Between Sundays for Week of August 12, 2024
This week’s reflection on Sunday’s gospel comes from William H. Willimon, published in Daily Feast: Meditations from Feasting on the Word, Year B (2020), edited by Kathleen Long Bostrom and Elizabeth F. Caldwell.
Here, standing before us, in the flesh, is the fullness of God. If you have ever wondered just what God looks like, or how God acts, or how God talks, then wonder no more. In this faith, we do not have to climb up to the divine; God discloses, unveils, climbs down to us…
Let’s admit it. There is something within us that likes our gods high and lifted up, distant, exclusively in heaven. We so want religion to be something spiritual, rather than something that is uncomfortably incarnational. Yet here we are with God-in-the-flesh before us saying, “I’m your bread; feed on me!”
Our hungers are so deep. We are dying of thirst. We are bundles of seemingly insatiable need, rushing here and there in a vain attempt to assuage our emptiness. Our culture is a vast supermarket of desire. Can it be that our bread, our wine, our fulfillment stands before us in the presence of this crucified, resurrected Jew? Can it be that many of our desires are, in the eternal scheme of things, pointless? Might it be true that he is the bread we need, even though he is rarely the bread we seek? Is it true that God has come to us, miraculously with us, before us, like manna that is miraculously dropped into our wilderness?
Response: For what do you hunger? For what are you thirsty? How is God feeding you?
Prayer: I offer you my life and my belief. I set my heart in you, God, you who satisfy all hungers. Amen.
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Ponderings
Mary Oliver (b. 1935)
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
“The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver, from The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays. © Beacon Press, 2008.
