the First World War. At the centre of this convent, and the lives of the nuns who inhabited it, was a curious paradox, not lost to us even as teenage girls. On the one hand there was an all-consuming devotion to Mary the mother of God and her perpetual virginity, and on the other was a mystical yet powerfully physical union with Christ through the ingesting of the sacrificial flesh of the Eucharist. For Catholics, the Eucharist is not symbolic – the wafer literally transubstantiates – its own substance being miraculously expelled and replaced with the very flesh of Christ, all the while retaining its outward appearance. Catholics literally eat God – made mercifully palatable by his appearing and tasting like a wafer – and his body becomes mingled with the blood and guts of the communicant. This is a fusion of two beings, one mortal and one immortal – in Catholic terms facilitating the "cleansing with its purifying flame [of] the smallest stains which adhere to the soul", but it is also a marriage of flesh with flesh (New Advent Catholic Encyclopaedia).
A long tradition of devotion to the Eucharist and the almost erotic presence of Christ in the flesh in the world has been nourished by centuries of saintly visions, debates, arguments, scandals and even wars. A multitude of stories of miracles and devotions prior to and particularly during the Reformation were associated with the wafer and the Flesh and Blood of Christ. This was not confined to women – the 16th century St. Philip Neri, a not uncommon example, was reported as having been so obsessed with the Eucharistic Blood that he was seen to suck and lick the chalice with such relish that he had consumed not only the gilding but the silver as well, leaving his teeth marks in the metal. Women, however, were more often to describe their relationship to the Blood and Flesh in powerfully erotic and personal terms.
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