The Feast of Corpus Christi

On Autism, Grief, and the Eucharist

The phone rang.

I answered it to hear the voice of a groom at the stables. He sounded worried. My horse Faal was sick.

We rushed to the stables and for the next six days we tried to save him. He would seem to get better, then the next day sink lower.

On the sixth day his body began shutting down and there was nothing left we could do but put him to sleep to end his suffering. I held his head to my chest, kissed his face, whispered to him how very sorry I was and how very much I loved him, and then I said goodbye.

I met Faal eleven years ago when he was upside down. Walking through the stable, I heard the sound of a horse kicking against the wall. When I went to investigate, I saw a bay gelding cast. Being cast is what happens when a horse is rolling and gets stuck against a wall and is unable to right themselves. It is dangerous and can even be deadly.

After shouting for help, the grooms and I got Faal back on his feet but it was clear something was still wrong: he was colicking. Colic is one of the leading causes of equine death. We called the vet and we were able to resolve the colic, but I learned that Faal colicked often. Weekly, sometimes. I also learned that his owners had not seen him in years.

Standing there that day, caring for this exhausted horse, my heart felt bruised thinking of the pain and loneliness he had been living with for so long. I contacted the owner and got permission to begin caring for Faal myself. I changed his feed regimen, bought him supplements and probiotics to sort out his gut health, gave him gentle excercise, and lavished attention on him. His health gradually improved and his bouts of colic decreased in frequency and then went away altogether. Most wonderfully, this horse who initially seemed to have no personality at all, who wouldn’t even lift his head when spoken to, came out of his shell. We became friends.

Eventually, we were able to convince the owner to sell Faal to us. That was one of the happiest days of my life because I knew Faal would be taken care of forever. For the next ten years he was an utter joy in our lives. One of the most beautiful horses in the stables, with liquid dark eyes and an elegant face, people would stop just to comment on how lovely he was. But it was his personality that everyone loved the most. Faal adored attention – so much so that if people were gathered somewhere he would do whatever it took to ensure their attention was focused solely on him. Once, he got down on the ground and rolled extravagantly in front of a Pony Club class, to the delight of the children. Another time, during a Christmas party under the gazebo, he strolled right in. Decorations flapped, music blared, little kids ran about, and Faal stood perfectly content in the middle of the hubbub.

Faal had the loudest whinny in our corner of the stables. He loved having his face washed and his hair brushed and he got mad if I looked at my phone too long in his presence. He had a girlfriend named Lady, they loved to scritch one another’s necks. He loved going for hand walks around the stables where he picked the path, pulling me over to whatever it was he wanted to sniff or whoever it was he wanted to meet. Most of all, for the eleven years I knew him, Faal always knew he was loved.

Grief is never easy. Autism is never easy. Put the two together and things can get ugly.

I had been struggling before Faal’s death with a bout of particularly intense anxiety. For Faal’s death to come in the midst of this was devastating. Initially, my mind devoured itself, insisting I was somehow to blame for what happened. If only I had been better, smarter, I could have averted tragedy. But the autopsy showed that there was a problem in his intestines that had been there for a long time, that no one could have caused or prevented. It was possibly the source of the chronic colic he had before I rescued him. The stasis we achieved kept him healthy and free of colic for a decade, something close to a miracle. But, as he aged, his body weakened and the inevitable happened.

Once I learned this, there was a momentary respite, a sense of hazy numbness. Faal had gone from his usual self to dead in six days, so at first it did not even seem real. But then the initial shock began to wear off.

Red hot pain intruded and my roiling anxiety ratcheted up to fever pitch. The autistic mind’s ruminative thinking can feel like a whirlpool from which there is no escape. Eating and sleeping and basic functioning started to feel impossible. I was terrified and I was furious and I was vicious to anyone who crossed my path.

While autistic people can struggle to create friendships with other people, they often find it easy to make meaningful connections to animals. This has been the case for me. Animals are, and have always been, my closest friends. Losing our pets is always tough, but losing the ones we have a particularly special bond with – like Faal – is overwhelming.

In my book Drifts I write about the lifetime of severe anxiety that, among other things, eventually led to my autism diagnosis at 37. Autistic people have very high incidences of anxiety, we seem to live our lives in a permanent state of hyper-vigilance. So when those terrible things we always suspect are gathering just over the horizon show up and prove they really do exist, all hope seems lost.

In grief, I am not always inclined to draw closer to God. And in those terrible days after Faal’s death, my prayers often turned into prayers of anger. My fury and my fear were so overwhelming that at times they seemed to entirely blot out my faith. Doubt surged to the forefront of my mind.

