Manna from Heaven

 “Moses said: that is the bread which

the Lord has given you to eat.”

--Exodus 16:15

The story of the manna in the desert has always pleased me.  It is one of those wonderful miracle stories of God’s care for His children: like Noah and ark, or the parting of the Red Sea, or even Jonah and whale; it is a story that speaks to me but has never really concerned me. Never caught my attention in any serious way. Yes, I have wondered about the dietary details (the flavor, consistency, --was there enough fiber, any high fructose corn syrup? that kind of thing…) but I have never sat down and considered what it means. There are people who have looked into it. I had a professor tell me that he had tasted manna once while he was in the Holy Land.  He said it still shows up.  Claimed it was something to do with the dew and some plants over there.  Maybe… I don’t know. I just never even thought about whether it was real.  Not in any meaningful way.

Then, I heard that story again recently (one of the Mass readings last Sunday) and something about it snagged my attention and I was hooked. Caught on it –like a splinter on a red-wood fence; it catches your sleeve and the rest of the day you are wondering, pondering that fence; why did I have to climb Mrs. Jensen’s fence? Why didn’t I just go around?  Or choose that end post where I know it’s safe? And why would I do it when I was wearing my new school shirt? Mom is going to kill me!  Especially when Mrs. Jensen calls about her flower bed and those vines that looked like weeds!  I could have at least taken the shirt off. David did. I had it already unbuttoned! But no, I wanted to show off and… Never mind. 

On the other hand, it is an interesting story; the manna in the desert, that is. Not my shirt. My Mom didn’t even find that one interesting as she paid to have the sleeve sewn up, and I am certain Mrs. Jensen didn’t either –standing at her back door –curlers still in her hair-- yelling at us to stop cutting through her backyard. And we better stop stealing her pomegranates, or she was going to… But, by that point we were over the next fence and laughing the way only a couple of nine-year-olds can laugh, clutching our stolen pomegranate.  She never did call our Moms, that I know of.  Hmmm…It’s funny what sticks with you.

Anyway, this manna thing… I was sitting there in Mass and the Word of God was the last thing on my mind. I was too distracted by the week to come: the in-service meetings at school (I’m a school librarian & teacher by day), our new and very confusing bell-schedule, one of my daughters had just left for graduate school in Minnesota and another was about to move into the dormitory and start college, the third continues to suffer from a sickness no doctor seems able to diagnose (and she’s about to age out of our insurance!); my Mom is becoming more and more confused and requires extra attention, which is putting a strain on sibling relations (we have never been a particularly close family, before now…); and I keep wondering: What am I going to do?  What if she can’t take care of herself? What if she has to move in with us? What if I can’t take care of her? What if she falls? What if… what if… What if I was 35 again and had cute little kids in jumpers and knee socks like that family sitting in front of us? I think I was pretty good at that. And the kids even stand when it’s time to sing.  Like little angels. My kids never did that! What hymn is this? … Good Lord! Who chooses the music around here?

You see…the last thing on my mind was being present to what was happening at that moment. I was too busy worrying about what might happen or what should happen or even what could have happened if I had been a different person with a better job and a thinner waistline and a thicker hairline… Instead of just being present to the blessings I have, I was –in a way-- looking for a short cut around the parts of life I find less pleasant. Isn’t that what worrying really amounts to?  We worry over something that might happen in the hopes that we can jump a fence and cut through a neighbor’s yard and avoid it.  If we worry enough, we might not have to experience it. 

Of course, consciously, we know that isn’t true. But unconsciously or subconsciously or half consciously we hope it is. We hope that worrying about something will work like a kind of talisman to help us avoid it.  And (I think) it also works in reverse.  If we worry about something that has already happened, if we dwell on it and replay it over and over again, we unconsciously are striving to get control of it and resolve it and make it (the memory, the regret, the sting of remorse) go away. 

But in this wonderful ancient story from Exodus we learn two things: first, that God gives us each day our daily bread (sound familiar?); He gives us what we need, so we should receive it and let it nourish us as it will; as He wills; and second, the day’s bread is meant for that day.  In Exodus 16:19, Moses warns the Israelites about trying to save some of the day’s bread for the next day.  Not only is this a vey important piece of dietary advice, but it is good psychological advice as well. We have to learn not to store up and hold onto our miseries or successes to be chewed and rechewed like cud.  God gives us the bread for each day and that is the food we are to be eating.  That applies not only to bread, and days, but to joys and sorrows and times of life.  I think what Moses is telling us here is echoed by Jesus when He says: Do not worry about what you will eat or drink; sufficient unto the day are the evils therein… (cf. Mt 6: 27-34). However, I don’t simply hear this (or Moses) as a warning. I hear this message as a directive, I hear it as a word of guidance.  I hear in it the way God would have us live; trusting in Him, eating His bread –whatever He sets before you each day—in other words, living the life He gives you without worrying about yesterday or tomorrow. Just receive the bread of each day, the challenges and the joys, as a gift.  Yes, the future is uncertain and a little daunting, perhaps. Yes, my Mom might suddenly need a lot of care, and yes, if she came to live with us, that could cause some dramatic changes in our household; but will worrying about it add a hair to my thinning head? No. 

