Bread For The Journey, And The People On It

Scripture Reflection for the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (August 2, 2015)

Scripture Readings:
Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15
Psalm 78:3-4, 23-24, 25, 54
Ephesians 4:17, 20-24
John 6:24-35

What a gift we have in the Eucharist: a God who feeds us with his very self! And what a gift, too, to share this food that has the power to transform us into a sharing of ourselves with each other as we sojourn together.

This is the awe-inspiring thought these readings leave me with. Somehow they bring out the musician in me, calling to mind song after song that remind me, in turn, of people and places that have been an extension of the bread of life to me along our shared journey.

In the Lord’s promise to Moses, “I will now rain down bread from heaven for you,” I hear the strains of a familiar song: “Rain down, rain down, rain down your love on your people.” I picture a dear friend and mentor whose recent passing has not lost its sting, his hands raised and eyes intensely closed in prayer, singing his heart out in a booming off-key baritone: “Rain down, rain down, rain down your love, God of life.” The image of “fine flakes like hoarfrost” recalls lines of psalms sung alongside Benedictine monks: “He hurls down hailstones like crumbs; he scatters hoarfrost like ashes.” And Moses’ explanation to the people – “this is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat” – takes me back to a beloved community I found in one parish choir, when my hunger for full communion was nearing culmination, as we sang, “You satisfy the hungry heart with gift of finest wheat. Come give to us, o saving Lord, the bread of life to eat.”

The psalm reminds me of my first prolonged encounter with the Catholic Church during a year of volunteering in Haiti, specifically one of the communion hymns that became my crash course in Eucharistic theology. It speaks of the bread of heaven that nourishes the angels, and us who are travelers toward heaven – and in this bread is our life. It continues with a short litany of prefiguring Old Testament images: Isaac on the altar, the Passover lamb, and the manna that fed the people. Each verse builds up to the simple refrain, “Jesus in the host, it is you who gives us strength.”

And surely many of us cannot hear our Lord’s words in the famous “bread of life” discourse without thinking of Suzanne Toolan’s well-known setting, which has linked the communities I have journeyed with by the breadth of its appeal: “I am the bread of life; you who come to me shall not hunger, and who believe in me shall not thirst … and I will raise you up on the last day.”

We may all find our own familiar images in today’s rich readings. These are a few of mine. They remind me how inseparable is this life-giving bread of heaven, in which our Lord meets and feeds us on our earthly pilgrimage, from our brothers and sisters who are on it with us. Dorothy Day captured this profound truth when she wrote at the end of her autobiography, The Long Loneliness,
“We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship. We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”

More succinctly, the same dear friend I mentioned earlier once said, “We cannot follow Christ if we are not fed by Christ. And we cannot be fed by Christ if we do not follow Christ.” Following and being fed: these are the essentials of the Christian life, which cannot be lived alone. Or as yet another great hymn expresses it, “Here in this world, dying and living, we are each other’s bread and wine.”

Image: Give Bread 3 by Gustavo Di Nucci. PublicDomainPictures.net