A Midnight Longing For Communion

The time was about 12:30 in the morning on April the 15th.  The place was my room, shrouded in black except for where the streetlight crept in from under my lopsided window shade.  Having finished my customary nighttime prayers, lying down in bed I felt the siren song of sinful ideas tugging at my mind.  I didn’t want to give in to them, not this time, and I particularly needed my sleep because I had to get up early.

Thus hoping to provide my vulnerable, fallen mind with an alternate image, I pictured Christ offering me a Communion wafer upon my entrance into Heaven, a comforting tableau I had used many times before.  However, instead of merely providing me with a nice mental picture before sleep took me, as I had intended, I found almost instantly that I wanted Him.  I wanted Him then, at that exact moment, in the form of a Host, in a way that I hadn’t in years, and I literally could not think of anything else.  Having not received Communion in months, yet being generally accustomed to this, such an unexpected desire shook me inside.  Furthermore, the strength of it pushed my thoughts of sleep away.

“Feed me,” I whispered into the empty blackness, feeling desperate.  “Feed me,” I pleaded again.  Still, as I lay there, it seemed like the longing only grew stronger.  Why was He doing this to me?  Then I thought, what if a priest could hold a monstrance to my lips?  No, a kiss would express the devotion I felt, but the idea only teased my longing.  I wanted the Host on my tongue, in my mouth, in my very body.  “I beg You, feed me,” I pleaded with Him, wanting my hunger satisfied.  “I beg You, feed me.”  Still, a Host didn’t miraculously appear in front of me, and though I hardly expected such an occurrence, I wished it would happen.  How badly I wanted Him.

As I continued lying there, I was reminded of an experience I read that Therese of Lisieux had in a children’s biography.  If I remember correctly, the description given of it in the book was “both painful and sweet.  Had it lasted one moment more, my soul would have parted from my body.”  Mine was a little different, in that I didn’t feel it would kill me, more that He—or desire for Him—had grabbed my soul and refused to let go.  It was also, in some sense, a reverse image of a previous night where I had been startled awake from a dream about sinning, and I struggled so much with resisting the evil thoughts offered I started tearing up.

Finally, although it was just a longer way of saying the same thing, I whispered “Lord, I wish to feed upon You,” a phrase I based on a loose translation of the hymn Panis Angelicus.  After I had said this at least three times, I did fall asleep eventually, and when my alarm went off in a few hours, I felt normal again.

Roughly 38 hours later, my beloved little brother was in his last hours on earth, so our pastor came to the house to give him last rites.  I caught our pastor on his way out and told him of the longing I had had two nights before.  He responded in a kind way, explaining that such a longing was good, in fact a Heavenly sensation on earth.  This made some sense to me since I knew that I was longing for Him Who is the greatest of all goods. But, Father continued by saying that “we can’t do [Holy Communion].”  At least I received some measure of comfort in knowing one of my spiritual fathers knew.  Furthermore, I already knew that at that time no priest would give me—or anyone else—Communion.

Still, it was a taste of bitter irony to think that upon this one April night, exactly when no one could have Him, I would have given much to receive Him, when at other times I barely noticed when I didn’t receive.  Though, as I said, I had been without the Eucharist for extended periods of time before the coronavirus pandemic, and I might long for Him too, the lockdown was the first time I knew many other Catholics were suffering the same.

Finally, on Pentecost Sunday, after having endured many hardships, the loss of my brother paramount among them, I presented myself, said “Amen,” and a priest placed the longed-for Host on my tongue.  At that point, it felt like a relatively ordinary occurrence.  There was nothing unusual about it, only a mild amount of comfort in thinking that it was what He wanted from me.

Taking this one April night in perspective does not necessarily seem like it would have meaning beyond, “Receive Communion often,” but I think there was more He wanted to tell me.  That night, because of my desire for Him, by earthly standards I lowered myself in a peculiar, even excessive way.  Normally, in my experience, if a person is reduced to begging for something, this means that he is at the mercy of someone else, which can be humiliating and painful by itself.

Was my request that night entirely at His mercy?  Yes, and I knew it well, but as He is my Lord, my relationship to Him is something I would do well to remember more often.  Was I humiliated?  In some sense, but I chose freely to humble myself before Him.  What desire for earthly dignity I might have had was a small prick compared to the shock of wanting Him. Yes, I was in pain, but only because He refrained from giving me Himself.

In some sense, it felt like a lesson in “For when I am weak, then I am strong.”  He made me incredibly weak that night, but the greatest reason for my weakness was that He was not in my body and soul.  I suppose, that being my weakness, what made me strong is that I was depending on and longing for Him rather than myself.  Whether or not He chose to give me Himself was up to Him.  [Yet, even now, I wish I could love and long for Him as I did that night since there is nothing greater on earth to long for.]

There is one more aspect of this mystical occurrence I have not yet mentioned, and that is, oddly enough, the joy.  Even though I felt that all of my soul was crying out for Him under the appearance of a Host, at the same time I felt joy.  It is difficult to put into words how I could feel joy, wanting Him as strongly as I did.  Yet, in another way, it does make sense, because I would say that my desperate longing and the joy that accompanied it both came from a wave of love for Him.  I was given joy as I thought of Him, but I felt empty as I wanted His Flesh and Blood.

Perhaps, preparing me for the loss of my brother, He wished to give me comfort in the form of showing me the true joy of loving Him.  Perhaps He wanted to show me how much my soul truly longed for Him in an unusual way.  In fact, at times the memory of it has been a comfort to me, knowing that He wanted me to long for Him at all.  Or perhaps, being touched by intense longing and joy at the same time, it was a foretaste of Purgatory, which, it is speculated, is the same two sensations.

I may never know in this life why He chose to put that desire on my heart, only that I wish I could love and long for Him as much as I did that night always.