This is the bread the Lord has given me to eat: the bread of a sick daughter and an aging mother and a troubled family and though it seems to me God is giving me too many vegetables to eat and not enough ice cream, this is the food God gives me each day: my daughters, my mother, my wife, my work… This is the spiritual bread God gives me to eat.  Just as the body is fed by a bowl of Shredded Wheat and a glass of Ovaltine, so is the spirit fed by the presence of God in the people we meet and live and work with each day.  Sometimes I look at my life and I want to send the plate back. I want to say: waiter, I think you brought me the wrong order.

But the fact is this waiter never gets it wrong.  Because what He always bring us, each plate heaped up high with it, is the chance to meet Him through love.  Through patience. Through charity. Forbearance. Humility… The chance to receive the bread of life through kindness to another.  The food of God isn’t in the sickness or the suffering so much as it is in the opportunity for us to serve; to set aside our own needs and wants and put someone else first. That opportunity is the gift; that opportunity is the manna God gives us each day. Best not try to take a short cut around that.  In the flesh of the people you live with, meet or work with each day, the Lord has come to meet you.  He is standing at the door… and He’s brought dinner.  Don’t ask if there are anchovies on the pizza, just open the door and invite Him in; ask Him to sit down.

The other thing that occurred to me was this:  Moses’ advice to the Israelites about not saving the manna for the next day. He warns them that if they do, it will grow sour and breed maggots.  I wonder if that’s what my Aunt Betty meant when she talked about borrowing troubles?  If you hold onto hurts and slights and frets and worries they will fester and grow sour inside of you, and breed maggots in your soul.  Perhaps that is a good spiritual way to think about being anxious.  Remember what the Lord said: sufficient unto the day… (Or something like that.)  Anyway, it’s kind of amazing what you can learn when you pay attention to the readings at Mass. Even by accident.

Confession and the Tranfiguration

“…he was still speaking, when…”

--Matthew 17:5

The other morning, I went to confession over at Our Lady of Czestochowa. It had been a while, and it is summer. I guessed it was time for my quarterly check in with the sacrament.  One interesting thing I think I know about this church is: there used to be a Charlie’s Hamburger there back in the 70’s. “Over two-dozen sold,” was their slogan. There were a few around town, but they are all closed now (I believe).  If I remember correctly, the restaurant was in an old two-story house that also sold antiques. Regardless, the fact that it was there tells me that this piece of land over on Blalock has always been a place that feeds the soul. It must be Holy Ground.

I like going to confession over at Our Lady partly because the priests are Polish and there is the strong possibility that they won’t fully understand what I am confessing, but also because of the old-fashioned confessionals. They have the kind with a kneeler and a screen; like in the movies. It feels not only private, but special, solemn; more real.  I know there are people who like going to confession face to face with the priest, but I have always preferred the idea of anonymity. Of course it may be a sign of spiritual (and emotional) immaturity, but I have never gotten comfortable with the idea of a priest knowing exactly how I feel about Doritos! Tree climbing! and Lana Turner!  Just the possibility…  It’s more than I can handle.  And, I must say I don’t like to see the disappointment in their eyes when I begin talking about my struggles the 10 commandments (at least 9.5 of them).  But that’s another story…

What I really wanted to talk about was my penance.  The priest recommended that I meditate on the Transfiguration.  He recommended either praying the fourth Luminous Mystery of the Rosary (the Transfiguration) or getting out my Bible and reading the gospel account (Matthew 17: 1-8, Mark 9:2-8, Luke 9:28-36) and spending some time quietly contemplating it.  Well, like any good and overly scrupulous sinner, I went straight home and did both… But nothing much happened.  I wanted to feel overwhelmed with grace and mercy and salvation and all kinds of luminous stuff like that. Basically I wanted to feel something transformative… but, like I said, nothing much happened. I read the Gospel account and sat quietly for a while, my mind wandering about like an owl in search of a cigarette.  Then I went for a walk to the park and prayed the rosary and picked up a dead fish that someone had left in the road… But, basically, I felt un-changed.  I was pretty excited about this penance and thought –Wow! That’s a cool one. Man. I lucked out. But, in the end –I prayed and I meditated and …nothing seemed to happen. I was still just me… and I was a little disappointed.  And that’s how prayer works most of the time (in my experience).

