Our Town & the Eucharist

Strangely enough, a fictional female character’s desire to communicate beyond the grave with her loved ones has taught me something about Christ’s presence in the Eucharist.

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I first read Our Town by Thornton Wilder when I was in eighth grade. The play, which was partly inspired by Dante’s Purgatorio, is short, divided into three acts which jump ahead in time as they progress through the characters’ lives and trace the changes in Grover’s Corners.

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What I remember most about reading the play, though, is that I wanted to read Emily’s part and that it was largely about death – or perhaps, more accurately, it is about the way the reality of death affects the living. Throughout the third act, the afterlife is presented as a fact of nature. This wasn’t unfamiliar to me, a cradle Catholic attending a Catholic parochial school, where the communion of saints and the drama of Christ’s death were frequent in my imagination and developing understanding. Looking back, though, perhaps the prominence of death in Wilder’s play also stood out to me because it was during that year that I experienced the first significant loss of my life.

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I didn’t know it then, but I would go on to become a teacher and eventually decide to teach this play to my own high school students. (If my life were a play written by Thornton Wilder, it might jump from that eighth-grade class to years in the future in my own classroom.) Reading at this moment in time with my students, new aspects of the play stand out to me, particularly the emphasis on paying attention. Premiering eighty-six years ago, it can even seem as though Wilder’s message is prophetic.  [MGM1] 

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If my life were a play written by Thornton Wilder, it might jump from that eighth-grade class to years in the future in my own classroom.

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As a fourteen-year-old, I wanted Emily’s part because she gets to visit her loved ones after she has died in childbirth. This was amazing to me. Did I believe this could really happen? At the beginning of the third act, the Stage Manager says, “We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even stars…everybody knows that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. […] There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.” Here, Wilder affirms not only that the afterlife is real, but that the eternal part of human beings, the soul, is also real. Emily might have died in the play, and I will die, too, but here was Emily – the eternal part of her – still existing.

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From this vantage point, Emily observes her still-living loved ones and comments, “Oh […] I never realized before how troubled and how…how in the dark live persons are. Look at him. I loved him so.” She watches her own parents during younger years and – in grief, as the stage directions say – she cries, “Mama, I’m here. […] I love you all, everything.  I can’t look at everything hard enough.” It becomes too much for Emily and so she asks the Stage Manager, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?” He answers her: “No. The saints and poets, maybe – they do some.”

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If Emily could do something to make her loved ones feel her presence or communicate to them that every moment of their lives is a gift, I think she would do it. She is pained because she thinks human beings are doomed to live their lives without noticing the wonder of it all, and she sees this as a tragedy. And yet, as I discussed this play with my students and we acknowledged the weakness of human nature and the temptation to distraction which is so strong in our present age, it struck me that if Emily, who is human, wants desperately to be close to her still-living family members, and to tell them to notice things, how much more does the Son of the Living God want to be close to us, to tell us to notice the ordinary present moment? Emily, who is human, wants there to be a way for her to be present to her loved ones who are living.

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Is this not what Christ does at every Mass? Christ is not only present to us but gives Himself to us in the Eucharist. Our Father has given us the Son, not just to visit us and watch us like a ghost, but to be with us physically and divinely. God wants us to know how much He loves us, and He wants to be as close as possible to us, so close in fact that He wants to live in us. He finds the most creative and humblest means of doing this: taking the form of bread and wine so that we can consume Him and be consumed by Him. As we eat the Body of Christ, we also become the Body of Christ; He becomes part of us – literally, as we digest – and spiritually. This is mind-blowing and it is also a mystery.

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Wilder’s play is all about the unique human challenge of living in the present moment. (I’m reminded of another author, David Foster Wallace, who discussed this in his famous Kenyon College commencement address by comparing us to fish who constantly need to tell ourselves “This is water”). There are gifts at every moment of our lives and sometimes – a lot of the time – we miss them. How often do I take this greatest of gifts, Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist, for granted or miss it altogether? We might not see Him in the flesh, but the gift of the Eucharist is what He has given us so we might continue to experience His presence. I’m here. I’m with you. I love you, He says.

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There are gifts at every moment of our lives and sometimes – a lot of the time – we miss them. How often do I take this greatest of gifts, Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist, for granted or miss it altogether?

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Wilder’s play is called Our Town, not Grover’s Corners. This whole world is our town. All of it is a gift from a God who is Love. Our challenge is to pay attention to these gifts, like the saints and the poets, and receive them at every moment. At the very least, let us try to pay attention to every Eucharist and live our lives “every, every minute.”