(Though clearly one is free to disbelieve that statement itself).

Though, to be clear, the change does occur whether someone believes it or not.

Which, in order to be believed, requires something like the faith of a child. Which is, of course, precisely the point.

Wherein a change occurs in what we call the ‘accidents’ of bread and wine, so that they become (by the efficacy of prayer, and through the power of God) the actual flesh and blood of Christ, though in appearance they remain the same.

In fact, there is no way to apply a literal interpretation (without dwelling in the cannibalistic or vampiric) until one allows for that mystical action, or process, known to the Church as transubstantiation.

In other words, it would have been one thing to hear Jesus speak about the necessity of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and another thing to grasp how a literal interpretation could be applied to that statement.

Which, of course, it had been. Insofar as Jesus had merely articulated, in the somewhat inadequate language of men, what had been written eternally, but which could be revealed and made manifest only in time. Which is to say, through events that required the elapsing of time before they could transpire.

Though ‘formulate’ might not be the right word, insofar as it suggests the origination of an idea that till then had not existed, rather than the recognition of a truth that had been there all along.

Of course, one can see why such a claim would be a stumbling block, insofar as its logic remains hidden, or veiled, until the Last Supper, when Jesus institutes the sacrament of the Eucharist (which Catholics refer to as the “source and summit” of the Christian life); and even then only in retrospect, after Christ himself has died, been buried, and resurrected, so that the nascent Church begins to congregate and, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to formulate a liturgy and a theology.

Chapter 12

And at the end of which discourse, as if to emphasize how much of a stumbling block these words of Christ could amount to, the evangelist tells us, “On hearing it, many of his disciples said, ‘This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?’” And, a few lines later, “From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.”

Though I should say that the Church is not applying some radical interpretation to these words, but is only observing what is evident in the context in which they are to be found, in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, during what has come to be known as the “Bread of Life Discourse”, which Christ delivered in a synagogue at Capernaum, shortly after that event in which he fed the multitude with five loaves of bread and two fish.

Because, according to that faith, Christ was not speaking in parable when he said those things, but with a literality that makes the meaning of his words at once difficult to believe, and central to the question of who he was, or is, and in what way we need him.

Which is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, in terms of the Catholic faith.

As in, “I am the bread of life”, and “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

Wherein he did not merely teach ‘nice’ things, but made certain claims, and insisted on certain notions, that speak to this fundamental ‘lack’.

Which the Catholic Church also understands, because Christ himself illustrated it, and addressed himself to it, by way of his incarnation and his ministry.

Which I would agree with, though I would go one step further, by way of my faith, to get back to Augustine, who would’ve understood that this ‘lack’, if it can be spoken of as having a ‘shape’, assumes the shape of God.

So that what I should have said, perhaps, is that things like food and water and shelter might be necessary to our survival, but that, according to Lacan, the desire for them originates in the same feeling of ‘lack’ that is always with us, no matter how completely we satiate ourselves by attending to our urges and our drives.

“Desire,” Lacan wrote, “a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation.”