Let Hunger Lead the Way
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June 17, 2017“The bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” (Jn 6:51)
A little before today’s gospel pericope, the people say to Jesus: “Sir, give us this bread always” (Jn 6:34). The Samaritan woman spoke similarly when she met Jesus by the well: “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water” (Jn 4:15). The desire is there and bursts forth, even unwilling and uncomprehending. If we know nothing else, we know, deep down, that we hunger for more than food and drink. An encounter with Christ awakens that deep yearning. In his presence, hunger and thirst need no longer be suppressed, denied, ignored, anesthetized or swallowed up in a glut of pleasures that do not satisfy. With Christ before us, our need comes to the fore, no longer as a curse – something that lurks in the shadows and threatens to consume us from within – but as an invitation to eat and drink from the one Source that will satisfy.
“He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted.” (Deut 8:3)
Teilhard de Chardin hungered for Eucharist in China’s Ordos desert, and offered his Mass on the World as a spiritual Communion:
“I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world. … I will place on my paten, o God, the harvest to be won by this renewal of labour. Into my chalice I shall pour all the sap which is to be pressed out this day from the earth’s fruits. … All the things in the world to which this day will bring increase; all those that will diminish; all those that will die: all of them, Lord, I try to gather into my arms, so as to hold them out to you in offering. … Over every living thing which is to spring up, to grow, to flower, to ripen during this day say again the words: This is my Body. And over every death-force which waits in readiness to corrode, to wither, to cut down, speak again your commanding words which express the supreme mystery of faith: This is my Blood. …
First of all I shall stretch out my hand unhesitatingly towards the fiery bread which you set before me. … To take it, is, I know, to surrender myself to forces which will tear me away painfully from myself in order to drive me into danger, into laborious undertakings, into a constant renewal of ideas, into an austere detachment where my affections are concerned. To eat it is to acquire a taste and an affinity for that which in everything is above everything – a taste and an affinity which will henceforward make impossible for me all the joys by which my life has been warmed. Lord Jesus, I am willing to be possessed by you, to be bound to your body and led by its inexpressible power towards those solitary heights which by myself I should never dare to climb. …
If my being is ever to be decisively attached to yours, there must first die in me not merely the monad ego but also the world: in other words I must first pass through an agonizing phase of diminution for which no tangible compensation will be given me. That is why, pouring into my chalice the bitterness of all separation, of all limitations, and of all sterile fallings away, you then hold it out to me. “Drink ye of this.” How could I refuse this chalice, Lord, now that through the bread you have given me there has crept into my being an inextinguishable longing to be united with you beyond life, through death?”
(Teilhard de Chardin, Mass on the World)
Let hunger lead the way into the unknown.
Image: Brotlandschaft, Sieger Köder
