The Eucharist and the “Ghost in the Machine”

As an autistic, I have the unenviable ability to almost completely compartmentalize my intellect from emotions. I go into a “machine mode.”

My friends often have a very unfortunate experience with that. They talk to me while I am in the middle of “implementing my agenda,” and they see that I do not acknowledge their feelings at all. Friends who know me well stop me and say, “Hey, I just poured out my heart to you,” or “I just disclosed something hard for me to say,” and of course, I collapse into a sea of apologies. I don't realize what I did, but of course I want to acknowledge the feelings of my friends!

My autistic reality is not all that different from neurotypical reality. Humans minds work very much like computers, which is why computers are designed based on how our logical intellect works. Our minds are different from computers because emotional drives can dominate our experience. I know all about that too! I have been known to immerse myself in emotion and the “lever” that makes my brain work seems to snap completely off, while emotions drive my life. Whether we are emotionally driven or intellectually detached, we are all divided, unintegrated and crippled in our human experience.

Until we insert the variable of “infinity.”

Infinity. Yes, infinity. The God who exists outside space and time enters our reality in the Eucharist. The God who exists outside space and time enters my body in the Eucharist. The infinite God who created me enters me, body and soul, and begins to thread his infinite Self into my bones and cells. This creates a “jolt” that literally drags me to my knees. I am grateful to know the impact of His infinite love moving through me, joining Himself with my lowly soul.

How must Mary have felt when the infinite God found His home in her womb? I will never know the magnitude of that experience, but I can receive a “taste” of it through my experience of the Eucharist.

Why am I Catholic?

The Eucharist is why. When I was a young protestant, I received the Eucharist without knowing what it was. I immediately wept because I felt in that moment in union with God. It's always been that way for me. The effect of the Eucharist is a stab in my heart that kills me and brings me to life at the same time.

For that instant, I am integrated. I am whole. 

I walk out the door of church and become once again the struggling Secular Carmelite in formation who has difficulty staying dedicated to prayer. I amble about my daily life, continually wondering why my experience in the Eucharist does not stay with me. Thankfully, I let that concern go fairly quickly now, because I realize maintaining a life of service to Him is more important than what I happen to feel, but I still remain bewildered.

Sometimes, it is unclear what really moves me. Once years ago, someone who was working with me started to call me, “The Machine.” That was because I always had a relentless agenda for him to follow. And by relentless, I mean relentless. I should never be in a supervisory position over people. I've always been considered to be hard-driving and that is because “The Machine” that is my mind likes to go nonstop. (Thank God for helpers in my life who help me find balance beyond hyperfocus!) My new study of Xcode to program smartphones is a beautiful haven of structure and logic. I like to enter and shut the doors to the world. But, often, it is difficult for all of us to turn all that off and enter into the softer side of contemplation the machine of our mind longs for.

Human beings also have free will. This is what separates us from animals. Our souls have only one essential choice to make here on earth, "Will we serve God or will we serve ourselves?"

If we do not receive the Holy Spirit in our human lifetimes here in life, the seeds are not planted for eternal life. There is no “Ghost” in our machine. What is our soul apart from God's soul, who created us? How can it survive in any meaningful way? There are many who believe their soul IS actually God's soul and that their mind creates the world. People who take this position live in a counterfeit reality, sadly. Others, who see the Eucharist as a merely “symbolic meal,” or an experience that somehow incorporates “Real Presence,” without being the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ miss out on an immense experience as well.

The Eucharist is more than a “feel good experience,” thankfully. The Eucharist is fuel to go about serving God, infused and strengthened by God Himself. The Eucharist provides the deepest and most intimate connection that man can have with God.

Without that connection, we are alone in our weak human state. We act selfishly. We hurt people's feelings. We damage relationships because we are callous. There is no infinite God to appeal to who can forgive, heal and strengthen us. I constantly and reliably fail but at least that is not the end of my story.

