When I was at the Seminary, we had the option to learn a little bit of Latin. A few of us felt that since this was part of the tradition of the church, that we should at least have an opportunity to have at least a bit of a grasp of it.
I am glad I did this… but really, how I learnt any Latin is a mystery of religion. It was so difficult. There were so many irregular verbs, and declensions… my mind boggled. And I didn’t put enough preparation in before the next classes, so I would worry that I wouldn’t be able to answer any questions about it. Mysteriously, though, several things deep seep into my brain, like a form of osmosis…. Just by being immersed in the language of Latin, some things did stay with me…
Like pronunciation, and the general structure and basic vocabulary….. and also, a few phrases really struck me, some for silly reasons…..
Like, our lecturer would present us with old Latin hymns and get us to pronounce the latin in them…… I was intriguied one day when we were reciting an old hymn set to the words of Thomas Aquinas, one of the great Doctors of the Church…… It was a hymn to Jesus…. And the mysterious Latin words echoed out…. “O Pelicanus”…..
I thought to myself…. How odd…. That sounds like… it looks like……. Aquinas is saying to jesus….. O Pelican !!
How odd…. Surely I have mistranslated…. But no… I had not……. But why a pelican….. why would a pelican be a symbold of Jesus…….
And here lies an interesting story…..
The symbolism of the mother pelican feeding her little baby pelicans is rooted in an ancient legend which is much older than Chrstianity. There is a legend about the humble pelican which is borne of a misunderstanding of what an observer thinks they are seeing……….. Legend has it that in time of famine, the mother pelican wounded herself (‘vulns” herself… as in another latin word from the same origin as the word ‘vulnerable.” Able to be pierced……, striking her breast with the beak to feed her young with her blood to prevent starvation. Another version of the legend was that the mother fed her dying young with her blood to revive them from death, but in turn lost her own life. This legend, as I mention, comes from a slight observational confusion….. a pelican feeds her young by regurgitating food it has stored in its upper throat.. by… lowering its neck onto its breast… hence what looks like it piercing its breast and lfuid flows out which the young then feed…… but even though it’s a misunderstanding… the symbolism is still clear……
Given this tradition, one can easily see why the early Christians adapted it to symbolize our Lord, Jesus Christ. The pelican symbolizes Jesus our Redeemer who gave His life for our redemption and the victory over sin and death he made through His passion and death. We were dead to sin and have found new life through the Blood of Christ. Moreover, Jesus continues to feed us with His body and blood in the holy Eucharist.
This gospel today reminds me about this… because jesus is using very clear and very dramatic and almost unpleasant words to explain how he intends to be made present to us and to allow us to draw life from him by partaking in eucharist… which is clearly a sharing in the body and blood of Christ so that we might be united in Christ’s life.
The other little latin that has stayed in my head, almost like a little jingle…. Is the words of a saying, again from good old Saint Thomas Aquinas….. Christ is “non confractus, non concisus” …… It’s a strange little saying, but an important one…. When the eucharist is celebrated, we break the bread… and Christ is present in his body and bllod in the euchartic bread…. But …. Christ is not broken, nor is he chewed, (non confractus, non concisus)…..even though we receive him in this special way…. Jesus is not parceled out or divided, by the sharing of the bread…. We each receive Jesus, and draw life from him as we take this food of grace….. I reminds me when I, and I am sure many others were told similarly… when I was preparing for first holy communion, the nuns preparing us reminded us… don’t chew the host, or else you are biting Jesus….. ….. now…. It would have been helpful for me to know a little latin back then…. Yes, we do believe we are receiving Jesus in what looks like bread and wine…. It is Christ present….however…. even if we were to chew the host.. and it is fine to do that…. we are not chewing jesus… it doesn’t work that way…. Nor are we breaking him or dividing him…….
Jesus had the problem of conveying the meaning of the eucharist to his followers, and it was very hard… he MEANT them to understand the dramatic reality of the action of the eucharist, whilst at the same time not wanting them to be so literal that they would be repelled by the idea of eating flesh and blood…… somewhere in the middle is the truth….
But all that matters, and I am forever grateful to my long-suffering Latin lecturer for this…. Is that Christ gives his life and body and all for us…. And wants to to enter into a relationship of faith and life with him that is so close that we are to be united with Christ… and what we celebrate here in this eucharist.. is the tangible expression of the life that we share with God made flesh… for the life of the world……. The pelicanus… who’s chest was pierced and his own life force flowed out… so that we might have life……
Paul W. Kelly
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