Praying for hunger: Corpus Christi & the food of God

“Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man
and drink His blood, you do not have life within you.”
--John 6:53

 “Brothers and sisters: The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not
a participation in the blood of Christ?  The bread that we break, is it
not a participation in the body of Christ?  Because the loaf of bread is one,
we, though many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf.”
--1 Corinthians 10:16-17

What does it mean to eat the flesh of the Son of Man? What does it mean to participate in the blood of Christ?  What does it mean to hunger after the body of Christ?

Here in the 21st century, as we struggle with all the issues of our day, how do we live out this calling? How do we truly participate in the blessing of His blood? His body? Those are questions that are key to the solemnity of Corpus Christi. We are called on this day to give special attention and adoration to the sacramental presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist.  And the church has selected these two readings from Corinthians and John's Gospel to help us remember that we are called to participate in the blessing that is the body and blood of Christ.  And so, some churches will have processions and set aside time for adoration of the exposed Eucharist: the body of Christ. It is a call we must not ignore, because it is a call for us to grow not only in our faith but in our hunger for God.

The first reading for today's mass is the one that spoke to me today.  The Old Testament reading  from Deuteronomy. And especially this passage:

“…He therefore let you be afflicted with hunger, and then fed you
with manna, a food unknown to you and your fathers…” (8:3)

In my New Jerusalem Bible, this verse reads:

"He humbled you, He made you feel hunger..."

I think that reading it I was reminded of poor Abram (in Genesis) being called out of his homeland and away from his kinsfolk and lead to a foreign land. Humbled and probably feeling a bit afflicted by God asking so much of him. And, of course we see the same kind of reaction from the Jews wandering in the desert for 40 years, complaining to Moses that He led them out of Egypt (where at least they had food and shelter) only to let them die of hunger in the desert.

  When God leads us away from the familiar and the safe, He leads us into a kind of hungering --and certainly it is  (as far as I can tell) always a humbling experience. God leads us out of our safe space and allows us to be afflicted with hunger, if not for actual food, then for safety and security, for friends and family, for comfort and reassurance.  And God lets us be afflicted by this hunger, not to test us or prove to us He's the boss, but in order that He might feed us with a bread unknown to us and to our parents. 

What is this bread that we do not know? This manna? That is my question?  And how do we get it? I think there is a clue in a famous scene in John’s Gospel.  When the apostles return to find Jesus talking with the Samaritan woman at the well, they offer Him something to eat, but Jesus tells them He has food to eat that they don’t know about.  And when they are puzzled by that, He explains:

“My food is to do the will of the one who sent me, and to complete His work…”
–John 4:34

I wonder if that doesn’t tell us something about Heavenly food, about manna, and also about the importance and the work of prayer. We tend to think about prayer as a way of filling our tank. We go to God in prayer so He can fill our spiritual tank up for the work we have to do, or the world we have to face, etc. etc.  We go to God because we need grace and we have a spiritual longing for the divine.  I certainly don’t deny any of that.  But, I also wonder if the paradox of prayer is that instead of filling us up, the real work of prayer is to empty us out. And that by emptying us it prepares us to be filled by the real food of God’s blessing; the real manna; that food that Jesus is talking about.  We go to prayer not to be filled, but to be emptied, so we can be made hungry for  the will of God, the work of God.  To be made ready for this meal, we have to be humbled, and perhaps a sign of this humility, of the process of being humbled is a growing hunger, a longing for something we cannot achieve on our own; something we cannot even imagine for ourselves: a food unknown to us and to our parents.

Like Abram, lead to a strange land, when we kneel in prayer we are emptied of all our earthly resources, all our powers and glories and achievements; humbled; we are emptied so that God can fill us with grace and make of us a blessing to the world –That is how we participate in the work of God. We pray not to be filled up, but to be emptied, so we can be fed by the work of God.
Want to know what work God has for you? Empty yourself in prayer. Let God afflict you with hunger through prayer. And then let God feed you with the food that Christ spoke of: the Work of God. 

