The antients would certainly have invoked the goddess Flora for this purpose, and it would have been no difficulty for their priests, or politicians to have persuaded the people of the
real presence of the deity, though a plain mortal had personated her and performed her office.
Valentine could not reply; the voice which indicated the
real presence of a being in the room, alarmed her so much that she feared to utter a syllable; still the expression of her eyes seemed to inquire, "If your intentions are pure, why are you here?" The count's marvellous sagacity understood all that was passing in the young girl's mind.
He thinks of the loaves and fishes even when he believes his is in a
real Presence. His manias make a startling combination.
The magic of the
real presence of distress,--the imploring human eye, the frail, trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony,--these he had never tried.
I was so filled with the play, and with the past - for it was, in a manner, like a shining transparency, through which I saw my earlier life moving along - that I don't know when the figure of a handsome well-formed young man dressed with a tasteful easy negligence which I have reason to remember very well, became a
real presence to me.
The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre- eminently, that carried with it a sense of
real presence, was his ability to talk, his words--the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.
But the more difficult part of the preparation is introducing 7-year-olds to the concept of the
real presence. It's difficult because it's a mystery--Thomas Merton, in his classic reflection on the Blessed Sacrament, The Living Bread (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), calls it "the central mystery of Christianity"--and you can't teach a mystery.
Looking at
real presence, or
real presences, as focus and locus of both spiritual and political power, Butticci examines the role they play in the relationship between Roman Catholicism and Africa Pentecostalism in Italy.
"You want that goal-scoring threat from all over the park and our full-backs are always capable of scoring from open play and we now have centrehalves who have a
real presence in the box and dead-ball situations are important.
The Holy Eucharist is not symbolic: it is a
real presence of the Lord in our midst even now.
However, for many Catholics there is a gap between their knowledge of thechurch's teaching regarding the
real presence and what their beliefs are.