Mark Shea - This is My Body: An Evangelical Discovers the Real Presence

This Is My Body

An Evangelical Discovers The Real Presence

Mark P. Shea

CHRISTENDOM PRESS

Front Royal, Virginia

Second Edition, 2006.

Copyright 1993, 2006 by Mark P. Shea. All rights reserved.

Printed in the U. S. A.

All inquiries should be addressed to:

Christendom Press, Front Royal, VA 22630

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Book design by Bill Powell at Wineskin Media. http://wineskinmedia.com

Dedication

I dedicate this to Bill Lewis, my friend and theological sparring partner, and to all the honest seekers and doubters of our divided Church. You represent some of the very best of my beloved Protestant tradition. May the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ carry to completion the work of unity, love and faith He is doing in the earth by His Holy Spirit.

Acknowledgments

This book, like all God's creatures, is not the product of isolation. It was born of the love and support shared by a community of dear sisters and brothers, both Protestant and Catholic. Without them, it simply never would have been written. In particular, I would like to express my profound gratitude to the following persons:

• First and foremost, to God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Whose Name I wish to glorify by this offering, even as He showers glory on us through His incredible love.

• To my wife Janet, whose astounding capacity to love is a beacon of the Holy Spirit. Thank you for everything you are. I love you.

• To our dear sons, Luke, Matthew, Peter, and Sean: the best boys in the world.

• To Sherry Weddell, for her unfailing and unique friendship, her incisive editorial acumen, and her tireless support during the mini-crises that periodically becloud me. You're the one who helped me see I could do it.

• To the Seattle Catholic Study Group and the Seattle Great Books Reading Group. You are comrades all and treasured friends.

• To Dan O'Neill, for his invaluable assistance and astonishing generosity.

• To Peter Kreeft, for his mentorship, and kind assistance.

Foreword

I have to read the kind of thing I write, so I have read many books of Catholic apologetics; also many autobiographical accounts of conversions to the Church; and a number of excellent books which do both (like Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy, and the accounts in The New Catholics and Spiritual Journeys ). Mark Shea's This Is My Body stands out to me as much more readable, more interesting, and more passionately truth-seeking than most.

It is also delightfully clear, free from platitude, clich, vagueness, and dullness. It is "a corking good read ."

It is also beautifully and strongly rational so much that its arguments seem not just reasonable but unanswerable. I hope some first-rate Protestant theologian reads it and has the moxie to take up the debate. The ensuing dialogue would be on a very high level, like Ronald Knox and Arnold Lunn.

Mr. Shea writes very much in the tradition of C. S. Lewis. He thinks and writes as clearly as an Englishman; yet, amazingly, he is an American.

Happily, he has chosen to write a short and specific book. It is not "scholarly research," nor is it "popu larization," but the high-level in-betweenness so neglected since Lewis' day. Just enough time and space is spent on this one crucial dogma, the Eucharistic Real Presence, to do it Socratic, investigative justice. This is no shallow "survey" or summary; it is in depth. But it is also very clear. It is not written for or by "experts." (God save us from them!) If all Christian writers combined these two virtuesclarity and depthas well as Mr. Shea does, we would see a great revival in our confused world.

PETER KREEFT

Introduction

It's hard for me to imagine a Christian upbringing more different from my own than Mark Shea's. He describes his roots as "an Evangelical/Charismatic/Non-Denominational mix."

When I was growing up, I didn't even know that such Christian varieties existed, never mind that they could be mixed. My family lived in an ethnic Catholic ghetto. We had our own parish, our own school. Worship was rich in bells, smells, and ornate devotions. The tabernacle in my childhood church was, and still is, front and center, and it was unthinkable that anyone might pass before it without bending the knee. The door to the church was always open, because folks might make a visit to the Lord at any time of day or night. On the major feasts, including the patronal feasts of our ancestral villages, we worshiped Jesus through Benediction and Exposition of Him in the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist.

In all my childhood I only knew one Protestant boy, my best friend, Nicky. He had an Italian surname, so he blended fairly easily, and he rarely brought up the subject of religion. The general consensus in the neighborhood was that he was to be pitied for his Protestantism, as if he had been born missing several major organs. He seemed to share this sense, often saying that Catholics were "better" than others. An odd statementand he died suddenly, in second grade, before I could think to ask him what he meant. Unlike Mark Shea, I never had to "discover" the Real Presence. In my life, it just was, ever since my earliest days.

Alas, however, even cradle Catholics are free creatures, and we can wax and wane in our fervor. Despite all my the best upbringing, I recall with regret that my teens and early twenties were definite "wane" years. I gave little thought to the doctrines of the Faith, and less to devotion. If asked, I probably couldn't have made it through the Creed with perfect surety. Still, even in the days when I was well into the zone of agnosticism, I could never bring myself to disbelieve that the Eucharistic Host was anything but the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ. I listened in silent horror when I heard college classmates make blasphemous jokes about the Sacrament.

Yes, I know that's irrational, but it's so. And I find that I'm not the only one to experience this. In James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Stephen Dedalus confesses to a friend that he has lost his faith, yet he cannot bring himself to make a bad Communion. That's a strong testimony to the formative power of Catholic culture. It's an even stronger testimony to the stubbornness of God's grace.

What brought me back to Eucharistic faith is a long story, which I won't get into here. But the culminating moment, I believe, shows precisely the kind of miracle that this book can work.

It was 1986, a year after I had married a beautiful Lutheran woman with moderately evangelical leanings. I had already begun the project of recovery of my childhood faith, but it was largely a spare-time activity.

Terri and I never argued about religion. We did have many discussions, though, and once she asked me to explain the difference between Lutheran and Catholic doctrines on the Eucharist.

Eruditely, I dug up a copy of Luther's Small Catechism and quoted that, according to her church, the sacrament

is the true Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ under bread and wine for us Christians to eat and to drink, established by Christ himself.

Then I pulled down my old Baltimore Catechism and read:

After the substance of the bread and wine had been changed into the substance of the Body and Blood of Our Lord there remained only the appearances of bread and wine.

She pressed me further to explain the difference.

"Catholics," I said, "believe that the Real Presence means Jesus is there, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, even after Mass, when the sacrament is reserved in the tabernacle. There's no longer a crumb we can call bread or a drop we can call wine."