Are you listening, Mr. Sutter?  Put down those chips and that bowl of dip, something better awaits you.

Condemned already: Making our own Hell

“Whoever believes in Him is not condemned,

but whoever does not believe is condemned already …”

--John 3: 16-18

I’ve been think about Dante again.  The Divine Comedy is always on my mind, it seems. The wisdom and the beauty of that great poem do feel truly “divine” sometimes, and the lessons I have learned by reading and rereading it have scarred my life. I say that only half-jokingly, because my experience of Dante now colors almost everything I read or do or learn. His poem seems to be (for me) a kind of guide or spiritual master that teaches me not only about the beauty of language and poetry and reason, but also how to read and finally how to live.

In the poem, Dante travels through the three zones or stages of the afterlife: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.  Guided for most of his journey by the poet Virgil, Dante is given the chance to see the eternal state of souls (damned and blessed) as a way of saving his own. While he is travelling through Hell, one of the many souls Dante meets is Bertran de Born, a man who carries his own head before him as if it were a lantern.  Like many of the souls Dante meets, Bertran de Born is based on an actual person; in life he was a warrior and poet who advised the son of a king to go to war against his father. For that reason (dividing things that should be united) the poet depicts him walking through Hell with his head divided from his body.  This sounds like “poetic justice,” and in Dante it receives the name “contrapasso.”  But the key to Dante isn’t found in the words of a damned soul.  It isn’t even found coming from the mouth of Virgil, the poem’s seemingly timeless voice of reason who guides Dante down through the levels of Hell and then up the mountain of Purgatory. Virgil is the voice of God's justice. He explains to Dante the legalese of eternal damnation. And for so many readers of Dante there is a willingness to trust Virgil's explanation of everything. Because Virgil makes Hell seem so reasonable.  However, the problem with Virgil as Dante's guide to God's eternal judgment is that Virgil doesn't understand God's love, God's grace.  Because God's grace is beyond reason.  So, we look again at this passage from John's Gospel and we pay careful attention to not just what it seems to say, but what it actually says:

“…whoever does not believe is condemned already …”

Whoever does not believe is already condemned already.  Harsh words, it seems.  We don’t like to hear of condemnation –it sounds judgmental and merciless to our modern ear.  But, consider for a moment what it might mean that the non believer might be condemned already.  What could that mean? Does that mean they are beyond God's mercy? But what if that person started believing next month or next week or tomorrow morning? Would they still be condemned?  That doesn't make sense? And it doesn't fit with what we see of Jesus in the gospels. Jesus calls people to conversion and change and redemption.  And no one seems beyond His mercy and love. Think about the tax collectors and sinners Jesus has dinner with, or the centurion with the sick slave, or the woman caught in adultery... Jesus tells us Himself that He didn't come to call the righteous, but the sinners (Mark 2: 17).  So what does He mean when He says those who don't believe are condemned already?

I think we can see a powerful depiction of this condemnation in Dante's vision of Hell.  The souls in Dante’s Hell (his Inferno) are not depicted as simply suffering some horrible --yet poetically apt-- punishment for their sins, but as still (and eternally) pursuing them.  The lustful are seen eternally caught in the wild winds of desire, the gluttons are eternally wallowing in the excess of their appetite, the wrathful eternally enraged, the thieves continue to steal, gossips to gossip, traitors to betray, etc etc.  I think what Dante is depicting for us is the fact that sin is Hell; sin doesn’t just bring condemnation, it is its own condemnation. Looking at Dante in this light, I begin to understand that quite possibly Hell isn’t a place; it is a state of being.  It is a choice we make.  It is found in who we become. When we choose selfishness over generosity, when we choose cruelty over kindness, when we choose coldness and isolation over vulnerability and a willingness to reach out to others we choose sin; and when we choose sin we choose unbelief; and when we do that we condemn ourselves to a Hell of our own making. Because despite what Mr. Sartre said, Hell isn’t found in "other people," it’s found in how we respond to them. Every time we turn away from someone who needs us, our hearts grow a little bit harder, a little bit colder.  And if you happen to read Dante, you will understand that a cold cold hard heart corresponds exactly with what the poet finds at the very core of Hell.  Despite what reason might tell us, our condemnation isn’t a punishment imposed upon us to satisfy some eternal justice; our condemnation (or not) is a choice we make every day. We can open our hearts, go forth, share the gifts God has given us and become a blessing, or we can... cling to our safety and security and treasures and make our own private Hell.  That’s what I find depicted in that beautiful strange poem written by that oddly prescient Italian poet from the 13^th century.  And that’s what I hear Christ telling us today. 

