As far as ordinary Catholics are concerned, the Eucharist is the pivot of their Catholic life. Eucharistic ritual as it is enacted today is founded on the last Supper of Christ where the passion death and resurrection are foreshadowed. The Eucharist of Christ is the Church’s act of embodying of Christ whose presence in the world was taken away in ascension. This act of making the body of Church present is typified by Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of John. It is this sole woman who goes to the tomb of Christ looking for his body. She was ready to carry away his body through which Christ was historically present. Even Thomas in John is adamant to touch him and feel his body. For the body of Christ that touched so many and cured all must remain with the world. It represents the continuation of the Gospel of Jesus, which was about touching humanity. God the Father touched mankind through His Son. That was a touch of salvation where by the Body becomes the saving point of touch.

Church as the body of Christ has instituted His memorial the Eucharist whereby every Christian is called to become His body in the spacio-temporal situation of life. The Christian has to intervene in history for Him and with Him. Every Christian has to be possessed of him. This taking possession happens by eating His body and drinking His blood. These are symbolic acts of sacraments which create what it represents. The Church proclaims a man and woman husband and wife, and so they are. When baptized, the person becomes a Christian. The bread and wine are blessed and proclaimed body and blood of Christ, and so they are. Transubstantiation was a Thomistic way of expressing what the church believed. It is more of an Aristotelian form of expression, but its relevance cannot at all be denied although new forms of expression can be given. “Digging deep into the sources, the theologian and the liturgist aim simply to penetrate the profundity of the mystery of the faith as it has shown itself in the concrete life of the Church all through her history,” Says Gadmer. “The right order has no history.” History is always a history of disintegration and every attempt at the restoration of the right order involves a hope which creates ritual of recreation. The Church must be liturgical, but not cultic. Joseph Ratzinger rightly says: “The essence of religion is the relation of man beyond himself to the unknown reality that faith calls God. It is man’s capacity to go beyond all tangible, measurable reality and to enter into the primordial relation…This relationship itself, I would say is, properly speaking, the content of religion.” This relation is expressed in manifold ways. Rites and Symbolic expressions are inevitable in religious life. Fr. Subash Anand in his book on Eucharist seems to fail to appreciate the relevance of rituals in life and in the life of the Church. Ritual is like the favoured instance of a game. There is no community secular or religious without rituals. Ritual is a divine play, which takes you to the heavens and you lose your sense of time as you become a part of it. But the ritual is not a plaything; it is most earnest and serious. How does ritual actually do what we say it does? Ritual mastery is the ability—not equally shared, desired, or recognized—to (i) take and remake schemes from the shared culture that can strategically nuance, privilege, or transform, (2.) deploy them in the formulation of a privileged ritual experience, which in turn (3) impresses them in a new form upon agents able to deploy them in a variety of circumstances beyond the circumference of the rite itself. A ritual has two grammars, one of them is that it has to be enacted and the other is the grammar of life it has to some way create in the participant.