Fundamentally it is concerned with--and I say it with all possible
respect, but without wishing to sacrifice the expressiveness of the
phrase--the eating and drinking of God, the Eternalizer, the feeding
upon Him. Little wonder then if St. Teresa tells us that when she was
communicating in the monastery of the Incarnation and in the second year
of her being Prioress there, on the octave of St. Martin, and the
Father, Fr. Juan de la Cruz, divided the Host between her and another
sister, she thought that it was done not because there was any want of
Hosts, but because he wished to mortify her, "for I had told him how
much I delighted in Hosts of a large size. Yet I was not ignorant that
the size of the Host is of no moment, for I knew that our Lord is whole
and entire in the smallest particle." Here reason pulls one way, feeling
another. And what importance for this feeling have the thousand and one
difficulties that arise from reflecting rationally upon the mystery of
this sacrament? What is a divine body? And the body, in so far as it is
the body of Christ, is it divine? What is an immortal and immortalizing
body? What is substance separated from the accidents? Nowadays we have
greatly refined our notion of materiality and substantiality; but there
were even some among the Fathers of the Church to whom the immateriality
of God Himself was not a thing so clear and definite as it is for us.
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