The blessing of vulnerability --further reflections

“Go from your country, your kinsmen

and your father's house to the land
that I will show you... You are to be a blessing.”

–Genesis 12:1-2

What are the Beatitudes but a call for us to leave our place of security and comfort and go to a foreign land –a place of vulnerability, of risk and of blessing.  In Genesis, God calls Abram to leave his homeland, his kinfolk and his father’s house to go forth to a land that God will show him.  In that place and by becoming vulnerable to the curses and blessings of these foreign people, by leaving behind his security and earthly support system and putting his trust wholly in God Abram becomes a blessing. 

“Blessed are you who are poor…”

“Blessed are you who hunger…”

“Blessed are you who mourn…” –cf. Luke 6:20-21 & Mt. 5:3-11

Is this not a call to us to leave behind our homeland of culture and identity, our kinfolk of support and insurance, our father’s house of security and comfort and go to a foreign land that Jesus is showing us: a land of hunger, poverty, mourning, meekness and abuse?  Go not where we are safe and feel secure and accepted, but where we feel some risk of rejection and martyrdom even.  What greater love is there than to give up your life for another? 

But how do we live this out?  What does it mean in our daily life?  For me, there was a wonderful incident the other night that assured me that I had stumbled in the right direction.  I was volunteering at the hospital with the chaplain’s office. The chaplain tapes a list of names to his door for me. It is usually a longish list, but he will highlight the ones that he wants me to visit. Usually I just visit those highlighted names; I tend to be a rule follower. But as I was heading to the elevator I noticed a name --someone I had visited before–not highlighted. And something inside me made me feel that I should visit that patient.

I imagined that I would go up, say hello to him, perhaps offer a prayer and be on my way.  But when I got to his room on the 4^th floor, he was asleep.  So I was about to go back to my assigned list when I noticed a man who looked a little troubled in the room next door. So, I poked my head in and asked if there was anything I could do for him.  He was very hard of hearing, but he was also quite clearly agitated and needed someone (or something).  So I struggled to talk with this elderly man, but I listened as he told me that he was anxious about his daughters and confused about why he was being left at the hospital. After a while I offered to pray.  He didn’t understand at first, but as I began to pray the Our Father, he fell right in with me –as if suddenly something clicked.  A nurse arrived while we were praying and when we finished, she began her business with charts and scans, but she also began to ease his worries by reminding him why he was in the hospital. 

I left and tried the other man again. He was still asleep.  As I turned to leave and go back to my assigned names, another nurse approached me.  He wanted to know if I was the chaplain, because a patient had just died and his family needed someone.  My first reaction was a start of fear. I’m not a chaplain and I wasn’t sure what to do.  But, instead of hiding behind my lack of qualifications. I explained that I was a volunteer, and asked him to show me where the family was.  Standing at the door to the room, I asked God for a blessing and went inside to be with a family in deep and unconsolable mourning.

That was a place and a moment where I felt weak and slightly afraid. I hungered for the security and safety of the “right words,” but I had only my presence and a selection of psalm to offer them. I felt fearfully vulnerable. But, it was the place God lead me. And so I trusted. I trusted that whatever happened –this wasn’t about me. It was about their sorrow and their need to have someone come and pray with them in their time of mourning.  And so I went. And praying with them, sharing psalm 42, listening to their memories and their pain, hearing what a loving father the deceased was, all of it –I believe it was a blessing for them, but I am certain it was a blessing for me.

