Going up to the Altar of God,
Reading and Shaking

The opening pages of James Joyce's modernist epic Ulysses (1922) have long been very important to my understanding of why the Eucharist is the source and summit of our lives. Joyce makes the case in breach of this truth, though the vitality of his creative act depends on the vitality of God's creative act, which dates from Christ’s last supper with his disciples, in the Upper Room, through to every Mass celebrated every day, everywhere and always. Joyce’s creativity, in other words, is in full and vigorous opposition to God’s and the Church’s. The novel begins with a wilful, spirited act of sacrilege on the part of one of its characters:

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“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

- Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

-Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.

- Back to barracks, he said sternly.

He added in a preacher's tone:

-For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.”

 

Joyce's novel is, among many things, a mock epic updating of Homer's Odyssey, and it’s perhaps best known that way, even though it begins with a jaunty and aggressive mockery of the opening of the Tridentine Mass, which culminates in Buck Mulligan’s declaring that a bowl of shaving cream “is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns.”

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I read and reckoned with this passage as a graduate student in Boston, twenty-five years ago, finding in it an unexpected encouragement to take more seriously the extraordinary reality of the Eucharist itself. We believe in the Real Presence. Joyce was mocking that belief through his character’s cavalier parody, and he wasn’t doing it lightly. Indeed, were it not for the strength of this conviction, proposed by the Church and adhered to by Her members, Joyce’s satire would lack any creative charge or challenge. Making the decision to take seriously Joyce’s satire of what Catholics take seriously made me, in turn, take seriously my encounter with Christ in Body and Blood, whenever I took Communion.

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Making the decision to take seriously Joyce’s satire of what Catholics take seriously made me, in turn, take seriously my encounter with Christ in Body and Blood, whenever I took Communion.

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Actually, that’s not entirely true. All of this made me take more seriously that encounter at the level of ideas, if not the weekly reality of it. The greatest challenge of the Eucharist, I think, is its abiding in our ordinary, churchgoing lives. Put differently, it’s not because of the sacrilegious efforts of great, fallen-away Catholic writers like Joyce that it’s so hard to summon a presence of mind and heart worthy of the Eucharistic encounter. Instead, it’s the regular custom of it that makes it too easy to take for granted.

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Here was someone committed to going up to the altar of God who knew the stakes of doing so in and with his whole body.

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Thankfully, right around the time I was reading Joyce and thinking about the Eucharist, I witnessed someone else’s far more embodied relationship to the Eucharist. At the Boston University Catholic chaplaincy’s Sunday night Mass, which took place in the school’s austere, Methodist chapel, I happened to sit, one time, near a young, disabled man. He had a condition that produced an uncontrollable shaking in his arms and hands. At the sign of peace, he didn’t extend a hand but instead nodded in my direction, as I did in his. When it was time to go up for communion, I was right behind him. When he approached the priest to receive, he thrust his hands behind him, almost like he was trying to take flight. But he wasn’t trying to take flight, I realized, feeling a sting in my own casually swinging arms and hands. This young man was trying to make sure his uncontrollable shaking didn’t cause any harm to his Lord and Savior, present in the transubstantiated wafer. Here was someone committed to going up to the altar of God who knew the stakes of doing so in and with his whole body. Since then, I have gone up for communion with my hands pressed together like a small child’s, a self-reminder, beyond my reading life, that I have been invited to respond with my whole embodied self to the genuine Christ, body and soul and blood. ​