The Eucharist and Emotional Stability
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Christ’s Offer of Peace
Christ continually offers peace to his disciples. Before His Crucifixion, He tells his apostles, “Peace I leave you, my peace I give you,” and after His Resurrection he says, “Peace be with you.” Constant emotional turbulence, conflict, distress, tension – this we can handle on our own. This we’ve got down. But what Christ offers is peace. And He gives us peace through unifying the life of our soul.
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Lack of Peace as emotional disruption/fragmentation/conflict
The opposite of peace is conflict. When this happens within the person, it means that our passions are at war with each other.
A lack of peace means our urges and impulses are pulling us in contradictory directions. Sin and vice – unlike virtue – break us apart and don’t unify us. Prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope and love – these are all pursuing the same thing. Greed and lust and anger and laziness – these are all pursuing different things, which often have nothing to do with one another.
If you pull both ends of a string in opposite directions, it’ll make the string tense. And if your various urges are pulling in opposite directions, it’ll make you tense.
The only way to peace is to unify your passions. And the only way to do that is to get them all pulling in the same direction.
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A unified life
So the ultimate problem with our emotional life is actually that it’s disorganized. It’s like a marching band where everybody’s playing different music and marching in different directions. A life without focus or direction is pure cacophony. It’s a pure headache. More than that, when we just follow one unrelated impulse after another, it’s like the image of individual sticks which can be broken, one-by-one. The chaos of vice makes us weak. The stress on each stick breaks us easily.
But you put all those sticks into a bundle, and they’re unbreakable. And if we can organize our entire life, everything we feel and everything we do, around one central mission – then you’re unstoppable.
Then the turbulence and distress are replaced with a vigor, a force that can do anything.
This is what the saints have found. They have found something to unify all their energies, something that gives them an astonishing momentum along with an astonishing peace.
And the principle that organizes, unifies, energizes and also calms their life, is Jesus Christ.
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Jesus’ Peace
As we’ve seen, peace doesn’t mean inactivity or listlessness. It actually means a full, joyful, vivacious energy – where all the passions of the soul work together in harmony. It’s the marching band all playing the same music and headed in the same direction. It’s a soccer team coordinating their passes as they run in the same direction towards the same goal.
And this is the peace Jesus offers. It’s a dynamic, powerful peace. It’s the peace that motivates Joan of Arc to lead troops into battle and Thomas Aquinas to write countless volumes and Francis Xavier to travel to the farthest ends of the earth.
It’s the peace that causes us to get married and raise a family and become priests and nuns and spread the gospel and work well and do everything we can to make this world a better place.
Our emotions, our passions – they’re an army waiting to be trained and deployed – but they need a general, and a cause worth fighting for.
Christ is the general. We must make Him the master of our soul, so that he can bring order and discipline where there is chaos.
And Christ is the cause. Union with Him – a share in His triumph, His glorious Sonship – is what’s waiting for all of us in Heaven.
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Communion and Peace of the Soul
If Jesus is our Prince of Peace, if He is the one who can bring order to the unruliness in our souls, then going to Him is the only ultimate cure for our inner conflict, tension, distress.
We find Him most profoundly in the sacrament of the Eucharist.
Again, peace is based on overcoming fragmentation through unity and there’s a reason we call the Eucharist communion – the uniting of multiple realities. The Eucharist unites us to Jesus. It unites us to the rest of the Church – to one another. But it also allows the Lord to unify all the disconnected threads of our emotionally disturbed souls. He draws those threads together before they snap, and weaves them into a strong fabric that He can rely on, and that He can use in His service.
So the next time you receive communion, offer the Lord the disorganization of your soul, and ask Him to give you the internal unity, the Peace, which the world cannot give.