And it all started with me reading a name on my list that wasn’t selected for me by the chaplain, but (I guess) was by the Holy Spirit.  The first step was leaving the safety and security of the highlighted names, to go somewhere God was leading me.  Then, visiting the man who was almost deaf was a second step. He wasn’t the one I felt an attachment to, and I only stepped into his room because I could see him through the window and saw what looked like fear and confusion on his face –in his eyes. It was uncomfortable and awkward trying to talk with him –but because I tried, because I didn’t just give up and walk away, I was still on the floor when the other man died and because I left his room when the nurse started her work I happened to be walking out the door just as the other nurse came looking for a chaplain. 

And by being vulnerable what did I find?  An opportunity to become a blessing.  And an opportunity to be blessed.  And you know, I think in that moment of blessedness I had a brief glimpse of another foreign land: Heaven. Perhaps what Jesus is telling us in the beatitudes isn’t just that being poor, or meek, or hungry or thirsty or suffering for Christ is good for us; perhaps what He means when He says “blessed are…” is that to offer ourselves in this way is truly blessed; it is a taste of Heaven. 

Think about your own life. When did you feel most blessed? Was it in a moment of earthly success (a 100 on a test, a new job, successfully completing a project or getting an award for some achievement) or was it when you offered yourself completely (in all your brokenness and insufficiency) and found that you were received and you were a blessing to someone who needed you?

To become a blessing is to be doubly blessed.

Reflection on Abram, Vulnerability & Blessing II

“I will bless those who bless you…”  -Genesis 12:3

 

           Here is the other thing that I was thinking about in relation to this reading –to this verse in particular— what if it isn’t simply descriptive of how Abram became a blessing to the world –by leaving the security and safety of his homeland and his father’s house and going to a foreign land—but what if it was also instructive of how someone we turn someone from a curse to a blessing in our own life? Of course, it could certainly be both and most probably even more than that (i.e. the four-fold reading method), but with my own prejudices (or predilections) I tend to look for the paradox or the strangeness in a passage; that is the element that tends to call out to me and so I stumbled over the blessing of vulnerability in my first approach to Abram’s call.  But, ruminating over the passage I kept hearing this little piece echoing over and over again in my soul. And so, after a day or so, I began to contemplate whether the talk of blessing might also apply to how we look at others, how we treat them, how we transform we feel toward them. 

            And this all came into my heart as I was falling into a moment of personal failing and –if not sin, then a very near occasion of; I was doing something very much like gossip.  I was talking about someone who had been hurtful toward me. A person who frightened me even. It all started with me telling a friend why I wouldn’t be part of an event, and by way of explanation I brought up the event that caused me such pain and my need to avoid a particular person.  And if I had stopped there, my words might have simply been informative.  But, I began to elaborate on what happened and my own hurt feelings, and I began to speculate about this person and to shape my story to make myself the innocent victim and this other person a mean-spirited bully. 

            And then suddenly I stopped. Cut myself off. Sitting there, in that classroom, talking with a friend, I heard God’s words echo in my head: “I will bless those who bless you…” and I thought –What am I doing? I’m not blessing her; I’m cursing this person; therefore, I am cursing myself.

            It was probably that precise moment when I realized that this was not simply a description of Abram’s call to go become vulnerable, but also an instruction for how we are called to treat others.

I will bless those who bless you.

I began to suspect that this wasn’t JUST directed to Abram of Ur in 2000 BC. I began to suspect that, like most of the rest of the Bible, it contained a truth that was meant for me as well.  And I began to suspect that it had something to do with turning my heart around; with how to turn what seems like a curse into a blessing. 

I will bless those who bless you.

