“I saw the throng, so deeply separate,
Fed at one only board – 
The devout people, moved, intent, elate,
And the devoted Lord.

"Oh struck apart! not side from human side,
But soul from human soul,
As each asunder absorbed the multiplied,
The ever unparted whole.”

Alice Meynell’s poem A General Communion comes from her 1913 collection. Sadly, her work is largely unknown in our day, but she was a prominent writer, who along with her husband Wilfred, were part of a Catholic literary revival in the UK. 

A Catholic convert, some of her poems are profoundly Eucharistic, including this one where the speaker observes the Mass. Curiously, the speaker sees the whole body of the church, the great “throng” as being General Communion and so has a fuller understanding of the Eucharist as the body of Christ and not only the reception of Holy Communion. This is a significance that can always be more fully understood.  

Meynell finds meaning in the gathering and the dispersal at Mass where the body of Christ is the “ever unparted whole”: that we gather and are drawn into communion and how this communion extends even as we depart and continue the business and busyness of life.  

As Holy Communion is “absorbed” we respond to the call again to be the body of Christ wherever we find ourselves so that we might truly become what we eat.  

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Fr. Ryan Service