We are more than machines. We need a healthy soul. The soul runs best on the fuel of the Eucharist and nothing else will do.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_machine

Something Woke Me Up Yesterday- and it wasn't about me.

I learned something great at the Carmelite Monastery yesterday, just as I was dozing off. It was right after our thirty minutes of quiet prayer time and I was groggy.

I'm not sure how or why this came up, but we have been doing Lectio Divina with the encyclical Apostolicam Actuositatem for months now and yesterday, we spent about forty minutes on number 20. I hadn't found this document to be thrilling reading, and it wasn't exactly jarring me out of my stupor.

We were contemplating how the laity is to participate in the work of the Church, because all Secular Carmelites are required to have some sort of lay apostalate, and so we need to understand what that means as well as we can.

Somehow, in our discussion, this verse from Paul came up, "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I do my share on behalf of His body, which is the church, in filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions." [Colossians 1:24]

The person who brought up the question that served as my "alarm clock," is a pre-aspirant. She is also a convert, such as I am. She had a question I've often had myself. She wanted to know how anything could be lacking in the sacrifice of Christ. In response, I remember becoming suddenly alert, excited that I knew the answer. I rattled off some sort of response I had heard that technically might have been considered right, when actually I did not fully understand the verse myself. So, my response confused her.

I listened for a while and I heard some really profound and eye-opening things from my sisters in Carmel, people who have seriously contemplated this verse for decades. 

For one thing, we don't actually pray. The Holy Spirit prays within us, for us. For another thing, we don't actually produce any good actions in the world. Only God can do this through us. It's not just that in humility, we give God credit for everything. It's that in reality, He really is the only one who HAS credit for anything. This is the only thing that is actually true.

As Christians, we are not ourselves, or who we were. We are the Body of Christ. Each time we receive the Eucharist, we are becoming one with Him and with each other. So, it is Jesus who sees through our eyes, speaks through our mouths, thinks through our brains and suffers in our bodies. So, Jesus is still here on earth, continuing His joys and afflictions through us. We are the vessels and witnesses of His greatness. Christ's work of redemption is complete, yet we must do our share to continue His work on earth, to complete the work that is "lacking" or still needs to be done in the world.

Apostolicam Actuositatem seems really dry at first. I wondered, how do you contemplate something that keeps talking about our personal relation to "the hierarchy." Well it's really about our personal relationship to the Body of Christ, and the hierarchy is just a term for the way that is structured. There's not a word in it about "me," the individual. It's about "they" and about "acting together." If we look more closely at the verse by Paul, it reads, "I do my share," implying he does his part of the group. It doesn't say, "I, on my own, because I am uber-super Catholic girl, do what Jesus couldn't finish doing." It says, we continue to do His work on earth.

The reason Apostolicam Actuositatem seemed so boring to me for the past few months is that I wasn't hearing things about me, me, me. I wasn't hearing what "resonates with me," or that I can "apply to my personal life." I was hearing about how to be a part of something larger than myself, to continue, through my share in the body of Christ, to make Christ's presence more known here on earth.

Well, I'm not sure if I understood all of this correctly or if it was even explained correctly, but it woke me up. (I was literally nodding off before my friend asked this question and I woke up quickly, seizing that opportunity to attempt to say something brilliant to impress everyone-- which thankfully, did not happen, because the group, as a whole, had a wider message.)

I'm not sure we can read the Bible as individuals with individual interpretation as our guide. I'm not sure it was intended to be read that way. In fact, I'm confident that it's not. The  Body of Christ is not the fragments of Christ, after all. 

It was interesting that our President, Chris Hart, talked about how common it is for people to just give all their energy and work towards what they think is serving God, only to find themselves depleted and exhausted. In that weakened state, God actually has someone there to work with to accomplish His true aims. If we think we're serving Him, we're not. I stand convicted- all the way. I started to ponder what it actually means to let Him accomplish His work through us. There's a profound passivity involved that isn't easy to learn.

Well, I can't hit the snooze button on that.