Brief synopsis of the readings: Today we celebrate the Body and Blood of Christ, a teaching at the center of what we believe as Christians. In Deuteronomy we see Moses reminding the people that God led them for 40 years in the wilderness. When they were hungry God gave them manna, which was new to them. In John’s Gospel Jesus spoke to the Jews and told them he is the living bread and that this bread is his flesh. The crowd disputed this, asking how he can give his own flesh to eat. Jesus responded by telling them that anyone who does not eat the flesh of the Son of Man cannot have eternal life. This bread is not like manna because those who ate manna eventually died, but this bread that he gives will grant eternal life.

Last year the Catholic News Agency reported that only half of Catholics believe in the Real Presence of the Eucharist. OK, I need to unpack that before I explain my problem with that poll.

When Jesus blessed the bread and wine at the Last Supper he famously said: “Do this in memory of me.” Early Christians repeated this blessing at their weekly gathering and this weekly gathering, over the years, became what we now see as Sunday Mass. At the same time they reserved some of the bread to bring to those who were sick or for some reason couldn’t attend. With this practice came the belief that once bread and wine became the Body and Blood of Christ they remained in that state forever and is known as Communion or Eucharist. All Catholic Churches keep a supply of this blessed bread reserved and under lock and key. This belief is called the “Real Presence.” So here’s my problem: I’ve never seen this. I’m not sure how they worded the questions but I’ve never met a Catholic who treated the Eucharist with anything other than the highest respect and honor. Whatever someone may think of the intellectual concept of Real Presence, without fail I’ve witnessed someone who lives strongly in the belief that what looks like bread and wine is indeed something profoundly sacred and hold.

Eucharist is also sacrament, indeed we call it the “blessed sacrament” We see sacraments as rituals that bring us closer to God and to each other. Each sacrament has its own character and we’ve always equated Eucharist with nutrition. That’s at the core of what Jesus was explaining to the crowd, with limited success.

We can’t look at the sweep of human history without recognizing that seeking and acquiring nutrition took most of our energy for most of our lives. Until the last few hundred years most of our ancestors lived with the real possibility of starvation and the image of manna from God made perfect sense.

I don’t think any of us wish to return to those days, but as the fear of starvation fades we need to look at feasts like this one with new eyes. Let’s face it: most of us live in a society where we take the escalator to the gym where we burn calories on a stairmaster. We continue to search for the drug that delivers on the promise to balance our blood sugar and take off weight. Adolescents, particularly adolescent girls, know well the jungle of balancing beauty and health.

So if the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ doesn’t necessarily speak to us about nutrition, what does it say to us today? Mother Teresa legendarily told us that we don’t hunger for food, we hunger for connection, for each other. She once said that if someone is hungry she had an easy time with that. She can provide food. But if someone is hungering for intimacy, if someone is just plain lonely that’s a much harder reach. Starbucks gives us parallel, isolated communities where we sit feet apart and lock in on our laptops. Social media convinces us we are the end user of all activity and we must be doing well if we get likes and our thoughts are forwarded to other people. I don’t mean this to vilify Starbucks for Facebook but do they bring us together or just give us the illusion of community?

This is not an easy road and I don’t want to sound defeatist. But in my experience when faith communities go well they do so because they bring people together in ways that nobody imagined. Some are obvious: married couples who first met when they both served on a church committee and found that they stood in the parking lot for an hour after the meeting was over, just talking. But there are also people who crawled into Twelve Step meetings out of desperation and found a place of healing and light that brought a new meaning to their lives that they never thought was possible for them.

Perhaps our modern understanding of Eucharist, of the Body and Blood of Christ, needs to take into account something new. Without taking away from the sanctity of Christ’s Body and Blood in our relationship with God we should look anew at how Eucharist binds us to each other. Years ago I met a priest, Fr. Ellwood (Bud) Kaiser, who was a television and movie producer. In addition to the 1989 movie Romero he produced a series of television programs called Insight in the 1960s and 1970s. He told me that conflict on the set was sometimes inevitable and there were times when he would stop filming. They would then gather for mass; he said he found this was a good way to remind themselves and each other that they were in this together and they could produce a good product only if they were committed to each other.

There are countless other examples of this. Not all gatherings include the Eucharist, but all can be “eucharistic.” When Jesus said “do this in memory of me” we can take an expansive look at these words. And when we do we understand that the communities we create or participate in are truly the Real Presence.