The faith behind searching for holy things.
These holy days of the Sacred Triduum — Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, emptying themselves into the glory of Easter — are days when Christians find themselves seeking to become closer to Jesus Christ, to encounter Him in new and deeper ways. This can include encounters with holy things, such as relics, or meditations on the Divine Person and His Sacred Heart, Holy Face, and Precious Blood. These are all realities of an incarnational faith, drawing us in deeper. For these reasons and others, Charles A. Coulombe has written A Catholic Quest for the Holy Grail, which he talks about here.
Kathryn Jean Lopez: You spend the book answering this question in many ways, but what’s the Holy Grail, and why should we view it as much more than a medieval knight’s tale?
Charles A. Coulombe: On one level, it is a holy and miraculous relic — in most accounts, it is the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper. But it has come to mean the end and goal of any lifelong quest, as in such phrases as “the Oscar — the Holy Grail of Cinema.” At the very least, its hold on the popular imagination and its constant recurrence in art and literature over the past eleven centuries tells us that there is something in it that human nature is drawn to, regardless of time and place. There are few items in our culture of which that can be said.
Lopez: Is there something unique about a Catholic quest for this Grail?
Coulombe: As noted medieval scholar Richard Barber noted, the stories of the Grail were reactions to the idea of Transubstantiation; only a believer can really see them from the inside as they were meant to be seen by their composers. Barber confesses himself, as an “agnostic academic,” only able to “look in from outside.” This is true to a greater or lesser degree to everyone without that belief. But for the Catholic, the Grail stories can speak in the way in which their original authors intended them to.
Lopez: What does this have to do with Holy Week and Easter?
Coulombe: Everything. The death of Christ on the Cross opens to us the way to Heaven, which was closed by the fall of our first parents. The formation of the priesthood and the institution of the Blessed Sacrament at the Last Supper gives us the concrete means to apply His sacrifice to our own souls. The Grail was “Holy” because it served as the vessel wherein Christ first transubstantiated wine into His own blood, and the following day it was used to collect some of the blood flowing from His side and other wounds. As that blood made the cup holy, it can do with us. And, of course, Easter is a prefiguring of the victory of all who persevere in the path Christ set down.
Lopez: How is it “intimately bound up with the Eucharist”?
Coulombe: The Eucharist is the daily return of Christ to Earth, whereby all of us can renew our participation in that salvific act of Christ’s — in His coming to us truly in His body and His blood. For God, all things are “now” — as Christ said, “before Abraham was, I am.” The reality of His first Transubstantiation and death on the Cross breaks into our time-bound reality with every Mass. Every Mass, of whatever Rite, Eastern or Western, that has ever been offered or ever shall be, is intimately connected with every other, and with those two basic acts. This is the lifeblood of the Church, and of her members. Bit of a mindblower, really.
Lopez: How can meditating on this quest draw one deeper into prayer or help one become a better Christian?
Coulombe: Because you begin more and more to see things as they are — everything in its relationship to God, not merely as a thing in itself; the importance of even little acts for good or ill; how incredibly good and loving God is, and truly horrible denying His commands — which are, after all, for our own good — truly is. In our time, we have lost the sense of personal sin — though we are ever quicker to point it out in our neighbor. Remembering that God died upon the Cross for the man who annoys me as much as He did for me — even if said man rejects the salvation so offered — should help me build up a little humility!
Lopez: What might it mean to be a better Christian in the light of the Holy Grail?
Coulombe: To realize that the Faith is objectively true — truer than political parties or the income tax. That the seemingly intangible parts of faith — the sacraments, the prayers and devotions, the shrines, relics, and saints, the Blessed Mother and the angels — are the vast unseen body of the iceberg, which give the all-too-human and often frustrating bits we see what importance they have.
That the moral law we so often struggle with has its roots in joy, and the worst priest we have ever known still can bring God down upon the altar (that may make whatever malfeasances he has committed worse for him; but for us he can still be a source of grace, however little good it may do him). That is to say, the Holy Grail reminds us of what is true and important, and what is passing and less so.
Lopez: You spend a lot of time talking about the Precious Blood. Why is that an important and efficacious devotion? What if it seems like pious nonsense to someone reading your book?
Coulombe: Because Christ’s blood is the means that He ordained to wipe away our Original sin and make it possible for us to achieve union with Him — that is, to go to Heaven. Death was the penalty required for our Fall and on our ongoing sinfulness, and He paid it and then some with that Blood. I am reminded of a response in regard to the apparitions at Lourdes: “To those who believe, no explanation is necessary; to those who do not, none is possible.” The age-old maxim “I believe that I might understand” is extremely important. Without that belief, we cannot grasp reality. It is a bit like a sea captain who refuses to accept that there can be anything to an iceberg other than what he can see above the surface. I guarantee you that someday he, his ship, and his passengers shall join the Titanic!
Lopez: And the Sacred Heart of Jesus? Why fixate on an organ? Maybe especially in the days surrounding the commemoration of the Passion and Death of Jesus?
Coulombe: Because it is from that organ that the Precious Blood and water (symbolizing the Eucharist and Baptism) first flowed — at least some of it into the Holy Grail, if the stories are true. In later centuries, Our Lord appeared to various Saints, and made it clear that His Heart symbolizes both His humanity and His incredibly deep love for each of us — which love, in the main, we do not really return — although each of us wants to be loved. That love is the very reason He endured the Passion and Death, and so this is indeed a particularly good time to remind ourselves of that loving Heart.
Moreover, it is fitting that so many Catholics who took up arms to defend the Church in the last few centuries, knowing they were likelier to find death than victory, took the Sacred Heart as their badge — to show that they too were trying to offer their sacrifices to Him, and unite said sacrifices with His. “Greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for his friends.” It is interesting also to note that when Jesus resurrected, He chose to keep His Five Wounds intact — including that to His Heart.
Lopez: What did you learn most or most treasure about the adventure of writing this book? How do you hope it helps people?
Coulombe: The sheer reality of the Catholic Faith, regardless of whatever peccadilloes might be performed by the faithful – clerical or lay, in whatever position, high or low, they may hold in Church or State. I hope my readers shall see that, and, in the words of one Crusaders’ song, “Take the good and cast the evil” in the visible Church. I hope to redouble their Faith and confidence, that, as Saint Thomas More said, “we might all meet merrily in Paradise.”