Receiving a gift is such a beautiful experience, paralleled only by the giving of gifts. A real gift is gratuitous. It is given or received not because you did something that deserves recognition but because you are you. It feels much better when it is a sign of deep love. We love receiving gifts because we appreciate the love of the giver.
I refer to real gifts, not stage-managed exchanges. Such occasions have become so common that they are undermining the meaning of gift giving and receiving. We now expect gifts in return for favours done, thus losing the surprise of their gratuity.
Christianity is the victim of such a quid pro quo mentality. We believe we can buy God by our merits. We have reduced Him to the bonanza prize in a gigantic gift scheme. We substituted the joy of experiencing God giving Himself to us by the ‘burden’ of ticking the right boxes called Commandments. Instead of considering Christianity as the way to happiness we reduced it to the sad compliance with a long list of ‘noes’.
Without joy there is no Christianity. The words that Bernanos put on the lips of the Curé de Torcy while talking to the young priest in The Diary of a Country Priest are so true: “The opposite of a Christian people is a people grown old and sad.”
Christianity detractors jump on this sad masochistic bandwagon to project the faith as an inane desire for a pie in the sky that alienates us from everyday reality and from fellow human beings. Christianity is anything but that. It is the ideologies of the right and the left that are alienations. They promise a lot but their long-term deliverables are minimal, if at all.
I experienced the joy that comes from the discovery that God is madly in love with us
Christianity is about receiving and then becoming gifts for others. God is the ultimate gift who gives Himself gratuitously, generously and repeatedly. He is a tsunami of giving and cannot not give Himself because He does not just love; God is Love.
Today we celebrate the feast of the Eucharist (Corpus Christi), the greatest gift Christ gave us. Many have reduced this gift to an individualistic devotional practice. It is much more than that. The celebration of the Eucharist is an eminently political act by the community of believers as it is a blueprint of a polis where authority is an exercise in service and where there is a dignified place for all. This first celebration of the Eucharist pointed towards a truly inclusive society as the only way forward. There was a place for the saviour, the traitor, the denier, those who run away and for the only apostle who remained with the Lord. All were welcome but not all welcomed the gift.
The Eucharist is the rising of the concept of gift onto a higher level. Christ does not just give us himself, he becomes our food and drink. We consume the gift to be more like the gift. The celebration is a roadmap to the Kingdom that is sacramentally already present among us; it is a way of living our humanity to the full in communion with others. It is a celebration of the new freedom earned for God’s children by the blood of the Risen One. It is a clear statement that evil never has the final word.
The Eucharist is the hymn celebrating creation and the work humans do. Wheat and grapes are transformed into bread and wine to become, by God’s power through the priest’s words, the body and blood of Christ. Salvation achieved through things created not in spite of things created. The gift of the Eucharist was accompanied by the institution of the priesthood as a gift given for the sake of the community, not for the recipient’s sake. It is given in spite of the recipient’s shortcomings. This is why the statement made by Alec Guinness’ politically imprisoned prelate in The Prisoner (1955) is so true: “Do not judge the priesthood by the priest.”
Yesterday, together with the community of the parish of St Joseph the Worker, Birkirkara, I celebrated the 40th anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. I am thankful that the Lord chose me to celebrate His joy by communicating it to others and by experiencing it myself. I know the joy of saying to others and often listening myself to the words “your sins are forgiven”.
Whenever I confessed my sins or pardoned those of others I realised the truth of Bernanos’s words: God is no torturer. But unfortunately instead of being ministers of His joy we sometimes foolishly act as if there can be ministers of His wrath.
I experienced the joy that comes from the discovery that God is madly in love with us. I am awed by the power of His Word as the only lasting foundation for a better world. I have seen the joy of God’s love radiating from people in pain, the smile of young children, the love of proud mothers and fathers, the fragility of the old and so many others. These last 40 years I have been comforted by the love of God who, for my sake, became a weak man unable to carry his cross on his own. Such a scrawny, vulnerable God understands my weakness and vulnerability.
Today I look back at all these years and thank the Lord for being so kind to me and thank the ecclesial community for accepting and loving me despite my sins and limitations. Today, I experience more than ever the truth of the words of Fonda’s hunted priest in The Fugitive: “The priesthood is large, it’s tremendous; I was always too small for it.”
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt