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VOLUME X, Number 1
January - June 2020 
A MEDITATION FOR CORPUS CHRISTI It was a few days before Corpus Christi. My friend Ashutosh Tripathi had arranged to meet me on the heights of Srinagar Danda, where, on April 10, 1950, Maurice Herzog had first laid eyes on the Annapurna Massif. From there we left the last suburbs of Tansen and walked for nine kilometers along the ridge line to the temple of Bhairavsthan, to which other pilgrims were already making their way in great numbers. Before entering its courtyard, we stopped at a small shop to buy a rot, a large pancake fried in oil. When they go to the temple, Hindus always bring something to offer to the deity - usually garlands of flowers and coconuts. What is distinctive about this Nepalese shrine is the offering of bread to Bhairav, a fierce manifestation of Shiva who protects the inhabitants of the region.
As he waited his turn to enter the shrine, I contemplated my Brahmin friend as he piously held the tray on which the rot was placed. I thought of the reading for the following Sunday: "And King Melchizedek of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of God Most High." (Gen 14:18).
When he came before the terrifying effigy of Bhairav, Ashutosh handed the wheat bread to the officiant, who cut out the center of it, offered it to the deity, and returned the hollowed-out rot to my friend. This was the precious prasad that Shiva had now filled with his blessing as he directed his benevolent gaze on Ashutosh. This was the prasad that had to be eaten in order to receive divine grace in its most intimate form.
An ancient Upanishad says of Brahman - the Absolute - that: "Food is Brahman. From food beings are born. Through food they grow. Into food they enter when they die."[1] What a splendid image of that which is most daily being transfigured by that which is most divine to express our ultimate destiny. The eating of the prasad participates in the great divinization of the cosmos. It brings to mind Augustine’s words, "I am the food of those who have come of age; grow up and you shall taste of me. You will not transform me into you as you do your fleshly food, but you will be transformed into me." [2] How striking is the Hindus' conception of prasad, and how striking their understanding of what faithful Christians are doing when they receive the Eucharist!
Then we set off again through the hills. Along the way, Ashutosh divided the rot into several pieces and hastened to distribute them to his friends and family. My friend's joy was palpable and everyone received the prasad with great reverence. In silence, I watched him perform the same gestures that I repeat every day in the celebration of Mass. I also remembered a word of Henri Le Saux to his disciple: "For all that is received, is given in order to be given in turn. The Eucharistic bread broken and broken again without any limit, until all have eaten their fill!."[3]
On that feast of Corpus Christi, which Ashutosh without knowing it made me appreciate all the more, I as a Christian saw in the humble appearance of the offering made to Bhairav a mysterious reflection of Christ, who did not fear to be tied to our daily bread for all time. Indeed, the Savior born in Bethlehem - literally, "the house of bread" - explained his coming among us with the image of what is so familiar at our tables - at least for a large part of humanity: " "Very truly, I tell you. . . it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world" (Jn 6:32-33). Then, at the hour when he showed his greatest love and wanted to make clear that "no one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord" (Jn 10:18), Jesus again made use of bread, breaking it and sharing it with his disciples - a marvelously ordinary gesture of the father of the family, but one which, in that evening's offering, had a much deeper meaning: "The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh" (Jn 6:51). And finally, it was in the same bread, which my grandfather never cut until he signed it with a small cross, that the Savior wanted to remain sacramentally with us “to the end of the age " (Mt 28:20) so that, by eating it, we might be led by him into eternity: "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever" (Jn 6:51).
Everyday life has now become infinitely divine. The infinitely divine becomes quotidien in the glory of its simplicity. Here I hear my grandmother reprimanding us children if we inadvertently dropped crumbs on the ground. Now that the child has grown up and become a priest, he often feels the urge to do away with the super-thin hosts that invaded our churches in the Middle Ages and go back to the ancient unleavened loaves that have the smell of a heated oven. "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them." (Jn 6:56).
Perhaps what we have lost in the course of time is the simplicity of eating and drinking - the very concrete materiality of the religion of the Incarnation that Maurice Zundel described in this dazzling statement: "He has taken us at our most material, at the most elementary point of our carnal life: our need to eat. He taught us to eat in a way that is holy, to eat divinely, to commune with the immortal King of the Ages in a piece of broken bread."[4]
From now on, Corpus Christi will have the face of Ashutosh for me. I will remember him as he respectfully carried pieces of the rot on the road to Tansen whenever I hear the glorious words that Thomas Aquinas wrote for this solemnity:
Ecce panis angelorum
factus cibus viatorum,
vere Panis filiorum
non mittendis canibus.
Lo, the Bread of Angels
is made the food of pilgrims:
truly it is the Bread of children,
And as I pray to the Father in Heaven to give us our daily bread, I will see my friend again for a long time to come, sharing the bread of Bhairavsthan with his relatives with the same joy as Christ did at the Last Supper:
"Panis angelicus fit panis hominum
dat panis caelicus figuris terminum
O res mirabilis manducat Dominum
Pauer, servus et humilis.
Bread of angels become the bread of humans;
The bread of heaven puts an end to signs
What great wonder! That a poor and humble servant
Should feed upon the Lord. [6]
Translated by William Skudlarek
[1] Taittiriya Upanishad III, 2, 1: « annaṃ brahmeti vyajānāt annāddhyeva khalvimāni bhutāni jāyante annena jātāni jīvanti annaṃ prayantyabhisaṃviśantīti ». [2] Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, VII, X, 2 : « cibus sum grandium: cresce et manducabis me. Nec tu me in te mutabis sicut cibum carnis tuae, sed tu mutaberis in me ». [3] Letter from Henri Le Saux to Marc Chaduc of June 20, 1972. Cf. J. Stuart, Swami Abhishiktananda. His Life Told through his Letters (Delhi: ISPCK, 1989), p. 306. [4] M. Zundel, « Le poème de la sainte Liturgie », Vivre la divine liturgie, Œuvres complètes I, Paris, Parole et Silence, 2019, p. 224. [5] Thomas Aquinas, Lauda Sion [6] Thomas Aquinas, Sacris Solemmiis. |
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