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| Vacation time! |
Dear friends,
I was away for the last three weeks on vacation. Thank God for the
break. It included 9,000 miles travelling, 1,100 of which was on my
motorcycle. Thanks for coming back to my blog.
Some time back a priest friend of mine was telling me that he was just back
from holidays where he had been mountain climbing with a German
priest friend of his. They were somewhere in the mountains on
the Austrian-German border. His friend had a map, but it was
five years old and one of the paths they took turned out to be very
dangerous. It was basically no longer usable. He said
that for most of it there was a rope on one side for safety, although
there was a sheer drop on the other side. But then they came to
a place about 5m long where there was no rope, so they just had to
cling to the side of the cliff on this extremely narrow ledge until
they got past it. He told me that it was quite terrifying and a
matter of slowly taking one step at a time, then finding proper hand
grip, then another step. By the time he got to the far side he
was quite exhausted and traumatised, but what interested me was that
his friend who is an experienced mountaineer, then told him to sit
down and that they should eat something. When you have been
through an experience like that, eating changes your metabolism and
calms you down. And he said that it did just that. Within
a short time he was fine again.
There
is also an interesting story in the Old Testament where the prophet
Elijah is on the run having just worked an extraordinary miracle, but
now Queen Jezebel is out to kill him. So he escapes into the
desert, but at one point he sits down feeling fed up and prays to
God, ‘Take my life, I am no better than my ancestors’, or in
modern English, ‘I wish I was dead; I’ve had enough’.
Then he lies down and goes to sleep. But then he is woken by an
angel who tells him to get up and eat, so that he will have enough
strength for the journey. There he finds food beside him.
The right kind of nourishment is essential.
In
this Gospel passage Jesus is just after working the miracle of
feeding five thousand people with the five loaves and two fish and
the people come after him to see more of this wonder-worker.
However, as is often the case, the miracle Jesus worked was pointing
to something deeper and he says to them, ‘You are only looking for
me because you got free food, but you didn’t see the “sign”.’
What ‘sign’? What was he talking about? And then he says, ‘Don’t
be worrying about temporary food, but look for the food that endures
forever.’ The miracle of multiplying the loaves was a sign of
something much deeper. Jesus then begins to teach them that there is
another kind of food that we need for our whole life; not just
material food that you eat, but food which is
meaning/purpose/direction. And then He tells them that He is
this food that lasts forever, and the kind of food we need for the
journey which is our whole life. He is talking about the Eucharist. Jesus is the one who gives us
strength and meaning to keep going by giving us his own Body and Blood in each mass. He is the one who makes
sense of what our whole life is about. If you don’t have the
right kind of meaning or purpose for being here, then it is very hard
to keep going especially when things don’t make sense, as they so
often don’t.
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| Some of the beautiful countryside I got to ride through in Pennsylvania |
It
is interesting too that in the second reading (Ephesians 4:17, 20-24)
St. Paul says, ‘don’t live the kind of aimless life that
Pagans live.’ That is exactly what can happen to us if we
lose sight of our faith, or get too caught up in the world and
worldly worries. We forget what the real purpose of our life is
about. You see this happening all the time, especially when the
economic boom was here. Many people got completely carried away
with money and forgot themselves. I suppose now that things are
harder it’s a lot easier for us to focus on what is really
important. That is much harder, but it is also helping us.
God
is showing us that to have the right kind of strength for the
journey, we need the right kind of food, and Jesus is this food.
‘I am the bread of life’. That is why Jesus gives himself
to us in the Eucharist and speaks to us through his word, so that we
have all the nourishment that we need for the journey. If we
know what our life is about, it is much easier to keep going even
when we are struggling physically. Where do we get direction
from? In Jesus. He is the one who makes sense of everything for
us.
Now
I know that there are also real worries such as how am I going to
provide for my family when I’ve no work. But what God is
telling us is that if we focus on him first we will begin to discover
that He will look after all of these needs as well. Jesus must
be at the centre, everything else second.
I am the bread of life.
Whoever comes to me will never be hungry;
Whoever believes in me will never thirst.
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