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January 2004: Hunger |
St. Augustine says about us: "Our home is with God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in God".
| Week 1: Divine And Human
Hunger A Hunger Never Completely Satisfied - There is a great danger for us, in our celebration of the Eucharist, that we forget why it is that we do what we do. What is the purpose of the Eucharist? What is the gift it offers us? And what are the demands that it makes on our life? In the early days of the Church, many Christians were killed for their practice of their faith. Yet, believing they could not live without the Eucharist, they continued to gather for that meal in remembrance of Jesus. What is it that kept them coming even though they could be killed for their practice of their faith? What is it that continues to draw people 2000 years later? It is clear to us, there is a deep hunger in the human heart, a hunger that is never completely filled. We experience it differently, sometimes knowing it as emptiness, or a yearning for intimacy, a thirst for the truth. The desire to have someone or something we can believe in. I believe that it is so important that we embrace that hunger. To truly experience the gift of Eucharist, we must know that we are hungry. Human Hunger Meets Divine Hunger - Whenever we feel our human emptiness, it is so important that we simply mean it. And then, just sit with it a little bit. I feel empty - however it manifests itself! too often we try to distract ourselves from our pain, or we try to fill it with things that won't satisfy. Somehow we rather think we should avoid human emptiness or that we can fill it with success, fun, more relationship or power. No, there is nothing that can completely take our emptiness away. There's an emptiness in our heart because that is how God made us. We must embrace our incompleteness because that can turn us to God. The truth is, no matter how we experience it because at that moment, that emptiness is ultimately our hunger for God. At the same time, it is clear to us, that there is in God a hunger for us. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in the first chapter says, "Even if we reject God, God will continue to pursue us". In our images of God, I think we sometimes forget that that's the truth of God that God yearns for us. That God has a passion for us. The scriptures are filled with stories of that. Luke describes a God as a woman seeking for a lost coin, or a shepherd searching for a lost sheep. That is God searching for us. Though we might sometimes find it hard to believe, it is the truth. God has a hunger for us. God Feeds Our Deepest Hunger - Our coming together for Eucharist therefore, is not all our initiative. God who hungers for us gathers us. God is always going about gathering people. In the celebration of the Eucharist, God's hunger to be with us meets our hunger for God. Jesus takes us to God. God to us, in the power of the Spirit - in bread, in wine, in our gathering, in silence, song and in so many ways at Eucharist. God feeds our deepest hunger. Our Amen is our deep YES to God. To the God who longs for us and for whom we long. though we will never know the fullness of our union with God here, if we embrace our hunger, letting ourselves know and feel it, Eucharist becomes for us a taste of God. Eucharist for God is a taste of us. Week 2: God's Dream God's dream is a key statement on the Eucharist. It describes the Eucharist ("the sacrifice of Calvary") as GOD IN ACTION REALISING HIS DREAM FOR HIS WORLD. What is this dream? God described it for us when He said: "Let us make man to our own image" (Gen 1:26) And what is God's image? That will depend on one's idea of God. However, He who knew Him who came from within Him, the Son of God, Jesus, has revealed Him to us as a community of Persons: Father, Son and Spirit, each in communion with the other, each relating with and related to the other. The life of God is Communion: we call it Love (Jn 14 -17). God longs to be one with us. Let us make man to our own image: Man: Not one man, but a multitude, men and women, increasing and multiplying so as to be surrounded with persons to relate to and to commune with, and, in communing and relating to externalise and make visible the innermost life of God: Father, Son and Spirit, one God in many persons. The sacred writer alludes to this dream of God when he shows God disappointed at not being able "to walk with man" because man would not walk with Him (Gen 3:8-11). Implicitly, he is revealing the heart of God: God longs to be one with man. He reveals too, the heart of man wanting to be one with God and with everyone and with everything. He condenses into one sentence this dream in God's mind and heart when he says of God, "He breathed into them" (Gen 2:7). To breath into is to bring out what is in - one's inner being, to duplicate to externalise one's self to create. Are we not said to be creative when we give a concrete, external form to what is in us? Like God, poets, artists, composers, sculptors, breath themselves into their works; these works image forth, make visible, the glorious content of their being. Mankind is made to image the Life of God. God comes alive in human communion. God's inner life is Communion. He lives to relate, to love. When we love and relate and are in communion, individual with individual, group with group, nation with nation, God is alive and present in and among us. To see people united, is to see God; to be in communion with man is to be in communion with God. People united, are God's temple. God has built it for Himself; stone churches are houses men have built for God; He honours them, o doubt, by staying in them, but His pleasure is to live in and among people. They are His Temple, the ambience of His presence, the divine milieu. Many other insights into God and into our relationship with God, our entire RELIGION, with all its practices and doctrines, commands and prohibitions, is more easily understood and more joyfully lived when we see ourselves, individually and collectively, as God's image. There is much to be reflected on in this "Image idea" of God; much also to be said and discussed. We have set out on this journey in order to understand the Mass, to discover what there is in it which makes it tremendous. From what we have shared so far, what emerges is that the Mass is tremendous because it is GOD IN ACTION REALISING HIS DREAM FOR MAN, HIS HUMAN FAMILY: "THAT THEY MAY BE ONE LIKE US" (Jn 17:11) Week 3: God's Dream Shattered Disunity shatters God's Dream. Humankind is not one. God's dream has been shattered. We are broken. There is no one but hates himself, "Others are better; I, no good." This is the unspoken verdict of many a human against himself with the consequent urge within not to want to be one's self but to be like what others are, with God's idea of one's self rejected and along with it God Himself. (The Disowned