The most difficult moment for me when assisting at Holy Mass is usually the period after the Domine non sum dignus (Lord, I am not worthy…) – that time when after declaring one’s unworthiness to receive the sacred host, one is now invited to cultivate a deep desire and intention to receive It nonetheless. In each Mass, I always remember reading from my grandaunt’s old missal that in this moment, one must pay attention to the self as one approaches the sacred host, to approach the Body of Christ with much fervor, with complete trust and devotion, with utter joy and gratitude for the gift of communion with the Most Holy. To approach something so completely different, radically out of this world – not just a crispy host or a symbol that stands in for something else but the living body of God HIMSELF in sacramental form – yet also something so familiar and concrete, tempting and inviting. Each time I queue in line for communion, I find myself perturbed, in many occasions, uncertain how to approach the priest, in some, feeling inadequately and not fully enraptured by an amorous desire to consume the sacred host.
During these times, I would repetitively recite St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Anima Christi or St. Thomas Aquinas’s Prayer before Holy Communion or when they fail or when I feel too lazy to recite them or the choir’s communion songs are so tempting to not sing with, or the church architecture overwhelmingly edifying, I simply allow myself to be possessed by the moment, to be seized and drawn into the instance, yet simultaneously self-aware that I am in grave need of something other than me to be able to make the approach properly. In either of these, I am confronted by a mutual sense of inadequacy – if it were just me, I would not know how to approach the Sacred Host – but also a longing for self-understanding – I so desire to desire the Sacred Host so I may personally affirm my longing for it, my longing for self-completion.
Consider this: in today’s popular mood where spontaneity in human relations is considered the mark of authentic or genuine form of social encounter, structured modes of decorum and sanctioned rules of propriety have come under attack as performances of hypocrisy or in contemporary parlance – acting in a “plastic”, rigid, cold or uptight way. It appears that in today’s dominant mode of social relations, the preliminary act of approaching each other is rendered superfluous, unnecessary and if possible, must be bypassed in favor of an unmediated interaction or encounter independent of any norms or conventions. Such an injunction assumes, even enforces outright commonality, sameness and the possibility as well as the desirability of complete commensurability, all in the name of bringing about intimacy in interpersonal relations: one already knows, must already know, should already know the other in order for prefatory moves of approaching to become irrelevant and inconsequential to the encounter itself. One finds in contemporary culture today the drive for effortlessness, the quest for the natural, pure, untutored talent and the rejection of anything learned, rehearsed, or repeated – in many ways, birthed by and bound to tradition.
Overcoming the approach thus demands a supreme confidence in the sufficiency of the self and the other whom the self encounters. This is in a way an apocalyptic rendering of the present and of the self and its others – a moment that insists on a finality, an already, a fabrication, rather than the unfolding and realization of an occurring event. Subjects caught in the economy of the already merely exist as completed representations supposedly embodying and as such capturing the possibility of oneself and of the other whom the self encounters in social relations. Self-sufficiency however, is not the same with self-knowledge. In fact, the problem with declarations of self-confidence and sufficiency is an implicit, secret and repressed despair over the self. This is why perhaps today religion – as distinct from but not necessarily opposed to spirituality – but more pointedly, religious disciplines, codes and obligations are under attack – both from within and by religious individuals and from without – pagans, atheists and non-believers: the present constitution of the world has systematically done away with, materially no longer capable of, and deliberately unconscious of the necessity, the beauty and sweetness of approaching.
