Better than chocolate

Have you heard the story of the 9-year-old who asks her mother, “What’s sex like?”? While Mom hems and haws for an answer, the girl fires off a second question, “Is it better than chocolate?” Mom, happily relieved, says, “Yes, now go do your homework.”

Innocently, the girl has given herself and us a valuable clue. Although chocolate is an inanimate object without feelings, it gives intense pleasure on the tongue when savored in moderation. It is best as a treat or a dessert, not the main course--a lesson the girl may have to learn by getting sick a few times. Sex, of course, is better because the pleasure is reciprocal and grows with the increasing reciprocity between two free-willing adults. To give is to receive and to receive is to give. Children are a wonderful continuation of this reciprocity, through old age and the entire history of the human race, as the generations interact in many varied ways of giving and receiving. But everything begins with pleasure inside the bodies God gave us. We cannot think without bodies. We cannot love until we are loved. Blessed be God forever! Blessed be chocolate and sex, hopefully in combination with each other!

I notice that eating chocolate and making love are not opposites but on a continuum. The lesson of moderation is not abandoned but transformed into the lesson of reciprocity between equals. The wholly new element, however, is a second human being created by God, not by man. [And what a human being she is!
She can earn a Ph.D., cook, have children, write poetry, do taxes and run through the forest without her loins girt!] In Genesis when Adam named all the plants and creatures, he was still lonely, so God gave him an equal, bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh. [Maybe the story can be retold in reverse, in a non-sexist way.] As an equal she can refuse advances, initiate them or just let them happen spontaneously in the dance of love. So can he. It is frightening to “look” for a mate. I personally prefer love at first sight, which feels more like the gift God meant me to have.

Enter the apple, sin, fig leaves. You know the story. If only Adam and Eve had discovered chocolate before the apple, they might still be in paradise. As any child knows, there is no contest. However it happened, at some point our appetites became obsessions and our frolic became power games. We messed up big time. Eve is still working on her dissertation comparing eating to sex, and Adam is still in high school studying auto mechanics.

Now imagine an adult asking, “What’s the Eucharist like?” and “Is it better than sex?” Yes and in more ways than I can possibly say. I would have to be God to explain fully the gift of the Trinity within itself and to us. Hey, I’m not a Eucharistic theologian but just an average guy with a vivid imagination, so be suspicious of everything I say.

The Eucharist is an acquired taste. As a thin wafer and a sip of wine, it isn’t even food in the usual sense. If I were a daily communicant but had nothing else to eat, I would starve to death in less than 40 days. I might go straight to heaven, but I would be dust on earth. But let’s return to the girl and her mother. If the girl is lucky, her mother will teach her how sweet it is to share her chocolates with friends. If the mother is lucky, she will learn how rewarding it is to raise children after finishing her dissertation. Even in our sinful, relentless pursuit of pleasure, we learn with the Samaritan woman that the well eventually runs dry. We are dust and to dust we shall return. Thus, it is entirely appropriate that Jesus should meet us where we are and offer us a kind of food that is “anti-food”, i.e., heavenly food requiring faith. Since Jesus can make anything out of nothing, he can sustain us with nothing but faith. We can be baptized with water and a few words. We can be redeemed with a wafer and wine. One practical consequence of this is that salvation can be offered to the poor in all climates and situations, to the elderly on their death beds, to the injured in war zones. Among many other things, the Eucharist is the greatest environmental, technological miracle ever.

In the Alma Redemptoris Mater we pray:

To the wonderment of nature you bore your Creator,
yet remained a virgin after as before.

If God can shrink himself into Mary’s womb, he can shrink himself into a wafer, die for us, and offer his body to us as eternal food.

If there is a hint of sacrifice in appreciating chocolate (through moderation) and sex (through reciprocity), it is perfected in the Eucharist in a thousand ways. God died for us sinners. Divine love is deeper and more powerful than human love. It can never be exhausted but is always refreshing. The new element here is not an equal but a superior, i.e. THE superior, who humbled himself to save an inferior, indeed, to raise us up to his level. Chocolate and sex are good things in and of themselves, but sin can pervert them. The Eucharist leads us only to freedom, salvation and glory by calling us to follow Jesus on the path of love. He enters our bodies like a whisper.

Ron Day
ronaldeday@gmail.com