Transubstantiation is more than a magic trick.
What we join to the sublime gift of God determines what we get.
Getting what you give applies no less to the spiritual life. What we bring to Communion from our lives in the days preceding will determine what we leave with.
Jesus says:
“To sustain physical strength one must nourish the body. The indigent who cannot buy food beg for it from the rich. They usually ask for bread. Without bread life is impossible.
“You are poor people needing food for your souls. To your poverty I have given the Eucharistic Bread. It nourishes the medulla of the soul, gives vigor to the spirit, sustains spiritual strength, and increases the power of all the intellectual faculties, for where there is vital energy there is also mental energy.
“Healthy food imparts health. True food infuses true life. Holy food produces holiness. Divine food gives God.
“But, in addition to being poor, you are sick, weak, not only with the weakness caused by a lack of food and ceasing when there is food. You are weak from the illnesses exhausting you. How many illnesses your souls have! How many germs the Evil One injects into you to create these diseases! Whoever is weak and sick needs not only bread, but also wine.
“In my Eucharist I have left you the two signs of what is needed for your nature as poor men and for your weakness as sick men. Bread that nourishes, wine that fortifies.
“I could have communicated Myself to you without external signs. I can. But you are too dull to grasp what is spiritual. Your external senses need to see. Your souls, your hearts, and your minds surrender only – and still with difficulty – before visible, touchable forms. This is true to the point that, if you go so far as to believe in Me in the Eucharist and receive Me in the consecrated Host, most of you do not admit into yourselves the infusion of the Spirit, from whom quickenings, lights, and impulses towards good works come to you.
“If you believed with the forcefulness the Mystery is worthy of, you would feel a life entering into you on receiving Me. My drawing near to you should burn you like coming close to a burning furnace. My remaining in you should make you sink into an ecstasy which would carry away the depth of your spirit into a heavenly rapture.
“The fusing of your corrupt humanity with my perfect Humanity would bring you even physical health; sick in body, you would thus withstand diseases until I should say, ‘Enough’, in order to open Heaven to you. It would bring you intelligence to understand swiftly and correctly. It would make you impenetrable to the Beast’s unbridled assaults or subtle deceits.
“Instead, I can do little, for I enter where faith is languid, where charity is superficial, where the will is sketchy, where humanity is stronger than the spirit, where, above all, you make no effort to repress the flesh so that the spirit will emerge.
“You make no effort at all. You expect a miracle from Me. Nothing keeps Me from working one. But I want at least the desire on your part to merit it.
“To anyone who turns to Me, crying out for help and imitating the faith of the crowds in Galilee, I will communicate Myself not only with my Body and my Blood, but with my Charity, my Intellect, my Strength, my Will, my Perfection, and my Essence. In the soul that is able to come to Me, I will be as I am in Heaven, in the breast of the Father, from whom I proceed, generating the Spirit who is Charity and the summit of perfection.”
From The Notebooks 1943, Maria Valtorta, pp. 94-96; used by permission of the publisher Centro Editoriale Valtortiano srl, Viale Piscicelli 89-91, 03036 Isola del Liri FR, Italy