My previous post, “Does Jesus Still Heal?,” generated a terrific question and my response that tried to draw a strong connection between the Eucharist and God’s healing presence in the things of materialistic medical care. I want to expand a little on that here but it won’t make much sense to you unless you read the previous post, Tom’s comment and my response to it.
The natural follow-up question would likely be, “If God is Eucharistically present as you say, how come my beloved was not healed? I prayed hard enough!”
The Eucharist is about providing us with holy food and drink to sustain us through the trials ahead while, at the same time, assuring us of new and unending life with God and in God. In my analogy of medical care as Eucharist, that care becomes a carrier of the holy and bears with it the certainty of spiritual healing and the possibility of physical or emotional healing. But at it’s best, that physical or emotional healing must be temporary. All those healed by Jesus’ touch would some day again become mortally ill or injured, and so each of us must pass through the gates of death in order to enter into new and unending life in God’s presence.
Those who are Eucharistically fed are never without the eternal holy coursing through their veins. The promise of renewed and eternal health that cannot be fully ours in this life, is nevertheless present in theirs in some measure. It is the well known already but not yet. That Eucharistic feeding is most clearly apprehended as we receive the bread and wine of Holy Communion, and even then it is a mystery that cannot be comprehended. But I think that Eucharistic feeding can be present in other forms also, and among them is materialistic medical care that is infused with prayer.