Lovers are each others' food and drink. Their presence, their touch, is the strength given to endure the daily challenges and sacrifices of life.
The truth of love, the truth of lovers, is that they can never let each other go. They desire, they yearn, never to be separated. If one goes out of the other's life through death, the one left here in human history is utterly desolated.
Mystical prayer, faith grounded in mystical love, understands that God is our Perfect Lover. We are His Beloved, and He is ours. Faith grounded in mystical love understands intuitively why God chose to become human, to penetrate the human body, to become one with us as both Divine and human lover, to become present to us through ALL OUR SENSES through Jesus.
So Faith grounded in mystical love also intuitively understands the truth that Christ, our resurrected Lover, cannot bear to be separated from us and chooses to remain with us. And He remains with us, not only united to our hearts, minds, and souls, but also, as passionate lovers do, united with ALL our bodily senses in His Real Presence in the Eucharist.
We hear His voice: "This is My Body, Which is given up for you -" His life, His death, the ultimate sacrifice and gift of God for human beings.
And we can murmur to Him in return: "This is MY body, which is given up for you -" as lovers always pledge the fidelity of their whole selves to each other, their whole lives to each other. We know as we say it that we will be unfaithful. We say it, knowing He will bring us back.
We see His Presence in bread and wine, the Lover Who is our food and drink, our strength, Whom we can touch and taste and consume even as His Love consumes us. And, as we taste, we can smell the distinctive, intimate smell of His Presence in bread and wine.
And, in the mysterious multiplication of mystical love, when we are united in the Eucharist with the resurrected, the cosmic Christ, through Him we receive His entire Body, which is also our Beloved, because of His Divine Indwelling -
"For You spare all things, because they are Yours, O Lord and Lover of souls, for Your imperishable Spirit is in all things!" ((Wisdom 11:26 - 12:1)
Now we know the truth of Love: our Beloved gazes at us through eyes of all colors, touches us through skin of all colors. His Mind lives within the mind of the madman in a psychiatric ward, a calculating killer on Death Row. We can smell Him in the nervous sweat of a mother, an illegal immigrant, fearing deportation for her and her child.
We hear the echoes of His voice in a patient weeping in a Hospice, in the singing of a black congregation in a Church of God in Christ, in the chant of a Cheyenne Indian in a sweat lodge. We taste His tears as we kiss the cheeks of husbands and wives grieving for their spouses at funeral parlors.
Our limited, fearful hearts, overwhelmed, cry out "Too many to love...!"
His voice replies "Beloved, Do this in memory of Me."