The types of the Old Testament not merely foreshadow; they help our understanding of the fulfilment. They foretell and interpret; for God, whose power designed the world, can arrange life and the chances of life so as to portray some future happening. Now one of the most splendid types of the Blessed Sacrament was given in the story of Elias, whom in the desert angels fed. He had passed through a time of adventure and excitement. His challenge to the priests of Baal to prove the authority of their gods by bringing down fire from Heaven to consume the sacrifice had ended in his triumph. The altars had been set up on Carmel, a trench dug about it, and a day set apart for the tournay. First the priests of Baal clamoured to their god, while Elias with terrible mirth mocked their failure. Over the altar they leapt, cutting their flesh with knives as would do today the dervishes. Then when his turn was come, the prophet poured water over the sacrifice till it ran down and filled up the trench. But at his prayer God sent fire which burnt up altar and sacrifice alike with so fierce a heat that the water in the trench was licked up by the flames. After so wonderful a proof of God's power, the King, Achab, submitted, the priests were slaughtered, and in further token of the Divine pleasure a storm of rain broke on the country that had been three years waterless. Elias was wrought up into a state of over-confidence. Consequently the hostility of the Queen, who threatened him with death, drove him to over-depression, till he fled into the desert where he prayed to die. Then came the angel with food: "Take ye and eat, for you have yet a long way to go."
Now this surely is a very true interpretation of the purpose of Holy Communion. It is to give me the courage to persevere. Too often probably to me as to Elias has come the same swift change from presumption to despair. Perhaps I had thought that I had finally quelled some temptation or sin that had long bothered me. A chance sermon or a passage in a book, or the remark of a friend, and at once the old world has come back to me. Or it may be that it was some trifling but frequent failure which for long distressed me, and then was for a time overcome and driven from power. Always, however, the result was that however successful for the moment, I found myself ultimately returning whither I had first begun. All the exceptional efforts and fierce resolutions and elaborate addition of prayers, all the feeling of having done great things, ended at the best in a respite, which after all the stress appeared a complete victory. I thought to myself that the battle in that part of the field had been won, that I could rest now without precautions or guards. Then swiftly has come my fall, though months may at times elapse before my undoing is manifest. But all the same the effect in my soul is a quick despair. What is the use of struggle if it is always to end in defeat? I find myself utterly weary, hopeless. The old faults are still there unconquered at least not slain.
Now it is just at this moment of discomfiture that I need the voice of God's angel to call me to the Bread and the Wine, for I have always "yet a long way to go." By no means has the end come. For Elias the victory of God over Baal, the slaughter of the priests, the downpour of rain, and the fierce run which he made by the side of the King's chariot from Carmel to the royal city of the northern kingdom, had produced a sense of exaltation that was utterly unsound. The nervous excitement was so tense and strained that the least failure at the moment was bound to become as exaggerated as the supposed triumph had been. The opposition of the Queen had been forgotten, or its strength underestimated, and as a result nervous prostration brought him to despair. Instead of triumph, defeat; so off he goes to the desert, where his feelings entirely change. Not now is there any talk of having been more successful than his predecessors, as had evidently been his previous idea; but only, "I am no better than my fathers," and a cry for death. So with me, the victory, the over-confidence, the despair; whereas the struggle is only just begun, and it were foolish at the first assault or repulse or reverse (or even after many) to lose heart or run away or submit. Rather because of my weariness and dismay is my need for the Food more urgent, that in that externally provided help I may walk the rest of my appointed path. Courage is my greatest requirement, and it is here I shall find it. Even if my age is failing and my time on earth to be short, I have need of that Viaticum for the long last journey of the grave.
- text taken from Meditations for Layfolk by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.