Wednesday of the Third Week of Easter
In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass recounts
many brutal events about his life as a slave. He endures the worst humiliation
and receives countless beatings, and as he writes he gives these events all the
gruesome attention they deserve. However, out of the many abuses to which his
masters subject him, he saves his most vicious resentment for something
unexpected, particularly for a modern reader: hunger. When, in one episode, one
master who had a cruel habit of starving his slaves sends Douglass to Mr.
Covey, a notorious slave owner who “broke” slaves with relentless scourging,
Douglass actually saw that as an improvement, for it at least mean that he
could eat.
Living during culture of material prosperity,
people today have a difficult time understanding the hardship of physical
hunger. Those of us who fasted on the prescribed days of Lent might have a
small modicum of what it entails, but not the constant gnawing that afflicts
the very poor. Real hunger brings multiple dimensions of suffering, changing a
person's whole condition: it weakens him; it depresses him; it silences him. So
much of a person's peace of mind rests on how full he feels. When the appetite
rages unabated, the hungry man can become utterly desperate, eating anything in
sight, or utterly despondent, exerting no effort and choosing to wither away.
For this reason, among others, the Church will prescribe fasting as a way to
grow in holiness: fasting often exposes what little discipline we have when we
have had nothing to eat, and how much of our charity stems from God and not
mere comfort. Like most people, I feel quite generous on a full stomach—I even
have a habit of singing as I wash the dishes after a good meal—but this
ebullience vanishes in the state of hunger. On an empty stomach, my mind
drifts; my compassion falters; my hope degenerates into cynical dismissal of everything.
Fasting reveals what lurks in my heart, and how much more I need God.
Jesus tells a physically hungry people that he
will feed them with spiritual food and slake their thirst with spiritual drink.
One can imagine the dismay the crowd must feel at this, especially when they
just witnessed him multiplying loaves and fish just the other day. Sensing an
opportunity, He uses their hunger to teach a lesson about the soul and its need
for sustenance. Jesus insists that they should transcend their physical
appetites and instead feed their souls. His miracle of the multiplying the
loaves, like his other miracles, was to serve as a symbol of what he does for
his disciples on a spiritual level. Yes, a man must eat physical food to
sustain his body, but he also must eat spiritual food to sustain his soul. In
other words, Jesus desires to move all of us from the worldly diet to the
spiritual diet. As it stood, the people whom he addresses, and the world at
large, suffered from widespread spiritual malnourishment. They needed the bread
of life.
Without Jesus, all men are spiritually hungry, and
just as a physically hungry man becomes desperate or despondent, a spiritually
hungry man suffers something analogous. In desperation, he may try to consume
anything that can fill his soul for a moment, some form of pleasure, some
ideology, some elaborate unsustainable lie. He will cling viciously to this
spiritual junk food and make it his form of idolatry, carelessly leaving his
soul perpetually restless and unsatisfied. Otherwise, he may become despondent,
welcoming the emptiness and nihilism that he thinks constitutes reality. He
will refuse the bread of life and let his doubt consume him since he decided to
consume nothing. Either way, the malnourished soul faces the same end:
spiritual starvation.
Jesus tells the hungry disciple that his Father
sent Him so “that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have
eternal life.” God wants Jesus, His Son, to feed His people, and he wants
His people to eat and drink. If they do this, they will have eternal life; if
not, they will have eternal death. To eat spiritually, one must come to Him,
and to drink spiritually, one must believe in Him. Using the language of food,
one could say that cherishing the idols of pride, vanity, and sensuality spoils
the spiritual appetite and delays necessary nourishment. We must come to Jesus,
the Eucharist, for our meal. In the same way, those who do not believe, those
who adopt materialism and skepticism as their mode of life, will grow parched
and dry up. Thus, we must believe in Jesus, the living water, to slake our
thirst for meaning and purpose.
If we satisfy the hunger and thirst of our souls,
we can find joy that one attains after a great meal, except we feel this in an
infinitely deeper way. To be physically fed means to bring peace to one's body
for a few hours, and to allow for another day of life. To be spiritually fed
means to bring peace to one's heart and mind for a lifetime, and to allow for
eternal life.
This meditation was written by Benedict Augustine, an English teacher
who works in the DFW area. He has taken on the pseudonym, Benedict Augustine,
to honor his two favorite Catholic thinkers: St. Augustine and Pope Emeritus
Benedict XVI.
Excellent meditation! Looks like your font selection matches perfectly with Fr. Alfonse's! ;)
ReplyDeleteI know whenever I'm hungry I become very irritable and crabby. Cynicism sneaks into my thoughts, too. My mind drowns itself in negativity. But once my belly is full I feel whole and nice again. Fasting during Lent doesn't seem all that agonizing because I know I will be able to eat whatever I want soon. But for those who are genuinely starving to death, it's a whole other story. I think about the hundreds of pounds of food we waste every year when poor children in Africa are starving to death. I recall in 1 Kings 6:29-30 the sometimes overlooked story of a woman who eats another woman's child but hides her own son so he will not be eaten the next day! Heart wrenching that such severe hunger causes people to do the most heinous actions.
When we don't satisfy our spiritual hunger with fulfilling and nutritious Christ- inspired cuisine, we truly miss out on His loving grace. I'm thankful each day that the Holy Communion is available for us to partake. The Eucharist gives me strength and encouragement knowing I will never be spiritually hungry or thirsty.
Great thoughts! Keep up the inspiring posts. :)
-Jennifer
Thanks for the compliment. I forgot that episode in Kings, but you're right; that does happen: that woman would be the desperate starving person. When I think of history, and the way people won battles, you learn that people won them through food, not really weapons or tactics. The Crusaders would have had much better luck if only came down to military prowess; what they lacked were adequate supplies. The concept in most of these conflicts was simple: besiege a place and starve them. The only places in the ancient world that could withstand a siege were places that had nothing to begin with (i.e. Sparta; all the tribes north of the Alps) and places next to sea (i.e. Athens, Carthage, Constantinople). Right now, I'm reading Judith, which recounts a siege that almost drove the town of Bethulia into surrendering, but is saved by the courageous woman Judith. I was curious about this book after seeing so many paintings of this woman holding up the head of some Persian general named Holofernes--Baroque painters seemed to love this subject. The book makes the point that her chastity and austerity gives her strength while the gluttony and lust of the general renders him vulnerable. Physical and spiritual virtue met in the heroine, Judith.
ReplyDeleteI think this siege continues in a spiritual way for most people in the West. People often cave into the pressures of sin instead of holding out a little longer and trying to gain control. As you said, in the developing parts of the world, hunger still ravages the population, and those of us in developed countries too often play the role of Pilate and wash our hands of it. God bless the missionaries and workers who risk their neck to give food to those poor people in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. They face unimaginable odds and horrible persecution that no one wants to talk about. You can be sure that the Holy Spirit inspires these heroes.
Book of Judith is one of my favorites in the OT. I really love all the bible stories depicting courageous and holy women. Esther is another book to check out if you haven't read it already.
Delete-J.