Self by Nathaniel Brandon, Bantam Books.) There is none but feels himself an alien, in conflict over anything and everything, distrustful, fear-filled; each seeking protection behind barricades - physical, social ethnic, - groups poised against groups, nations against nations. Humankind is at war, seeking to destroy in order to be safe. The love that issued from God into man, when man was at one with God, brimming over in loving service and respect towards his fellowmen, this love has gone out of Man. It has turned into a drive towards oneself; into an inverted love seeking everything and everyone for himself/herself. God's world has become a war field and God's human family, a broken family; each member of it driven towards self and against others, all fighting for power, killing to survive, robbing, polluting, wasting, destroying the earth and its resources according as it helps or hinders one's profit, unmindful of the loss to others. This is an universal experience. This is everyone's pain. Humanity's alienation from God. St. Paul gives a fearful description of man without God. "I do not understand what I do, he says, "for I don't do what I would want to do, I do the evil that I do not want to do... What an unhappy man I am". There is no one who is righteous, no one who is wise, all have turned away from God, they have all gone wrong... their words are full of deadly deceit; wicked lies roll from their lips... they are quick to hurt and kill... Since what I do is what I don't want to do... I am not really the one that does it; it is the SIN that lives in me... a different power has taken over in me. God with His love has taken possession of me - of all." (cf. ROM c3, c7) God pursues alienated humanity. When it happened and how no one knows. But every single person, in all ages and in every age has experienced and continues to experience the tragic effect of it. Of what? Of man telling God "Leave us alone". How man said this to God: By word? By action? By attitude? Individually? By corporate collusion? All this is a matter for separate discussion. However it was that man said it, it was clear to God that man did not want Him. The union with God was broken. God did not leave man, but man closed himself on God - shut Him out - so that God could not enter. We hear God saying to man - with divine pathos - "Behold I stand at the door and knock. If any one opens to me, I will come into his house and eat with him and he will eat with me". (Rev. 3:20) The sad implication is that man is closed to God. And so God's dream of Man being one with Him, in communion with Him and with the human family, has been shattered. God dared to save humanity. Man is alienated from God, from others from himself and has become an empty shrine. God breathed into him His life and His capacity to love has gone out of him, at Man's own demanding Man's own deprivation. Man found himself naked without God, without love, with only self love, making of him a grabber, a killer; and of his world, inferno of hate and destruction. "Save, save us!" Man cried, and cried again. Who was there to hear? Man had driven away from himself and his world. Who then could save? Who would dare save? ONLY GOD AND THAT, GOD DID. Week 4: God's Dream Realised. Humanity To Be One In Love God, like the Father He is, contemplated with compassion the broken condition of His children, some killing, others being killed; some inflicting pain, others suffering pain; some withdrawing to escape defeat, others assaulting to forestall attack, all at war, none at peace. Uncompelled by anything or anyone save by the Love in His heart, He freely, on His own, took the irrevocable decision to offer His friendship to humankind, to each and everyone, so that they might be what He had intended they should be; His image, one in love, one with one another, one with Him. He comes in human form so that they will see Him loving them and recognise His love. "And God became man and dwelt among men" - in the person of Jesus, His Son. God Becomes Love In Jesus How God became Man has been described in the Gospels. In the pages of the Gospel we see, what eye-witnesses saw, God-in-Jesus loving men, offering them His friendship, drawing them to Him by His love. To all who received Him, He gave the power to become children of God, (Jn 1:12) to have and to carry in them, as children possess and carry in them, the life of their father. In every action of Jesus, it is God we see loving man and offering to him reconciliation with Him. He loves in various ways - now healing, now teaching, now forgiving, now correcting. in the way each one needs to be loved. His love reaches its peak at the Last Supper when He projects His love into edible form. "Take and eat this bread become me." Love has, in that consecrated bread, become edible. On Calvary He offers His love in an environment of hate. He remains among His children loving them even while they are striking Him with ruthless passion. He never takes back His preferred love. In His Resurrection, He is with His children and among them, seeks them out as one who has never stopped loving them even though they, in fear, fled from Him. In the command "Do this in memory of me", He puts His love into food and serves it in a ritual meal (called variously "Mass", "Eucharist", "Breaking Bread", etc.). In the Mass, we take and eat God's life to make God's world beautiful with God's love become flesh in our flesh through our eating it. Through Communion with man, God puts His love back into the world, redeems it from hate, restores it to communion with Him, with all men. He realizes His dream: "that they be one like us" (Jn 17:22). Jesus's Love Becomes Alive In The Eucharist When at the Last Supper Jesus told His disciples: "Do this in memory of ME", he initiated the process of on-going redemption. This process is the Mass, the Eucharist. This world "Eucharist" (thanksgiving, acknowledgement) is more in use since Vatican II. It would appear to refer to more to the relationship of Jesus - the whole Christ, Head and Body - to the Father: a relationship of love, praise, worship, obedience; "Mass", derived from Mission, seems to point, to the relationship of Jesus - the whole Christ, Head and Body - both to the Father and to the world: a relationship of loving service. The term MASS is preferred to Eucharist because of the dynamism of loving service which the members of Christ's Body take to the world from the Mission they receive from the Father in the concluding rite of the Mass. Through it, God's dynamic love breaks into and permeates the entire world - on the ritual altar through the symbols of life (the rites of the Mass); on the altar of the world, through the events of life. How the events of life come to be symbolised in the Rites of the Mass, how what is symbolised in the Rites of the Mass is actualised in the events of life will be taken up for reflection in the concluding session: "The Mass on the Altar of the World". |