Personally, I don’t understand the belief in transubstantiation.
The Lord’s Supper was started as a change in the Passover meal. When we look to the origins of Passover, it was done so that the Israelites would annually remember how God rescued his people out of slavery. When Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me”, he was restating the initial instruction that they were to do this to “remember how I brought you out of Egypt.” Essentially, Christians were to carry on the tradition but recall their delivery from sin, the one thing that keeps all humanity captive.
With all due respect to my Catholic brothers and sisters, this is a symbolic act. To instruct Jewish apostles to eat of a body would be to ask them to sin because it broke their own laws. I believe that Jesus gives us some clues as to what he was referring to when he spoke of it as his body and his blood in John 6:25ff. It equates to how God supplied manna while Israel was in the desert. Truthfully, our salvation comes to us free of charge, a gift from heaven, God incarnate, Emmanuel. This is the idea of the Lord’s Supper. No longer do we need to follow rituals and laws to be saved. Rather, we are to believe in the one whom “he has sent.” John 6:29. By eating of the bread and drinking of the wine, we remember God’s provision.
As you have already deduced, I am not Catholic. However, I understand that none of us have a lock on the truth. I believe it is okay to research these things on your own and trust in God to provide you the answers. If he is anything, he is trustworthy and won’t let you stray if you are seeking him.
Jesus didn’t tell us to follow man’s truth, just the opposite he warned us against false teachers.
Your comment:”With all due respect to my Catholic brothers and sisters, this is a symbolic act.”
It doesn’t sounded like a symbolic act or was practiced by Catholic for over 2000 years. Scientific evidence has examined consecrated host as human cardiac tissue Blood type AB. I recommend that you do a search for Eucharistic miracles.
Your comment: “No longer do we need to follow rituals and laws to be saved.”
Jesus came not to change the law, but to fulfill it. Jesus told us to keep His commandments and die in the state of his grace. He will judge all of us upon our death. Jesus gave us 7 Sacraments for our salvation. Jesus also gave us His Catholic Church for our salvation and told us to teach and baptize all nations with his truth.
Your comment:”Personally, I don’t understand the belief in transubstantiation.”
Yes, I understand that this can be hard to understand. Yet Jesus clearly told us that we need to eat and drink His Body and Blood for our salvation. Can you imagine Jesus that loves us so much that he died for us, and Jesus who can do all things, left us His Body and Blood for us so that He would be literally with us for our eternal salvation?
I hope that you search for God’s Truth. Not my word but the words of Jesus.
It is not a question of whether we believe or not, Jesus does this and He Taught this as well as the Holy Spirit sent to the First Apostle/Bishops ‘to consecrate the Church in Truth and to lead Her into All Truth’ - it is as a Divine Aspect of the “all the Truth’ which is to be Taught to the nations until Jesus returns - cf. Saint John’s Gospel chps. 15-18 on why the Father and the Son sent the Holy Spirit and the last lines of the final paragraph of Saint Matthew’s Gospel... Remember as the Bible witnesses in Acts, the disciples ‘devoted themselves to the Teaching of the Apostles and the Transubstantiation of the Breaking of the Bread who is Christ Jesus the Passsover-Paschal Lamb Who is Truly eaten and drank’ so ‘that His little ones may have Eternal Life and have it to the Full’....
...recall satan proffers the forbidden fruit that we can discover the Truth for our self, but no, God is the Truth and Giver/Revealer of Truth and man is measure by God and His Truth, for His Ways and Thoughts are not ours, but ours must be His; therefore we rejoice in this mystery of Changing water to wine at Cana and even more so Changing wine into Himself at the New Cana-Calvary Wedding Feast! Alleluia!!!
His Truth at the center or middle of our heart as His New Garden Paradise is our Matrimonial Feast or Banquet!! - ‘is it really TRUE that the Lord says if you eat you will die’, satan proffers; setting aside the Divine Feast of Truth, man, male and female, dies. In the New Adam and New Eve, Christ and Mary, the Truth of the Father’s Will is eaten and drank in the Loving Obedience of Man’s being Redeemed and Reconciled into the New Paschal Covenant Matrimonial Life and Feast.
His Paschal Saving Life, Death and Resurrection has in Truth become the Tree of Life and of the Knowledge of Good and evil - this is what the Transubstantiation Is: the Paschal-Passover Covenant of Jesus and His Passion and Death, Resurrection and Ascension, this is what we eat and drink sacramentally. To not have this Transubstantiation Pasch is to not “do this in Memorial of Me” - which, as for the Jews in their Passover Lamb Covenant and the redemption and salvation it brought, makes that saving act and mystery present when it is celebrate - the same happens in the New Passover Lamb Covenant Mass - the Memorial or Christ in His Saving Life, Death and Resurrection is made Present. The “Memorial” is in the Old and New Paschal Liturgical Covenant not something done and over, dead, history, it is by God’s merciful love made present each time we ‘Do this [Transubstantiation Covenant] Memorial of Him’.
He sent us the Holy Spirit that His Truth will always be ours; He has not hidden the Truth, His Truth is ours to receive or reject when the Holy Spirit Teaches IT in and through the Apostles and those they impose Hands on/Ordain in and with the Holy Spirit (Lk 10:16), but our free will then shows whether we are His disciples or the adversary’s goats - the first goats were part of His 72 disciples who had been with Him from the beginning as they walked away from the Gift and Mystery of the Paschal-Passover Transubstantiation Lamb of God as the Truth to Hard to be true, loved and believed....blessings and graces and mercies!!