His presence brings peace, wonder, awe, and humility
This intimate fellowship with Christ, the source of joy, delights us and gives us peace and rest. This, in turn, is accompanied by increasing wonderment mingled with salutary fear, because the better we know Him, the more His presence fills us with awe, and the more His holiness haunts us with a lively sense of our unworthiness, which forces us to rid ourselves of all that is earthly, that we may welcome and entertain our God with all our powers, under the spell of the radiant beauty of His majestic Person. (Transforming Your Life Through the Eucharist, Kane, 34)
Christ’s presence is companionship.
Christ, in this prodigy of divine ingenuity, besides being the food of the soul and the pledge of eternal life, is also our companion in all the hardships of earth. The joy of his loving, silent, yet consciously felt, affectionate companionship—the harbinger of our intimate, perfect, eternal union with him—is a superadded blessing as if this were the only reason for this overflow of divine love. (Transforming Your Life Through the Eucharist, Kane, 115)
The unique presence of Christ in the Eucharist
the mode of Christ’s presence under the Eucharistic species is unique. It raises the Eucharist above all the sacraments as “the perfection of the spiritual life and the end to which all the sacraments tend.” In the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist “the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained.” “This presence is called ‘real’–by which is not intended to exclude the other types of presence as if they could not be ‘real’ too, but because it is presence in the fullest sense: that is to say, it is a substantial presence by which Christ, God and man, makes himself wholly and entirely present” (CCC1374)
Experiencing Jesus’ presence more deeply
Feed Your hungry beggar. Inflame my coldness with the fire of Your love. Enlighten my blindness with the brightness of Your presence. Turn all earthly things to bitterness for me, all grievance and adversity to patience, all lowly creation to contempt and oblivion. Raise my heart to You in heaven and suffer me not to wander on earth. From this moment to all eternity do You alone grow sweet to me, for You alone are my food and drink, my love and joy, my sweetness and my total good.
Let Your presence wholly inflame me, consume and transform me into Yourself, that I may become one spirit with You by the grace of inward union and by the melting power of Your ardent love. (The Imitation of Christ, a Kempis, 251-252)
Christ desired to remain with His disciples and us.
Christ wished to remain close to His disciples, not only as God, but also as man, as He was about to lead them to go to His passion. So, He instituted the Eucharist to be the sacrament by which He would continue to dwell with His disciples on Earth in His sacred humanity, even as His body would ascend into heaven. (Eucharist, Feingold, 6)
The Eucharist is the presence of Christ Himself.
The Eucharist alone contains Christ Himself in all His personal reality and makes His humanity present in our midst. In other sacraments, material elements, such as water and oil, are consecrated for use in the sacrament, but they are not substantially changed by that consecration. In the Eucharistic consecration, on the contrary, the elements are not just blessed by Christ’s word; they become Christ Himself. (Eucharist, Feingold, 35)
He is present in the Eucharist by the conversion of bread and wine into Him.
Christ Himself receives no change by transubstantiation. He is not bilocated, moved, multiplied, or divided. He is not increased by any additional matter in transubstantiation, nor is anything changed in Him when the consecrated host is fractured or digested. He comes to be substantially present in the Eucharist not through a change in Him, but through a conversion of the bread and wine into Him. (Eucharist, Feingold, 290)
Council of Trent
Christ remains present before the Father naturally while He is present to us sacramentally.
Trent also affirms that Christ’s substantial presence in the Eucharist does not contradict the fact that Christ “always sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven according to his natural way of existing.” This implies that Christ’s sacramental mode of presence is distinct from the natural way that a body is present in a place. (Eucharist, Feingold, 308)
Transubstantiation makes the one sacrifice present on every altar.
As transubstantiation does not multiply bodies of Christ, but rather makes the one Body present to us under the appearances of bread and wine, so the sacrifice of the Mass does not multiply Christ’s death or slay Him again and again, but likewise makes that one sacrifice present on every altar through the separate consecration of bread and wine into His one Body that was given for us, and His Blood that was poured out for the forgiveness of sins. (Eucharist, Feingold, 390)
Jesus left to be present to all sacramentally.
Christ’s sacramental presence is founded on his going away. If Jesus were still physically present, he could not be present to all men of all times and places in the sacrament of the Eucharist. (My Body Given for You, Hoping, 424)
When we seek God in His transcendence, He draws us into His personal presence in our soul.
We are to seek God in faith as concealed in his transcendent mystery and beyond our reach. Only in this way are we drawn into the personal presence of the One who hides within our soul. We are led to him by seeking him precisely as beyond our reach and outside our feeling. The true experience of God is necessarily an experience of his transcendent mystery. (St. John of the Cross, Haggerty, 37)
In the Eucharist, Christ is present, the present goal of our future.
The celebration of the Eucharist means that Christ enters and says: Ecce adsum, “I am present.” He, who is the land of the future, already stands in our midst. Our journey no longer goes toward something indefinite; rather, it goes toward him who is already here. … [W]e can complete our procession toward the future land as joy and thanksgiving. (On Love, Ratzinger, 100)