persons of the Trinity
and deserve our agapeic affection and all persons belong to
the mystical body of Christ in a communal personhood and thus
we should have an agapeic friendship for every person.
I,2.8 Nourishing Agapeic Eros in the Eucharist’s Present
The liturgy of the Eucharist makes Jesus present in the past,
present, and future dimensions of his presence and nourishes
our love with a special kind of felt affection that is universal.
The third part of that liturgy, the communion, especially nourishes
an agapeic, affectionate friendship uniting all in bringing about
the kingdom of God’s agape so that all might be reconciled.
My special problem was eros or sexuality so that sometimes
in my sinfulness like a black sheep I could not receive communion.
Thus the offertory come to have a special meaning for me
as I offered myself up in all my sinfulness with the bread and
the wine praying that I might be transformed in the consecration
and become a sacred priest set apart to serve God and his people.
Whereas each part of the liturgy of the Eucharist had past,
present, and future dimensions the offertory made Jesus present
to me in a heartfelt way as I tried to imitate him in his celibacy.
As time went on I came to see that many women loved him and
he loved many women for there was the Samaritan woman who
had five husbands and Mary and Martha and Mary Magdalene.
I was especially struck by how after the resurrection Magdalene
recognized him by the way he said her name with a love
that let her know right away that it had to be her Lord.
Jesus had a sublimated eros that let him love each unique
woman in a very special way even in all of her female uniqueness.
Many women came to love him with that sublimated eros
that would give a special content to their agape and a universality
to their eros even as Father Heeren had that toward my mother
and she toward him and she named her youngest son, Tommy
Joe, after Father Thomas Heeren and her husband Joseph.
Could such a transubstantiation ever happen to me in which
my sinful habitual substance would become a sacred substance.
I prayed each morning to become a sacred, sacerdos priest.
I,2.9 Nourishing Agapeic Mourning in the Eucharist’s Future
The liturgy of the Eucharist is all about a love stronger than death.
It is about death and dying and a mourning process that can be
totally successful if one can live out the sorrowful mysteries
in light of the glorious mysteries to bring about the joyful mysteries.
In the sacrament of the sacrifice of the mass the sacred heart
of Jesus who is the high priest is slaughtered as the lamb of God.
He was born for us in his incarnation that he might be killed
for us in his crucifixion but then in the reliving of this in the mass
he lives on in us in communion in his glorious resurrection.
The glorious mysteries that began with the resurrection bring
out the futural dimensions of the liturgy of the Eucharist,
which we can begin to understand by thinking about the prayer,
Glory Be:
Glory be to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
as it was in the beginning, is now
and ever shall be world without end. Amen.
Levinas explains in Otherwise Than Being (pp. 144ff.) how “Glory is
that which manifests the unmanifest even in its unmanifestness.”
So each day in communion we would give glory to God and
experience the glory of God by knowing God’s love more dearly.
Each day in communion it would become manifest to us
that Jesus who had died for us was now living within us.
So in communion we went through a mourning process
in which the lost, dead Jesus would be found alive within us.
As we were nourished day by day in communion the Love
that is God became more and more manifest to us even
though it remained beyond us in its mysterious unmanifestness.
The manifest is that which we can hold fast in our hand
or even in our mouth as we held Jesus in holy communion.
No matter which of our loved ones dies our mourning
for them through prayer and communion lets them be present.
I,3 Growing Intellectually in That Seminary Seed-Bed
I,3.1 Nourishing Agape with the Trivium
In the seminary our alma mater constantly cultivated within us
the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity and we came to see
how the intellectual virtues of science, art, practical wisdom,
intuitive reason, and philosophic wisdom aided the theological virtues.
Growing in the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love contributed
greatly to understanding agape and its various sublimations.
Right from the beginning in the minor seminary our teachers
began
