Sunday's Gospel

Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, "I am the bread that came down from heaven." They were saying, "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, 'I have come down from heaven'?" Jesus answered them, "Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, 'And they shall all be taught by God.' Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh." John 6:35, 41-51

I’ve sat inside a monastery rotunda contemplating a golden starburst monstrance enclosing a pale host, in a way that profited in my soul.

Sacramental objects teach me to see sacramentally. Sacristans, altar guild members, priests, handle chalices and fair linens as an almost remedial lesson in caring for ordinary things. Architects create beautiful orderly spaces of worship to open people's hearts to beauty in an unorderly world. Devout men and women eat the bread of Holy Communion in order to help awaken their consciousness to recognizing the bread of life everywhere.

If God lived in a tabernacle in a church only, I would never leave church. Liturgy lets me linger with the thought of Presence, then pushes me out the door with the insistent dismissal to seek and serve God elsewhere, that is, in the places most difficult to perceive Divine Love. When I'm weary, I come back to renew the process, each Eucharist giving me, hopefully, a deeper and wider insight into the next adventure.

The Eucharistic host, so small, pale, a mere wafer of lightness, contains the universe (Meditation One). A worshipper becomes One with the universe, consuming this wonder within the body, a mystery angels dare not look upon (Meditation Two). But we’re mistaken if we think we can contain the Holy in a tabernacle. The bread of life lives inside the least desired and least loved of humanity. Here is Christ's True Presence. (Meditation Three and Last Word).

Ever wandering toward wonder,
- Suzanne

Miscellany

Young people say, “What good can one person do?” They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our heart that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions, and know God will take them and multiply them as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.

–Dorothy Day  1897-1980
Loaves and Fishes

I don’t partake because I’m a good Catholic, holy and pious and sleek. I partake because I’m a bad Catholic, riddled by doubt and anxiety and anger: fainting from severe hypoglycemia of the soul. I need food.

-Nancy Mairs 

If we knew how to listen to God
If only we knew how to look at life
All life would become a sign
All of life would become a prayer.

-Michel Quiost
1918-1997

In my religious tradition, if there is leftover bread after communion, it is carefully placed in a ciborium ( a round cup with a cover) which in turn is placed within a tabernacle. The tabernacle is near the altar – in a wall maybe or carved into the reredos. If there is a tabernacle (or ark, sometimes it is called) in the church, a perpetual lamp is lit nearby. I remember this lamp from my childhood, a gentle glowing presence, a candle in a red glass cylinder hanging from the ceiling. Silent. Comforting.

The tabernacle evokes the tent of the presence far far back in our history when the children of Israel lived in the desert after escaping slavery in Egypt. The tabernacle was surrounded by a cloth fence, and a courtyard in which there was a golden laver and an altar for sacrifices. Inside, the tent had two sections – the larger contained an altar for incense, a candelabra, and a table for the showbread – an offering to God.

A veil separated the square inner room from the outer. Behind the veil was the Holy of Holies. Inside the Holy of Holies the Israelites kept the Ark of the Covenant which contained the tablets of the law given to Moses on Sinai, Aaron's rod which had once flowered with almond blossoms, and a jar of manna, to always remind them that God provided bread in the wilderness.

Centuries later, after the Israelites had conquered and settled in Canaan, King David, musing on his roof, (presumably his lovely neighbor was not bathing that day) thought: I live in a cedar palace – but the Holy One still lives in a tent. He sought advice from Nathan the Prophet. The Holy One was not pleased at the thought of a temple fixed in one place. Nevertheless David's son Solomon built a very fine temple (despoiling the remaining cedars of Lebanon).

The structure of the tabernacle, architecturally and symbolically in terms of degrees in which you could approach the divine, was the template for the Temple of Solomon and later, the Second Temple, built by Herod the Great. The destruction of the temple in 70 c.e.sent Jews and Christians alike into a diaspora where God again moved with the people. (The Ark of the Covenant had long disappeared when the first temple had been destroyed.)

When Jesus died, Mark tells us, the veil in the temple was torn from top to bottom. That image not only suggests grief, but a freedom – an unveiling – a letting out. Not that God was stuck in the Holy of Holies – but that in our minds, God dwelt there. (This is always a danger, isn't it?)

And this happened. Two people were walking to Emmaus. A stranger came and talked with them – about the scriptures - on the road. When they reached Emmaus, they urged the stranger to come inside, for evening was at hand. There, at table, the stranger took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them. They recognized him. And he disappeared.

From then on, the community had to remember carefully and meditate upon what had happened at the last supper with Jesus.

In the franticness of church life, it is hard to slow down enough to remember the Holy of Holies. If I do not reverence the Divine with all my being, how then, can I partake of the Holy and carry the Divine within myself, and then bear it out again into the broken, dangerous, suffering world? Or recognize the Divine within what is ugly, chaotic, and powerless? And while I know the Temple veil is ultimately torn, if I do not embrace the sense of Presence in the sacred space, how will I recognize it in the hubbub of life outside?