Handwriting on the Altar

That Sun­day, at mass of all places, I stum­bled upon the same lit­tle olé gar­den of olive trees, I’d encoun­tered dur­ing that other hell­ishly dry period of my life, back in the spring of the year. Only this time, I saw Abra­ham stand­ing on the mount in front of a roughly hewn stone altar, offer­ing an ani­mal sac­ri­fice to Yah­weh as the priest ele­vated the host at the con­se­cra­tion. As the priest returned the host to the paten, I saw a pen­cil of light, much like a laser beam, shoot down from the heav­ens and into the host. Instantly, I knew that the bread had been trans­formed into the body of Christ—the vis­i­ble like­ness of the invis­i­ble image of God. And in that same instant, I saw the same pen­cil of light trans­late the ani­mal sac­ri­fice into an inscrip­tion on the face of the altar, where Abra­ham had just laid it.

With that, I real­ized the mass is about the trans­for­ma­tion of our ani­mal natures into human nature—the image into the like­ness of God.

Through the priest, do we offer our bod­ies to God via the bread, so that we may lit­er­ally be trans­formed into full human beings, the body of Christ. So too, do we imi­tate the priest (Abra­ham) when­ever we sac­ri­fice, on the roughly hewn altars of our daily lives, those ani­mal­is­tic ten­den­cies which no longer befit us as human beings. Only when we see the hand­writ­ing on the altar, and embrace the holo­graphic pre­scrip­tion etched there, in place of the sin offer­ing, can we truly give up such ani­mal­is­tic behavior.