Faith and Family / Sean Gallagher

The Eucharist maintains our bonds with our deceased loved ones

On Aug. 1, my wife Cindy, her father and many of her 10 siblings and their families gathered to mark the first anniversary of the death of Cindy’s mother, Edith Lecher.

There was a cookout at the home of one of Cindy’s brothers and his wife and family on the southeast side of Indianapolis. Then many of us went to a Saturday evening Mass, which was offered for Edie, at nearby Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ Church.

It was a fitting way to honor her because she had a great and enduring love of the Eucharist.

There’s a deep meaning in the connection in the ties that bind together the Eucharist, our prayers for our deceased loved ones and us giving thanks for the life we were blessed to share with them.

The English Catholic scholar and novelist J.R.R. Tolkien reflected on this in a 1941 letter he wrote to his son Michael, who was then serving in the British Army in World War II.

J.R.R. had been a soldier in World War I, serving at the terrible Battle of the Somme in 1916 in which 57,000 British soldiers were killed on the first day of the battle alone.

In this letter, he wrote about the Eucharist, telling Michael that he had learned “out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated,” that the Eucharist was “the one great thing to love on Earth.”

There, J.R.R. suggested, “you will find romance, glory, honor, fidelity and the true way of all your loves on Earth.” While written in inspiring prose, these are insights other authors have written about.

What surprised me in the letter was another thing that J.R.R. said can be found in the Eucharist: death. But death here is seen as a gift, which is a theme in his fictional writings.

He wrote that there is a “divine paradox” in that death, “that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all,” gives us a “taste—or foretaste” of what all people seek in their earthly bonds with their friends and loved ones: “love, faithfulness, joy” and the “eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.”

How does this relate to the Eucharist? The great and mysterious grace of this sacrament brings worshippers here and now to Christ’s death on Calvary 2,000 years ago. In that death, Christ completely expressed his infinite love for each of us individually and all of us together. And in this complete sacrifice of himself, Christ opened anew to us the doors to a life forever with him in heaven, the doors that had been closed by our first parents in their original sin.

Christ gave us the Eucharist on the night before he died so that all of us who have been, are and will be his followers until the end of time can be drawn into his death and the great gift of eternity in heaven it makes possible.

The Eucharist, then, gives us “a taste—or a foretaste” of the “eternal endurance” of the “love, faithfulness [and] joy” that we seek in our human relationships.

Some of this came to mind when Cindy and I visited the grave of J.R.R. Tolkien and his wife Edith outside of Oxford in our travels in England in June. It dawned in my heart even more when I gathered with Cindy and her family at Mass on Aug. 1.

I pray that the “eternal endurance” that Tolkien reflected on 85 years ago in his letter to his son is now his, a prayer I also make for Edith. I invite you to make this prayer for all of your loved ones, especially when you worship at Mass. †