Glimpsing Divine Union in Merton's First Communion

Sometimes converts, with their “new eyes,” gaze upon the treasures of our Catholic faith and perceive greater insights than we who were “born Catholic” do.

One such insightful, perceptive convert is Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who died in 1968. Wikipedia describes him as a “writer, theologian, mystic, poet, social activist and scholar of comparative religion” who “wrote more than 50 books in … 27 years … on spirituality, social justice and a quiet pacifism, as well as scores of essays and reviews.”

Merton wrote in his autobiography “The Seven Storey Mountain” (1948) about his receiving the Sacraments of Initiation at a Latin Mass in 1938. I believe his description of his First Communion is theologically instructive – and spiritually inspiring – for us today as we engage in Eucharistic Revival.

“And I saw the raised Host—the silence and simplicity with which Christ once again triumphed—drawing all things to Himself, drawing me to Himself…. [Then,] Father Moore turned around….And my First Communion began to come towards me, down the steps. I was the only one at the altar rail. Heaven was entirely mine…Christ, hidden in the small Host, was giving Himself for me, and to me, and, with Himself, the entire Godhead and Trinity—a great new increase of the power and grasp of their indwelling that had begun only a few minutes before at the [Baptismal] font.

I left the altar rail and went back to the pew … and I hid my face in my hands. In the Temple of God that I had just become, the One Eternal and Pure Sacrifice was offered up to the God dwelling in me: the sacrifice of God to God, and me sacrificed together with God, incorporated in His Incarnation. Christ born in me, a new Bethlehem, and sacrificed in me, His new Calvary, and risen in me: offering me to the Father, in Himself, asking the Father, my Father and His, to receive me into His infinite and special love—not the love He has for all things that exist—for mere existence is a token of God’s love, but the love of those creatures who are drawn to Him in and with the power of His own love for Himself.

For now I had entered into the everlasting movement … which is the very life and spirit of God…. And God, that center Who is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere, finding me, through incorporation with Christ, incorporated into this immense and tremendous gravitational movement which is love, which is the Holy Spirit, loved me. And He called out to me from His own immense depths.”

Merton’s description that in consuming the Host, he had become “the Temple of God … the God dwelling in me” reminded me that Communion makes us tabernacles, repositories of Christ’s truth and grace. And when we offer that truth and grace to others by our words and deeds, we are monstrances - allowing others to see Christ in the communion we've become.

And Merton's realization that in Communion he had “entered into the everlasting movement [of the]…life and spirit of God” and that God had “called out to [him] from His own immense depths” to say He loved him captures for me the essence of the union which is at the heart of Communion. If our faith is about relationship, Merton wonderfully articulates how the Eucharist is the consummate sharing of love between God and us. We are made one in Communion.

I’m sorry to admit that as a “cradle Catholic” I never pondered, let alone experienced, the Eucharist in the way that Merton describes it – as relational, as communion, as union between God and man.

But from now on, in the spirit of Eucharistic Revival, after receiving Eucharist at mass I will “[hide] my face in my hands” and allow the mystery of how “Christ [is] born in me, a new Bethlehem, and [is] sacrificed in me, His new Calvary, and [is] risen in me…” to change my heart. And revive my life.