True Food

This is the only way we ever have life within us. Jesus is very clear and blunt about it. His flesh is true food, and his blood is true drink. Any other diet leaves us empty and hollow, hungry and bereft of life. “Truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you have no life in you.” Those are ominous words, words that haunt and challenge us to consider whether there is life within us, real life.

Most of us spend a fair amount of time, energy, and prayer trying to create and possess the life we want. In spite of our best efforts, we live less than fully alive. Sometimes the outside and inside of who we are don’t match up. We ask ourselves, “What am I doing with my life?” We wonder if this is all there will ever be. Is this as good as it gets? As the years and decades roll by, we may find ourselves lamenting over what has become of us and our life. Nothing seems to satisfy. Many are tempted to despair at what is and what they think will be. Despite community, family, and friends, it is possible for any of us to find no place in which we really belong. Life is elusive; we may even sometimes feel that we are dying from the inside out.

But in those unexpected, inexplicable, graced moments when we truly believe in Jesus as a person and eat, ingest, and take him into our lives, we live differently. We see ourselves and one another as created in the image and likeness of God and belonging to one another, rather than as obstacles or issues to be overcome. We trust the silence of prayer rather than the words of argument or manipulation. We choose love and forgiveness rather than anger and retribution. We relate with intimacy and vulnerability rather than with superficiality and defensiveness. We listen for God’s voice rather than our own. This is a great grace: to actually seek life rather than death.

And so, Jesus tells us that he is our life and the means to the life for which we most deeply hunger. To live is not simply a matter of working for the life we want. Amazingly, he calls us to eat the life we want. The wonder that should “stop us in our tracks” is that wherever human hunger and the flesh and blood of Christ meet, there is life!

For, it is in the eating and drinking of Christ’s Body and Blood that he lives in us and we in him. We consume his life that he might consume and change ours. We eat and digest his life, his love, his mercy and forgiveness, his way of being and seeing, his compassion, his presence - and most crucially, his relationship with the Father. Yes, he seriously invites us to eat and drink our way to life! The table of God is set, and there is always a place waiting for each one of us. Let us now become what we receive.

The Savior, El Greco (and workshop), 1608-1614, oil on canvas, 72 cm x 55 cm, The Prado, Madrid. Meditation by Father Damian.