The Hungry and the Thirsty

"Christ of the Breadlines" by Fritz Eichenberg (1952) for The Catholic Worker Newspaper

*Over the next several weeks, I will be reflecting on the beatitudes of Jesus.

~Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied~

One of the interesting things about this beatitude is the metaphor Jesus uses to describe those who seek righteousness. He says they hunger and thirst for it. It is not random. In the Old Testament, eating and drinking were common metaphors for the righteous person’s experience of God. Isaiah the Prophet preached: “Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; he who has no money, come, buy and eat.” There is a bread which truly satisfies, Isaiah insisted. “Hearken diligently to [the Lord], and eat what is good, delight yourselves in fatness” (Is 55:1-2). 

Jesus is picking up this same theme in Jewish preaching. In John’s gospel, he tells a Samaritan woman pulling water up from a well: “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give will never thirst” (Jn 4:13-14). Two chapters later ― and most dramatically of all ― Jesus tells the crowds “not to labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life” (Jn 6:27). Jesus reminds them that “your fathers ate manna in the desert, and died. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die” (Jn 6:49-50). Jesus finally told those crowds, “I am the living bread. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever” (Jn 6:51). 

There are just two realities Jesus explicitly identified himself with here on earth. “This is my body,” he said at the Last Supper, breaking bread and blessing it. “This is my blood,” he said with a chalice. “Take. Eat…. Drink of it” (Mt 26:26-28). Jesus placed himself inside the Jewish Passover ritual: The bread is me. The wine is me. That is the first time. The Eucharist. The Bread of Life. “For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed” (Jn 6:55).

The second time occurred just one chapter earlier. As he was sitting upon the Mount of Olives, the disciples asked Jesus about the end of the world and what a good judgment would look like. Jesus said this: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink” (Mt 25:35). A bit of confusion makes sense. For future generations of Christians, Jesus would not be physically roaming the earth. “When did we see thee hungry and feed thee?” they would ask (Mt 25:37). The response is the second time Jesus identifies himself with something on the earth. “Truly I say to you, as you did it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40). [1]

In this, then, we can see Jesus’ preoccupation with another kind of “hungering and thirsting.” Normally, when we hear Jesus say “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” we think he’s talking about those who have a strong desire to be good and live well. He is. But not only must we hunger and thirst to be virtuous ― to be prayerful, to forgive wrongs done to us, etc. But there are also those “least of these” who literally “hunger and thirst.” There are those who hunger and thirst in the streets. Those who literally have no food, no homes, no families. Blessed are those too, then, who hunger and thirst to see righteousness done for the “least of these.”

Catholics typically think that Jesus has met the world’s spiritual hunger and thirst by becoming what appears to be bread, by becoming the Bread of Life. “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst” (Jn 6:35). We always remember the first time Jesus identified himself with some earthly reality. We always remember the Eucharist. We never remember the second time. We never remember that, when we feed the “least of these” Jesus says we “do it to [him].” We never remember the poor.

Taken together, both of Jesus’ presences ― in the Eucharist and in the poor ― open up the true heart of this beatitude. The Christian hungers and thirsts for righteousness. Better yet, the Christian hungers and thirsts for the Righteous One. The Christian finds him in the Eucharist. The Christian finds him in the poor, hungering and thirsting alongside them. In both of these breads, the Christian is satisfied. 

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~Anthony Rosselli (PhD cand., theology, University of Dayton) writes out of St. Luke and Ascension Parishes in Franklin County, Vermont. These columns are archived here.

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Endnote:

[1] See the commentary on Matthew by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, vol. 3 (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2012), 839-840.

On Returning to the Eucharist

*Note: In the state of Vermont, public Masses resumed this week. We'll continue our reflections on the beatitudes next week.*

So the quarantine has been difficult psychologically. A friend of mine has been measuring her days in cries. 500 of her colleagues were laid off. “Today was a 4-cry day...” I feel it too. All of the psychological tools you normally keep sharp ― the ones that help you cope with simple stressors ― went blunt in my toolbag. Quicker to speak, slower to listen; quicker to be anxious; quicker to misread someone’s intentions. I’ve been comparing my soul to a storm. The slightest thing can speed up the winds: the guy texting at the green light, a frustrating article. 

On Monday I was able to receive the Eucharist for the first time in about two months. I returned to my seat and closed my eyes. Amidst the storm, I’d been yearning for this moment. “Peace! Be still!” Jesus rebuked the storm when the apostles woke him in the boat (Mk 4:39). Surely he would do the same for my own soul.

As I sat there, though, and looked inward, I really didn’t feel any different. I had a headache. I was hungry. I was unsettled, too, about how receiving the Eucharist had been awkward. I couldn’t get the mask to untie. My glasses got knocked around. I hoped nobody had seen.

“Stop!” I thought to myself. Jesus says that, when we pray, we should “go to our inner room and shut the door” (Mt 6:6). I need to shut the door on these distractions. “You are communing with God.” I said to myself. “What do you feel?” 

“I feel … nothing.” 

“That cannot be. You have not received the Eucharist in months. Look again…. What do you feel?”

“Nothin’. I feel ... nothing.”

And by then Father was into the Closing Prayer.

The rest of the day didn’t go much better. The headache never really went away. I thought that maybe Our Lady would appear to me after lunch. (Something spectacular was going to happen, right?) She didn’t. It was all very disappointing.

When I was driving home, though, I remembered something that a Carmelite nun once taught me. [1] I remembered that I had the whole thing 100% backwards.

