According to the author, Bishop Robert Barron, this book is intended to help bring Catholics back to the fold in regards to the Catholic teaching that despite all appearances to the contrary, the cracker and wine of Mass become the body and blood of Jesus.
How does he do this? Does he deal with the simple fact that one reason a lot of people don’t believe this literal-bronze-age nonsense is because we’ve learned a bit about the nature of reality in the past two thousand years, and we understand that the classic explanation of substance and accident (a la Aristotle) is really just an ancient attempt at explaining the world which has now evolved into current scientific understanding? No. Does he deal with the Church’s own admission that nothing physically changes? Even more no. So how does he deal with it? The only way he can — the best way Catholics deal with anything in their faith that inherently makes no sense. He piles on the metaphors.
But why then the prohibition [in the Garden of Eden]? Why is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil forbidden to them? The fundamental determination of good and evil remains, necessarily, the prerogative of God alone, since God is, himself, the ultimate good. To seize this knowledge, therefore, is to claim divinity for oneself-and this is the one thing that a creature can never do and thus should never try. To do so is to place oneself in a metaphysical contradiction, interrupting thereby the loop of grace and ruining the sacrum convivium (sacred banquet). Indeed, if we turn ourselves into God, then the link that ought to connect us, through God, to the rest of creation is lost, and we find ourselves alone. This is, in the biblical reading, precisely what happens. Beguiled by the serpent’s suggestion that God is secretly jealous of his human creatures, Eve and Adam ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They seized at godliness that they might not be dominated by God, and they found themselves, as a consequence, expelled from the place of joy. Moreover, as the conversation between God and his sinful creatures makes plain, this “original.”
What is this saying? Does this amount to anything other than just a rehashing of the story with some new metaphors thrown it? I don’t see anything more than that.
This complex symbolic narrative is meant to explain the nature of sin as it plays itself out across the ages and even now. God wants us to eat and drink in communion with him and our fellow creatures, but our own fear and pride break up the party. God wants us gathered around him in gratitude and love, but our resistance results in scattering, isolation, violence, and recrimination. God wants the sacred meal; we want to eat alone and on our terms.
Again, this is just metaphor. It doesn’t mean anything because it refers only to some story in a book that is itself of dubious historical accuracy (read: nonsense). Even Barron would suggest that the story of the Garden of Eden is really more metaphor than anything else, so this is all metaphor about another metaphor.
[T]he salvation wrought through Israel and Jesus and made present in the Mass has to do with the healing of the world. We see this dimension especially in the gifts of bread and wine presented at the offertory. To speak of bread is to speak, implicitly, of soil, seed, grain, and sunshine that crossed ninety million miles of space; to speak of wine is to speak, indirectly, of vine, earth, nutrients, storm clouds, and rainwater. To mention earth and sun is to allude to the solar system of which they are a part, and to invoke the solar system is to assume the galaxy of which it is a portion, and to refer to the galaxy is to hint at the unfathomable realities that condition the structure of the measurable universe. Therefore, when these gifts are brought forward, it is as though the whole of creation is placed on the altar before the Lord. In the older Tridentine liturgy, the priest would make this presentation facing the east, the direction of the rising sun, signaling that the Church’s prayer was on behalf not simply of the people gathered in that place but of the cosmos itself.
We can’t be surprised at the degree to which Barron relies on metaphor to describe the rituals of the Catholic Mass since he can’t even describe his god in straight terms:
God is, in his ownmost reality, not a monolith but a communion of persons. From all eternity, the Father speaks himself, and this Word that he utters is the Son. A perfect image of his Father, the Son shares fully the actuality of the Father: unity, omniscience, omnipresence, spiritual power. This means that, as the Father gazes at the Son, the Son gazes back at the Father. Since each is utterly beautiful, the Father falls in love with the Son and the Son with the Father-and they sigh forth their mutual love. This holy breath (Spiritus Sanctus) is the Holy Spirit. These three “persons” are distinct, yet they do not constitute three Gods.
The father “speaks himself”? What could that possibly mean? He insists that “as the Father gazes at the Son, the Son gazes back at the Father.” How can spiritual beings gaze at each other? It makes no sense. And then they “sigh forth their mutual love.” What, do the Father and the Son breath? What are they sighing? They don’t even have bodies — how can this make any sense? That “holy breath” is the third part of this weird god? And yet it’s one god? In an attempt to use metaphor to explain the inherently self-contradictory notion that three is one and one is three, Barron just ends up uttering inane deepities.