At the end of Lotus Eaters, as Bloom contemplates the bath he is about to  take, he thinks, "This is my body," echoing the Words of Consecration at the heart of the Mass. Catholic priests uttering these words change bread into the body of Christ in the mysterious process called transubstantiation. The words of the ritual, in turn, come from those spoken by Jesus to his disciples at the Last Supper, announcing that after his death he would live on in his believers, redeeming them from sin and death. The words do not mean quite this to Bloom, and Joyce uses them to suggest a different kind of mystery.

Matthew 26:26-28 says, "And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament which is shed for many for the remission of sins." Mark 14:22-24 and Luke 22:19-20 have similar language. John's gospel refers to the supper but does not narrate its events.

Stephen mouths scriptural and liturgical phrases like this with almost every breath, but it is odd to hear one tumbling about in the thoughts of Bloom, an unbeliever. The explanation is almost certainly that, earlier in the same chapter, he has watched a Catholic priest placing consecrated wafers in the mouths of the worshipers in St. Andrew's Church. In 1904 priests spoke the Words of Consecration in Latin rather than English, but Bloom has been listening as they are repeated for each communicant and he knows the meaning of the crucial word: "The priest bent down to put it into her mouth, murmuring all the time. Latin. The next one. Shut your eyes and open your mouth. What? Corpus: body. Corpse. Good idea the Latin. Stupefies them first." Presumably he is familiar enough with the scriptural phrase (he was, after all, once nominally a Catholic) to recall its English equivalent.

And here one encounters one of those questions that the book forces on its readers at every turn. Should Bloom's strange comparison of his body to Christ's be plumbed for symbolic significance, or should it be seen as a matter-of-fact deflation of a grand cliché? Both views are quite plausible, and they are not really incompatible. On the one hand, one can readily imagine Bloom thinking that "This is my body" is better suited to contemplating one's nakedness. Jesus, the supposed Son of God, was a peripatetic Palestinian Jew who without his clothes must have looked much like other men. As Molly would say, Who's he when he's at home? On the other hand, Joyce (not Bloom) may be redefining what is truly mysterious. "This is my body" introduces the final paragraph of Lotus Eaters, a description of Bloom in the bathtub that evokes the mystery of sexual procreation rather than transubstantiation.

After Bloom reflects on "the stream of life"—a succession of evanescent moments—he imagines the bath as a "gentle tepid stream." Then the third-person narration takes over to guide the chapter to a lyric climax in the final paragraph, and amid the "floating hair of the stream" Joyce places Bloom's penis, "the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower." The limp organ has not been doing its job for ten years now, but it is the means by which evanescent human organisms miraculously perpetuate themselves in their offspring. Having lost his only son, Bloom cherishes this link between past and future. If Christ the Son of a heavenly Father can offer his followers an escape from death in a piece of bread, Bloom the earthly father may find an escape from death in the seed of his floating flower.

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John Hunt 2022