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About the Author

Father James Corkery is an Irish Jesuit and an associate professor of systematic theology at the Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy in Dublin. He has studied in Ireland, Germany, and Washington, D.C.. Last semester, he was a Visiting International Jesuit Scholar at Holy Cross, and will be remaining through this coming fall semester.

Thinking Outloud

GOD, WHO NOURISHES AND SUSTAINS

Some twenty years ago two young ladies, with whom I had the good fortune to be acquainted, decided to embark on a baking venture. Radiating confidence, if not quite competence, these two ten-year-olds provided a mouth-watering account of the lemon squares they were about to produce. All we had to do was wait. And wait we did, although, like Alfred Hitchcock who was once banished from the kitchen for, oddly enough, not being able to 'stand the suspense', we fidgeted with giddy anticipation until our benefactresses announced, with a flourish, that the lemon squares were being taken from the oven. With pleasure we took the first bite; with skin-bursting expectation they awaited our verdict. But the clouds of dust that billowed into the air as each salivating palate sought its anticipated ecstasy assured the young ladies that their baking skills had not yet fully matured. And it took wads of soggy tissues, as well as enormous portions of ice-cream, to restore our teary, weary bakers to their usual radiance and verve.

People love to feed people; and there is something godly about that. To nourish one another is one of our deepest impulses; and it shows us to be in the image of God, who nourishes us. In Sunday's first reading, the man of God, who is facing a hundred others, is told to give the food to the people, that they may eat (2 Kings 4:42); and it is attributed to the Lord that they shall eat and have some left over (v. 43). In the reading from the Gospel of John, Jesus, seeing the large crowd, says to Philip: "where are we to buy bread, so that these may eat?" (John 6:5). Here again is evidence of God's concern that the people be fed. Indeed, in several places in John's Gospel there are references to Jesus nourishing and giving life. After he has favored his disciples with an enormous catch of fish and fed them breakfast once they have come ashore, he commissions Peter, as leader, to feed and nourish all those over whom he will have authority (John 21: 15-18). The miracle of Jesus feeding the five thousand draws attention to God's concern - one could even say preoccupation - with nourishing and sustaining us. God is a God of life. Probing more deeply this miracle, or 'sign', in which the five thousand are fed, we penetrate beyond the material food provided to the fact that what God is nourishing us with are foods for all our hungers: our hunger for bread, of course, but also our hunger for love, and for the touch of God in our hearts and lives.

Nourishment gives and sustains life. Later in chapter 6 of John's Gospel, from which this week's reading is taken, Jesus will call himself the Bread of Life and state that the person who comes to him will never hunger and that the believer in him will never thirst (John 6:35). Really? That seems...well, pious...since many in our world today still hunger and countless people who believe wholeheartedly in God do not have clean water. Why say that Jesus is the answer to all these hungers? When I'm on the highway and everyone in the car is calling for burgers and I point to the billboard that states "Jesus is the Answer" everyone choruses "no, burgers are the answer!" I think Sunday's gospel is aware of this practial matter. When it depicts Jesus responding to physical hunger, showing compassionate love and promising eternal life, it is showing how seriously God takes all our hungers - material, human, spiritual - but it is also indicating that, as creatures of desire, of many hungers, we will always be hungry and thirsty unless we recognise that we are made for more than bread (or burgers) and for more than what is merely passing. The genius of the gospel is that it recognises all our hungers - and 'puts order' on them.

This 'putting order' on our hungers reminds me of Saint Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, whose feast day (and 450th anniversary of death) occurs on the Monday of this week (July 31). Ignatius, though well off, spent his early life hungering, seeking to satisfy his myriad appetites with countless pleasures and gains. Eventually, through circumstances both painful and providential, he hit 'bedrock' and discovered the desire that lay beneath all his other desires and hungers. He discovered God, the eternal, loving, inexhaustible reservoir of truly holy Love. It shocked him, turned him upside down, changed his direction completely; but it did not stop him being a creature of desires. Rather it placed his desires 'in the right order', enabling him to long for God in all things and for all things in God. Later he would ask others: "what do you desire?" and he never feared their answers because he knew the Desire that lay beneath all the other ones. And he was certain that, if people rowed out into the deep and encountered what was calling them most profoundly, they would be fine, and their countless surface desires would be set in the 'right order' around the all-embracing Love of God calling and leading and saving them.

We are creatures of unlimited desires, finally fulfillable only by the One who is unlimited, eternal. The psalmist in Sunday's liturgy says to Yahweh: "The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due time. You open your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing" (Ps 145: 15-16). There's that desire thing again! It is what makes us open, generous, large-hearted: bakers of lemon squares on many levels. But it is two-sided. We can become victims of our endless desires, our constant hungers, unless we know Who it is who stands at the heart of them, conferring on them a right and peaceful order as the true Bread of Life itself. The advertisers and the marketers are attuned to the desire factor too and spend a fortune promising us the fulfilment of our every hunger. Almost every day I get catalogs and offers that are quite tempting in their allure. They home in on my surface-hungers very well and are clever at exploiting the fact that I, that we, are creatures of desire. But they lack the depth of the gospel, which has discerned the Bread of Life beneath the breads of everyday. They lack, also, the insight of Saint Ignatius who, when he fell in love with God, experienced a re-ordering of the frenzied desires that were tearing him apart because he had found the One whom he could love above all things - and then all the other things fell into place.

There is wisdom for the everyday in what we have been discussing. In our part of the world we are deluged with things to satisfy us; but we truly know dissatisfaction. This dissatisfaction would lessen - lessen a great deal - if we knew our heart's true desire and lived, like Ignatius, in the constant presence of God. Then we would have eyes to see what to do with the things, offers, possibilities that come our way. We would be rooted in a nourishing love that would enable us to know what to choose and what to put aside; what to receive and what to give; what to change and what to preserve. Based firmly on such a love, we would grow better, too, at being images of the God who is our own nourisher and sustainer. And we would nourish others, because - as I learned from those lemon-slice girls long ago and, more recently, from many generous people while I was travelling in Asia - people love to feed people; and there is something godly in that.