When it comes to how I approach and receive the Eucharist, I am somewhere in between common Protestant and Catholic interpretations. I think Donald Spoto summed it up best in his book
The Hidden Jesus (pages 190 to 206). I'm sharing this as a matter of interest, not as a matter of debate:
(197)
In discussing the Eucharist, it is crucial to keep in mind that all human language is metaphor a struggling and striving with crude human words and human concepts to express an experience of the beyond. The words, the formulae of faith, however necessary and refined, are always conditioned and limited by the culture, the time and place in which they are expressed. So much is self-evident.
This is as it should be, for it is not the formulae, however essential, but the act of giving oneself over to God in trusting faith: this is what matters when we speak the words we have invented to express our experience of the transcendent. With specific reference to the Eucharist, what counts is not that we twist and turn philosophical language (words like "substance" and "accidents," which would have made no sense to Jesus or his friends), requiring them to serve once and for all time an experience of God's gift of Himself to us can any words ever do that justice?
(198)
No, what matters is that one accepts that along the journey of faith, receiving this bread and sharing this cup with our fellow pilgrims places us in the presence of him who is our salvation. But there is a danger here: since the Risen Jesus is no longer limited by time and place, and cannot be said to be here (in the bread and wine, for example) but not there (a few feet away, on an altar table or in a pew), we have to be very careful about a magical interpretation of a sacred reality. Still more careful ought we to be: not to think wrongly that the presence of the Risen Jesus in our midst is due to the "power" of a cultic priest, who "makes" him present on command, by virtue of uttering a few words. That, too, is magic, not the divinely free activity by which God manifests Himself as He wills in the person of Jesus.
Clearly, when we speak of the presence of God we cannot speak in any way of a spatial or physical presence. We cannot attribute to God the kind of body that we have the body that is defined and limited by our place in space and time. Rather, he fills all matter but not in a spatial or physical way. When we say that God is everywhere, we don't mean that he occupies space but that the world and everything in it could not exist without his inherent, indwelling presence. (198)
After elaborating a bit on apprehending the numinous, he continues:
(200)
What does all this mean for belief that Jesus is present in the Eucharist?
It means first of all that Jesus the Christ is of course always fully present outside the Eucharist liturgy, or the Mass. He is really present wherever we are in a presence that is réelle parce que réalisante, as the French theologian Henri de Lubac said: real because it realizes, actualizes, is effective. The elements of bread and wine and the enactment of a formal liturgy are not negligible, nor can we forever do without them. In this regard, there is something significant about the tradition and, alas, tradition is neither a word nor an idea that carries much currency in our time.
From very soon after the death of Jesus right down to our present times, those who believe in him have gathered to break bread and share the cup. Over twenty centuries, the ritual has changed, become more elaborate at some times, simpler at others. But whether it occurs in a great cathedral, with a thousand-voice choir and the richest panoply that can be arranged, or in a mud hut where a few barefoot poor folk gather in hope, the reality proclaimed by Christian faith is the same. Like the infant imaginatively described as laid "in a manger," Jesus comes to be the food of his people his presence nourishes and sustains. If we dare to cast aside or even to diminish that tradition, so central to admitting both our need of God and His power to give Himself to us we are of all generations the most to be pitied.
A long list of rights and prayers, of devotions and cults, have come and gone over two thousand years. But just as Judaism would effectively abandon the core of its faith-witness were it to abolish the Passover meal, so it is with the Eucharist. In a sense, it lifts the restrictions on Christians in ever generation they are freed from the limitations of their own particularity, their own narrow ways of doing things. This, the sacred meal witnesses, links us to the faith of the apostles. This gives us a frame of reference outside ourselves. The sheer simplicity of the gestures, of the prayers, of listening to the Scriptures, of breaking bread and sharing the cup all this overarches every culture and epoch.
(201)
So much of this is linked to our need to adore. To kneel, to bow, to join the hands, to keep silence in the presence of the Holy One these seem stranger to contemporary people than perhaps to any previous age of the world. But the simple, quiet gestures, the humbling of the body, listening to the ancient words, withdrawing from everything that constitutes our busy world and our many cares is not all this the condition of our knowing the presence of God and allowing Him to enter our lives and claim us for His own?
Through the liturgy, the Risen Jesus is not summoned from another world in any spatial way, nor is there a physical or chemical change in the bread and wine. What happens is a change of signs, of what things mean. Bread and wine become signs actualizing the deepest self-giving of Christ to us. The Lord gives himself to us as food, and that is the reality of which these powerful signs speak. It is entirely inappropriate, therefore, to call the bread and wine "merely" or "only" symbols, for in the mystery of God's presence in and among us, the symbols given to us are the closest we can come to the reality. In the realm of faith, symbols are never "just symbols." They are the carrier of the reality.
Spoto, Donald. "The Supper: Jesus and the Eucharist."
The Hidden Jesus: A New Life. New York, NY: St. Martins Press, 1998.