But… Later (this is almost a little postscript; which may –in itself—be a sign of some kind) I was sitting in a lobby waiting for my daughter, reading a book and having trouble keeping my eyes open; I heard the slapping of sandals coming down a staircase and I was kind of startled awake.  I looked across the lobby (a large one --with an indoor garden) and I saw these two skinny legs coming down the twisting staircase slapping loose fitting sandals with each step.  The steps sounded like those of a small girl, half playing with the acoustics; perhaps delighting in the clap of her shoes as she walked. From my angle and distance I could see a pink gauzy skirt that came down just past her knees. It looked almost like a ballet skirt my daughters used to wear when they were very young.  As she came around the landing where the stairs turned back toward the main lobby I could see it wasn’t a child. It was a young woman; early twenties –I would guess—and she was walking as so many of us do these days with her face peering into her phone. She came down the rest of the steps just as loudly, but now the sound had lost its charm.  Now it seemed like the thoughtlessness of a distracted young lady who couldn’t be bothered to care whether anyone else was trying to read (or sleep).  She was too busy staring at her screen and emojifying things! I guessed.

And now that I was awake and cranky I was also a little perplexed by her outfit. Why was she dressed like an eight-year-old?  And why couldn’t she just put that phone away and stop slouching, and walk like a normal person (whatever that means, Old Man Sutter!)…

I watched her walk to the door still staring at the screen in her hand; her shoes still slapping the tile floor. I watched her open it and step through, still staring at it.  I watched as she let it swing closed and kept going, apparently oblivious to the other people who were walking past her to come in.  And as I did –my first thought was: of course, she won’t hold the door for anyone. She’s too caught up in her own little virtual world to bother about anyone else.  I had made up my mind about this young woman. And then something happened.  As she was walking away, she suddenly stopped and hurried back. And opened the door. And just stood there… as a very large (overweight man) walked stiffly and slowly past and through the door.  He nodded and may have spoken to her. I couldn’t hear from my vantage point.  But I could see her turn her head up from her phone and smile before she headed on her way.

What I witnessed that afternoon in that lobby was a type of transfiguration.  Like those sleepy apostles who looked at Jesus and thought they knew who he was. They had been with him a while and seen how He acted and heard Him speak and even seen Him heal people, but… Then he revealed Himself in a way they had never imagined.  Me… I was looking at that young lady and after just a few seconds of observing her, I thought I knew who she was. I thought I knew what I was seeing.  And that judgmental voice in my head just kept speaking. But, then she turned around and opened that door and… I too saw something I had never imagined. 

Shut your mouth, Mr. Sutter... and open your eyes.  There is more to God's world than you could ever imagine.

In my experience with the Lord, that is exactly how He works.  If I am acting all holy, and looking for a reward, nothing happens.  But, just when I am feeling exhausted and ready to give up on God, He comes clumping down the stairs in a pink ballet tutu looking like an overgrown 8-year-old.  When the priest gave me that penance, I had been kind of excited. Because I thought it was a sign from God. And I guess it was. But, just not in the one I had expected.  And yet, if I hadn’t gone to confession that morning, if the priest hadn’t given me that penance, and if I hadn’t gone after it like a dog after a bone, I wonder --would I have been ready to witness what I saw? Would my heart have been open to that little quiet moment of transfiguration if the seed hadn’t been planted by a priest I never saw sitting behind a screen in a little old fashioned “closet” (with a kneeler), on a weekday morning, in a Polish church in Houston, Texas? I wonder…

One thing I know for certain; somewhere along the way, I must have been on holy ground.  But isn't that true everywhere? I mean, think about who made it.

The lie unpunished --a meditation

“…the word of the Lord came to the prophet

who had brought him back…”

--1 Kings 13:20

 I’m still thinking about this story. It won’t let me alone, though I may be alone in this.  For me, the real question is why did the story teller tell this story?  If we assume that the story teller behind the stories in the Bible is God, that it is actually His word, then my question is: why is God telling us a story about a prophet who lies to a “man of God,” and tricks him into not fulfilling God’s call, and yet the liar goes unpunished, while the man who was tricked is killed by a lion for not doing exactly what God told him to do… and—another thing: Why put the prophecy of this doom into the mouth of the prophet who lied?  Why would the writer/creator of this tale, whether it is God or just a regular old story teller, create such a troubling story? Why not make it neater, with an obvious moral for the edification of the audience?

And, for me, well… I’ve ben struggling with what the actual lesson of this story is.  And now I am beginning to wonder if that struggle, my struggle, isn’t the point –or at least part of God’s lesson.

