Friday, April 12, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
A moment of awe, and then back to breakfast
A crowd of several thousand followed Jesus because they saw how he was healing the sick.
How are we going to feed these folks? What are we going to do with all these people, who will be hungry soon?
There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish.
Here are three ingredients to make a good miracle: hungry people, a generous boy, and Jesus.
Jesus took the loaves and fish, gave thanks, and distributed them to the crowd, reclining on the hill.
Just enough food to feed them all. Five thousand men, and women, and children. More than enough, actually. Twelve baskets left over.
What happens now? The people will be hungry again in a few hours. Many of them want healing for their sicknesses and injuries. Jesus would like them to join him and come into the kingdom of heaven, but they are distracted by their appetites and lose their interest in heaven. When we’re hungry, we’re all alike.
In her Wednesday web post, Maria Popova took on this week’s Eclipse. She shared parts of Annie Dillard’s essay on the 1979 eclipse in The Abundance. Annie describes how her mind and body move quickly from spiritual to physical needs.
The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, even God. The mind’s sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy.
Old Esau saw the soup, and he gave away his birthright. I can imagine being in his shoes and doing the same thing.
The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel. And, incredibly, the simple spaniel can lure the brawling mind to its dish. It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg.
Ha! Easy for me to laugh. I just had lunch. But not even an hour ago, Jasper and I were starving. Our stomachs were growling growling growling. We would gladly pay on Tuesday for a hamburger today.
While the mind reels in deep space, while the mind grieves or fears or exults, the workaday senses — in ignorance or idiocy, like so many computer terminals printing our market prices while the world blows up — still transcribe their little data and transmit them to the warehouse in the skull. Later, under the tranquilizing influence of fried eggs, the mind can sort through all of these data.
And it is true, after eating lunch I can write this story. After eating lunch, Jasper can put together an airplane with parts he hasn’t seen in a year. After eating lunch, we can take a nap, and then … we’ll be hungry again!
But Annie is talking about something more than a thought, or even an epiphany. She and her husband Gary just saw a wonder of the universe, and in those three minutes of supernatural mid-day darkness she was transported into a mental place she’d never been. But then it was over. And the sunlight returned.
We were born and bored at a stroke… Enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
As Maria Popova wrote, “we calibrate to everything.” We get used to anything. “Joy and sorry are equally transient. Even transcendence is transient.”
She describes what we have always been. Jesus became human. His patience might have grown thin, but he understood that humans adapt to whatever they encounter. Even our stomachs shrink when they have to.
But this is not the kingdom of heaven, it isn’t even the Garden of Eden. Where Jesus invites us we will find the right balance between body and mind. In a fine turn of phrase, we’ll eat to live rather than live to eat. Because we are living within the always satisfying love of God.
(Acts 5, Psalm 27, Matthew 4, John 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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