Enter most Catholic churches on any Sunday and you won’t see much aknowledgment of the real presence of the Lord there. The old testament Jews were obsessed with the sacredness of the Temple and the ark within it because God was there, present. Without seeing Him, they believed. They raised their prayers to the ONE. In II Samuel we read that as David was moving the ark in procession to a new local, one of the princes was struck dead when he touched the ark simply to steady it as the oxen were pulling it over a bumpy road. You don’t touch God, or his throne. Look upon the face of God and you will be struck dead.
It seems to me that this sense of the sacred doesn’t only apply to blessed things and spaces. People are sacred, too, and trees are holy, springs are sacred. The spirit of God moves and lives in everything that exists. But in our post-Christian world, we think we have the universe pretty much figured out and no one has found any evidence of God’s presence out there. No presence, no reverence.
It’s pretty clear that like the Torah lost to the Jewish community for so long after the Babylonian Captivity, the Holy Eucharist. the sense of the real presence God in our churches, has receded to lip-service.
A friend of mine was explaining to a practicing Muslim that we Catholics believe that Allah is really, truly and substantially present in our churches in the unlikely forms of bread and wine. When the Muslim heard this, he said “If I believed like you say you do, I would prostrate myself on the floor of your church in submission to the Holy One.”
The loss of the sense of the sacredness of things is dwarfed by the loss of the sense of the sacredness of the person. We have demystified the sacrament of the Eucharist and have lost a sense of the real presence of Jesus Christ and, perhaps, our reverence for one another.