I keep getting hung up on the unpunished lie, but this story is no more a story about an unpunished lie (and a king’s withered hand [cf. 13:4]) than Hamlet is a play about ghosts and sword fighting! Which is what I thought Hamlet was about when I first bought myself a copy at the used bookstore on Long Point (near the old Kmart). It was 1973 and the copy I bought (for .65 cents) had a drawing of a dead body, a ghost and a man with a sword on the cover –and since I had just finished reading Frankenstein and Dracula and (I think) had just seen Captain Blood for the first time, it looked like the perfect cover to the perfect book for me!  And heck, I already had part of it memorized: “To be or not to be, …”

Yet, –much to my 13-year-old self’s consternation— Hamlet is not really a play about ghosts and swordplay; as I have learned with time and reading and rereading, it is so very much more. It is a work that –in fact—reveals itself again and again to be so much more with each rereading.

There is a complexity to it, and a multiplicity of meanings that arise from its multi-faceted characters and plot and the boldness and largeness of its language.  Some readers will focus on the patriarchal elements and derive lessons about male dominance and female subservience, others will see themes of Oedipal conflict in the struggles between Hamlet and his step father (and his beloved mother), and still others will find Hamlet’s psychological turmoil over the idea of revenge to be the most compelling elements of the play… but, for me –when I taught the play to high school seniors—I began to hear in it man’s struggle to define himself and his place in a universe where he feels alone and compelled to make his own decisions about what is right and wrong; I heard in it a drama of life in a post-Catholic world.  At the beginning of the play, Hamlet returns from Wittenberg (i.e. Luther’s 95 Theses), and Laertes comes home from the University of Paris (i.e. scholasticism, tradition & Thomas Aquinas).   And throughout the play Hamlet questions whether he has the right to decide things on his own (i.e. interpret the world for himself), while Laertes does what he is told –i.e. obeys the magisterium of king, culture and family… Yes, I know there is more to it than that.  Seemingly nothing about the play is as simple as one might imagine upon first, second, third, fourth, eight, twelfth reading. The writing is so imaginative, alive and unsettling that each time I read it, I hear or learn something new; with each new gaze, the depths of works like Hamlet and The Divine Comedy, Homer’s epics, The Bible, seem only to grow deeper and the truths ever more profound.  One is left to wonder who wrote such things (and how). 

Which brings me back to the enigmatic story at hand. In my reading, the complexity in this story derives more from what has been left out than what has been included.  The fact that no judgment is offered about the prophet who lies, leaves us to ponder his actions, and his role in the story?  To contemplate the meaning of his role.  And why God would continue to use him to voice his message.  What could that mean? According to my Jerome Biblical Commentary some scholars have argued that this is a midrash story redacted into a historical document, and their focus is on the “man of God” punished for being disobedient, but my focus is on the source of his disobedience: the unpunished lie. The more I meditate on this element of the story, the stranger it seems to me.  Of course, one might dismiss this enigmatic element by saying: clearly it wasn’t important to the author; so let it go and move on.  Don’t waste your time.

But when I was learning to pray Lectio Divina we were taught to hang onto that little piece, that word or phrase or element that caught our attention –hold onto it, because that was what we were being given to ponder.  

And so, there are two things I am still turning over in my head about this apparently unpunished lie.  First: was it actually unpunished?  Is the punishment of the lie found in the message the lying prophet is called to deliver?  When he turns to his dinner guest and says:

“This is what the Lord says: ‘You have defied the word
of the Lord and have not kept the command the Lord your
God gave you. You came back and ate bread and drank
water in the place where he told you not to eat or drink.
Therefore your body will not be buried in the tomb
of your ancestors.’”—1 Kings 13: 21-22

What horror must have run through his own mind –being the one who lied to the “man of God,” knowing that it was through him and his lie that God’s word had been defiled; is that not (perhaps) his punishment: to live with the knowledge of the dishonor and doom that he helped bring to a fellow prophet?  Certainly some of my own worst memories are of the evil I have brought to others, even more than the evil I have committed on my own.

And second: perhaps one thing God is telling me, is this:  it’s not always about the answers; sometimes it is about the questions.  The complexity of this little simple story inspires me to ask and ponder –and maybe what God is teaching me through it is this: nothing is ever as simple as it looks.  Open your eyes. Open your heart. Look. Listen. Ponder… Ask questions. Ponder some more. 

How often do we look at someone and think: oh, she’s this or he’s that… she’s a snob, or he’s a bully, or she’s a conservative and he’s a liberal, or she’s a goth and he’s a jock… We dismiss the complexity of their humanity by compressing it into a label.   But, no one is that simple.  Everyone contains a multitude of sorrows and joys and contradictions --unspoken… The truth is, as Bob Dylan once said: "...even the president of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked..." There is always something more to be revealed.  And (of course) some things that need to stay between you and your bathroom mirror....  Anyway, as Hemingway so famously claimed, sometimes the most important part of a story –is what was left out.  Think about that for a while... and when you're done, ponder it some more.