I confess that my inclination is to spiritualize what you ask for. Let's make this about believing the right things about you, or about the pursuit of some sort of warm religious experience of union and bliss. Show me a pathway away from your flesh and blood. Show me an escape from the human condition you entered. Show me how to avoid the sweaty, stinky, bad-breathed, farting, hard-faced, arm-crossed chests of the people who are your body. Show me a way to escape from the homeless with their signs at the freeway exits; the gangsters driving their booming cars; this aging body; the moldering grave; the death of those I love and those I fear; the horror and brutality of the murderous human condition: from your tortured corpus on the Cross.
But, you say, "I am the bread of life." You call me to open the mouth of mind and heart wide, to take in and chew on the realities of the human condition you entered and loved and saved. Eat my flesh! Take all this in, swallow it, digest it, excrete that which is mere waste, and live on the rest.
Christ, if the only escape from you and all that you entered is soul death, then give me the grace and courage to eat--your flesh, the flesh of us all. Eating you, I chew on eternal life.
