Eucharistic Appetite or Anorexia?

The wedding banquet has been prepared by the King, but the guests are disinterested and apathetic or even hostile and homicidal to his agents. (Today's gospel: Matt 22.) There is one person I know who would have gone, enthusiastically, to the feast: Marylynn my wife. She loves good wine and food, she loves to dance and to dress up, and she loves to go to Church, especially for a wedding. "She has a good appetite. God bless her!" This old saying has frequently been applied to her. It recognizes appetite as a gift from God, a marker of vitality, of zest for life, and of appreciation for Creation in all its splendor and desireabilty. The opposite of appetite is anorexia, a mysterious and devastating condition. It's origin is understandable as an obsession with thinness on the part of an adolescent woman, uncertain of her value, bombarded by the media-and-peer message that only thin is beautiful. But at the advanced stage it becomes diabolical: a disgust for food, for the feminine body, and for life itself. Consider this contrast between appetite and anorexia as an analogue for our participation in the Eucharist. Jesus was clear: "If you do not eat my body and drink my blood, you will not have life within you." The word for "eat" used in this text was not the one normally used for human dining, but for animals as they bite, gnaw and devour flesh. By Catholic custom we speak of consuming, not eating the host as we distinguish from normal digestion in that we do not devour God, but are ourselves assumed into His life. Such language is important. We do not take communion, but receive it...as a gift from the One who initiates and accomplishes the entire Act. Likewise, it is NOT bread and wine that we receive, but body and blood. Actually! Literally! This is NOT metaphor or symbol or poetry. Jesus' choice of words, so different from our pious custom, indicates that He wants us to devour him, aggressively, desperately, passionately. Here there is no room for passivity, apathy or indifference. I think of my sons or my old buddies from UPS in a Portuguese restaurant, downneck Newark, being served Rodesia (a smorgaboard of meats): a glint in the eyes, saliva flows, hormones are exploding, the teeth tear into the flesh, stomach chemicals are percolating to receve the feast, there is laughter and good cheer. Now that is appetite, not anorexia. And so I have little use for Catholicism Lite: a piety of effete, non-gendered, under-sexed, apathetic, skeptical, unaggressive, anorexic gentility. If we are to be Cathlic, let's really be Catholic: as aggressive, meat-eating, blood drinking, passionate lovers, enflamed with desire! Let us hunger and thirst, desperately, for Christ in the Eucharist!