Two weeks after Faal’s death, we went to church and found white flowers positioned at stations along the interior perimeter. I was angry and heartsick over Faal, wondering why I had even come to church at all that day. Nothing in life seemed worth much at all. Children were crying and throwing their shoes across the aisle. My skin felt hot and a roving electrical storm had taken up residence in my chest. Sensory overload approached. It was the Feast of Corpus Christi.

The Feast of Corpus Christi originates in doubt.

In 1263, Father Peter of Prague was on a pilgrimage to Rome and found himself mired in confusion. Among theologians at the time there was a growing debate about the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The Church, since its inception, had taught the presence of Christ in the Eucharist – true, real, and substantial - so this new theological debate was troubling to many. As he traveled, Father Peter wrestled with this idea.

In this, Father Peter came close to echoing some of the followers of Jesus. When Jesus taught that the bread and wine were his true body and true blood and his followers were to eat and drink them, many of those gathered around him were scandalized. Some even departed.

But Jesus did not equivocate. He repeated multiple times this unthinkable thing:

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no Life in you. (John 6:53)

Continuing on the long days of his pilgrimage to Rome, Father Peter mulled all of this over in his mind. But no matter how much he considered the issue, he remained unable to feel completely confident in the Church’s teachings. Father Peter prayed for an increase in faith, echoing the prayer of the father in Mark 9:24: “I believe, help my unbelief!”

In the midst of his pilgrimage, Father Peter stopped in Bolsena, Italy to celebrate mass at the Church of St. Christina. And while reciting the prayer of consecration over the bread and wine, to his astonishment, blood began to seep from the host onto the altar and corporal.

A stunned (and one must imagine heartened) Father Peter reported this miracle to Pope Urban IV. Papal delegates were sent to investigate and bring the host and blood-stained corporal to the Pope. The miracle was found to affirm the Church’s doctrine of transubstantiation. The relics were placed in the Cathedral of Orvieto, where they remain today. It is this miracle that is celebrated in the Feast of Corpus Christi, also known as the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ.

While I was at church on the Feast of Corpus Christi, in his homiliy our priest spoke of the Eucharist. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

“The Eucharist is “the source and summit of the Christian life.”

Our priest told the congregation that Christ left us the Eucharist knowing how necessary it would be in our lives, how much need we would have of his real presence in our trials. Humans are ritual beings and we are physical beings, and while God is always with us, he said nothing can compare to sitting in the presence of the Eucharist.

The priest’s voice slowed and he leaned forward, gathering the crowd in his gaze. But we are not, he intoned, to come to church empty-handed. We are not only to take what is offered. We are to come with our full selves, to offer ourselves up to God in turn. We must come and offer ourselves on the shining days of our happiness and on the dark days of our misery.

Listening to this, I felt a flush of frustration. This concept is one that has not been easy for me to understand, the idea of giving up my suffering to God. I have always wanted to know what exactly this means and how exactly this is done. What are the metaphysics of this giving up? I understand the intent, but I want an equation I can be certain of.

Later, the priest held aloft the consecrated host and the chalice. A hush fell over the congregation. Even the babies seemed to stop crying. Hundreds of eyes rested upon the same point; all of reality drew itself close, pivoting around this moment.

The doctrine of transubstantiation is not an explanation of precisely how the eucharistic mystery occurs. The Church maintains it happens in a way that surpasses our understanding. But that it happens, that in the Eucharist there is Christ - body and blood, soul and divinity - is foundational to the faith. It is also a belief considered by many non-Catholics to be strange or even repugnant. For me, though, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist was easy to accept. Of course a radiant theophany would be at the center of the faith. There must be a consciousness-bending mystery around which all coheres. It could be no other way. From this, radiates all.

Later, during the procession, the priest moved around the interior of the church in a haze of billowing incense smoke, holding aloft the monstrance. On my knees, I turned on the spot to follow the procession. There was Christ and there was me, miserable and angry and tired.

And suddenly I understood.

I had been making it too complicated, looking for an over-analytical solution to what is profoundly simple: being there in pain while knowing God is the only one vast enough to contain the tumult of being human. Life will always fall apart. That, I told myself, is simply what life does. And the longing, the misery, the joy, all of these crashing crescendos and decrescendos of a human life only make sense in his divine presence.

After the teaching of the Eucharist, over which many of his followers left him, Jesus turned to those who remained and asked if they too would be leaving.

Peter replied,

“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

In church on the Feast of Corpus Christi, amid the haze of smoke and the clamor of crying children, amid the raw pain in my heart and the tears in my throat, I realized that in the depths of my furious grief when God had felt so distant, he had always remained. For there is nothing in the vagaries of the human experience that can make him turn his face from us. No matter what, there he remains, closer than my own breath.

Lord, to whom shall I go?

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• First painting by Jan van Kessel the elder, second painting by Stefano Camogli