What is it that I want out of Christianity? Is it certain feelings? To have my heart blazing with pleasure? Do I want to see a miracle? 

Or do I want God? 

More often than not, in Christianity, we want pleasurable feelings, or remarkable moments of prayer, or a rich “spiritual life.” We want to notice something when we talk to God. Very rarely do we want God himself. For the first time in months, in the Eucharist, I had God ― in so far as one can have him ― and I was looking for something else, I was clenching for feelings in the pew. 

That’s 100% backwards. Indeed, when we experience rich spiritual feelings, that’s fine and good. They’re a gift and a help, a caress from the Creator. But, in those cases, we should be yearning for God. We desire the Caressor, not his caresses.

There is a story about Saint Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century Doctor of the Church who’d written volumes and volumes of theology. They say that, while kneeling before a crucifix, Jesus once spoke to Saint Thomas. “You’ve written well of me,” Jesus said. “What would you receive for your labor?” Without much hesitation: “Non nisi te, Domine,” Thomas replied. “Non nisi te.” “Nothing but you, Lord. Nothing but you.” Thomas had it 100% rightward. 

This question extends to the whole of life. What is it that we want from this life? What, truly, do we want? To finally feel good about it all? To have such-and-such thing from our past somehow get fixed? Or do we want God? Because — feel it or not — we worship the God who allows us to unite with him. And starting again this week, that is precisely what is offered us in the Eucharist.

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~Anthony Rosselli (PhD cand., theology, University of Dayton) writes out of St. Luke and Ascension Parishes in Franklin County, Vermont. These columns are archived here.

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Endnote:

[1] Ruth Burrows, To Believe in Jesus (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2010), 27-29.

The Long Lent of 2020

Catholics are giving up much more than they’d planned on this Lent. In order to slow the spread of this new coronavirus, extraordinary social distancing measures are being implemented. Schools, businesses, and restaurants are closing. Several states have issued mandatory orders to “shelter in place.” It’s now a misdemeanor to go out for something non-essential in California. These are strange and hard days. Catholics weren’t imagining they’d be giving up “other people” for Lent.

Hardest of all, though, is that many Catholics no longer have access to sacramental communion at Mass. This is true for us here in Vermont. Catholics fast during Lent. But nobody fasts from the Eucharist. 

This decision was necessary. But it’s also tragic and painful: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,” Jesus says, “you have no life in you” (Jn 6:53). I can’t smooth Jesus’s words into nothing and pretend our distance from Mass over the coming time will be painless. Neither can I assure you that TV Masses and spiritual communions will suffice. They won’t. But there are some things we can say about all this that might be helpful as we grind through the “Long Lent of 2020.”

A first point: Jesus says we’ll “have no life” unless we consume his flesh and blood. But he doesn’t say we need to consume him every week, or every day, or anything like that at all. And what’s interesting is that, in the grand scope of Catholic history, even if we've always attended Mass every week, receiving the Eucharist every week is actually very recent and exceptional. In the Middle Ages especially, there was limited reception of the Eucharist. The Poor Clares received only six times each year. Third Order Dominicans just four. Even some of the Church’s great saints, like Saint Louis, received just six times a year. Saint Elizabeth of Hungary just three. 

A second point: There’s a startling story from the fifth century about Saint Augustine. When it became clear to him that he was dying, he did something quite extraordinary and counterintuitive ― he began to fast from the Eucharist. You’d think that, in his moment of vulnerability and weakness, he would seek communion even more frequently. On the contrary, he said that, in this moment, he wanted to be among those who hunger and thirst for Jesus with the greatest possible acuteness. 

I’m not saying that, under normal circumstances, you should fast from the Eucharist. But I am saying that, under our current circumstances, yesterday’s saints might have something important to teach us: namely, that fasting increases our desire. And if it’s Jesus that we’re fasting from ― in this case, forced to fast from ― our best move is to allow this Long Lent to increase our desire for the Eucharist. It’s a chance to finally be numbered ― like Augustine, Louis, or Elizabeth ― among those who truly hunger and thirst with the greatest possible acuteness for Jesus.

There’s a third and final point to be made, and it’s one that we always forget. We need to remember that there’s a flip side to the Eucharist. When we receive communion, we not only receive Jesus; Jesus also receives us. But right now, he cannot receive you. And so his desire for you is increasing. [1] Do not think for a moment that he will be satisfied with spiritual communions and TV Masses. They are good, as far as they go. But he desires you way too much. You thought you were heartbroken about the cancellation of Mass? It does not compare.

The Old Testament Song of Solomon describes a lover who pines after her beloved: “I sought him whom my soul loves, but found him not; I called him, but he gave no answer” (Sg 3:1). This woman breaks into the streets and searches up and down the alleys in search of her beloved, wailing the whole way. Right now you might think you’re the lover, heartbroken and lost because Mass has been taken away from you. I assure you. You are the one being sought after. And when we’re through with this Long Lent ― when the Divine Lover gets you in his arms again — he’ll respond just as the lover from the Song of Solomon did: “when I found him whom my soul loves. I held him, and would not let him go!" I would not let him go!

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Endnotes:

[1] Father Justin DuVall, vice-rector at Bishop Simon Brute College Seminary made a similar point this week.

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~Anthony Rosselli (PhD cand., theology, University of Dayton) writes out of St. Luke and Ascension Parishes in Franklin County, Vermont. These columns are archived here.

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