If this wasn’t just directed Abram of Ur, then it probably wasn’t just directed to me either. Maybe I needed to look at it from a different point of view. Step out of the middle of the “you-ness” of the statement and consider it from the other side. From this other vantage point I’m not simply the one being blessed or cursed, but I’m also the one doing the blessing and the cursing.  And reading it thus, I realized: God blesses me –when I bless others.  I don’t mean as a reward, I mean that the supernatural consequence of blessing another is to be blessed. The supernatural result of cursing someone is to be cursed.   

            For me the message was clear: Having a difficult time with someone? Stop talking about it and start blessing them.            

On the Blessing of Vulnerability (Abram's call to go to a foreign land…)

“Now the LORD said to Abram:  Go forth from your country, and from your relatives and from your father’s house, to the land which I will show you; And I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you, And make your name great; And so you shall be a blessing; And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And all clans on earth will bless themselves by you.”      --Genesis 12:1-3

     When the Lord sends Abram to a far country, away from his relatives and his father’s house, we might be tempted to simply accept it as part of the narrative –a plot device so to speak. We might not question it, or contemplate it because it feels like the introduction to a story; it feels like a “once upon a time” moment.  We are so familiar with the rest of this story, the covenant drama with the split animal bodies, the many conversations with God, the name changes (Abram to Abraham; Sarai to Sarah), the heavenly visitors who prophecy Sarah’s pregnancy, the bargaining with God and especially the sacrifice of Isaac, that this opening detail can easily get glossed over in our rush to get to the action. But reading this passage the other morning, especially after reading Romans, I was struck by the weirdness of it.  Am I crazy? Quite possibly.  But, bear with me as I chase this idea once more around the bend. 

     Here’s what I heard in my heart when I read this: God called Abram to leave the place he knew, his homeland, and leave the place where he felt secure, his father’s house, and to go to a place that God would show him –a place Abram didn’t know and where he would have no standing. Go there. Go to this foreign land where you will be vulnerable and quite literally out of your comfort zone, and by doing this you will become a blessing for all people.  What does that vision say to my life? What does it say to the world today? 

     The first thing that occurred to me was: I need to go where God calls regardless of how comfortable or safe it seems. Because where God calls us to go will often be somewhere unfamiliar and challenging, but it will most assuredly be a place of vulnerability.  Isn’t that confirmed in Jesus? To be a witness for God, is to be vulnerable, to place ourselves in the hands of others –that we might become a blessing for them.  Notice that God tells Abram that those who bless him will be blessed and that those who curse him will be cursed. That sure sounds like God telling him, telling US, that some people will accept us and bless us and others will curse us. And notice that God doesn’t give any directives as to how Abram should react to either. In light of recently reading Romans, I still had these words of Paul’s echoing in my head:

“None of us lives for himself and none of us dies for himself. While we are alive we live for the Lord, and when we die, we die for the Lord…” (cf. Romans 14:7-8)

And with that thought still in mind, I saw in God’s call to Abram a call to all Christians to leave their comfort and their security and to go forth to an unfamiliar place where you can become a blessing to those who bless you.  It isn’t our business to judge the people who curse or bless us, it is only our business to get off the couch and go out to the world where we will be vulnerable, where God will give us the opportunity to serve Him in the people we meet, the people who bless or curse us, the people who simply reach out to us in need of help, a friend, food, or a consoling hand.  And I think somehow in God's algebra of grace, being vulnerable is an essential part of the equation; it is essential to becoming a blessing. Eegads! Contemplate that the next time you feel insecure.

     If you turn off your TV or shut off your phone (or computer) for a while you may hear a voice calling you, a voice calling from deep inside of you, calling you to get up off the couch and go outside –out of your comfort zone, out of your familiar places—go somewhere and just be vulnerable. Go somewhere that you might not normally go. Is that to the hospital to volunteer? Perhaps. Or to a soup kitchen? Maybe. Quite possibly it starts with simply telling someone after mass how much you liked their singing. Ask yourself this: Does it make you feel uncomfortable? Vulnerable? Then quite probably that is where you are being called to go. 

NEXT—that other thing this reading brought to mind.