During our celebration, Fr. Edward shared a few memories of his vows and his ordination to the priesthood. Even though I’ve heard some of these stories many times, they are very important to share, especially with the new men in the community. These stories always include and presuppose, in some sense, God’s actions. God acts in concrete circumstances, and His providence has shaped us into a particular community with a unique expression of monastic life. This is true for every monastery. It is only through the memory of God’s actions in the past that each monastery understands His unique mission for us today.

This was perhaps the most helpful teaching I received from my Novice Master, when I was a young novice. Youth is a time for ideals, for great efforts in service of noble goals. This is as it should be, and it is part of what makes the young so attractive. And so, at that tender age, I was eager for ascetical practices of all kinds, ready for every kind of self-denial—so long as I was still in control. I was eager to take up several Crosses of my own choosing.

Eventually, a great purification began to take place in me through sufferings that were not of my choosing. In fact, these were often baffling, contrary to my beliefs about what religious life ought to be like. It helped me to remember that this was the Cross God chose for me, the one I needed. It was precisely in those areas in which I was spiritually blind that I needed the painful actions of grace to open the eyes of my heart. That meant accepting all manner of contrary experiences as a participation in the saving Cross of Christ, the Cross I had not (intentionally) asked for.

In a similar way, repentance is never easy, but at least when we can name our own faults, we can rebrand repentance as self-help. We can seek out the advice that appeals to our tastes and promises improvement according to our own self-assessment.

On the other hand, when someone else points out our faults, however accurately, it is quite a bit more painful. They might even call our attention to faults that we didn’t know we had.

Sometimes a hidden fault of ours is uncovered in the rough and tumble of everyday life, revealed through circumstances not entirely in our control. In monastic life, we often find that progress against one sin uncovers a completely different sinful habit that we weren’t aware of. For example, pushing back against gluttony by fasting often makes us irritable. What this reveals is that I have the sin of anger within. But I’ve been avoiding it by distracting myself with delights of the palate. Here, a sinful disposition is revealed to me. But this time, instead of a person pointing it out to me, the revelation comes through the hard truth of reality.

There is a conundrum in all of this. If we want to be holy, we must address our hidden sins. Yet these are the ones we most readily resist confronting. This raises a question: is there a way to dispose ourselves so that when unexpected criticism arrives, we can receive it humbly, with a willing heart? Can we take up this unasked-for Cross?

To answer this, I offer another anecdote. A couple of years before entering the Monastery, I was having dinner with a very dear friend. I can no longer remember the context of her criticism, but I remember the substance of it well. In the course of our conversation, she suggested that I could do a better job of listening to what other people were saying and asking them questions. I remember the sting of hearing this, but I also went home resolved to capitalize on this tough advice.

What made me able to receive this rebuke profitably (I hope!) was the mutual love shared between two friends. My esteem for my friend short-circuited the typical reaction of defensiveness. Love turned the shame of acknowledging a fault into motivation for change. The effect is the one that Jack Nicholson’s character discovers in the movie “As Good As It Gets.” He says to Helen Hunt’s character, the only person in the movie who has shown him kindness, “You make me want to be a better man.” Her kindness opened his heart and made him ready to welcome the hard truth that he needed to change his life. Love makes all things possible.

So a strategy for living in the truth with greater fidelity is to love more. Whether the hard truth is delivered by a comment or by the unbending fiber of reality, love provides an opening to our hearts. “Where there is not love, put love — and you will find love [Saint John of the Cross].” When we love our neighbor, we are better disposed to any and all truths about ourselves that he or she may bring to light.

This also works in our encounter with the world around us. When we love, in a proper way, the creatures that God gave us, we can learn to trust them as His messengers. God’s message always emanates from His love. Reality is not an obstacle—even when it brings suffering—but was fashioned by God for our benefit. For “all things work for the good of those who love Him [Romans 8: 28],” even the Cross that we have been avoiding.

The election of Pope Leo XIV. The website “Streamcharts.com” reported that nearly six million people watched the announcement of his election online. Internet viewers logged over sixteen million hours watching the conclave as a whole, making it one of the biggest news items of the year. Anyone who thinks that the Catholic Church and the papacy are irrelevant in the modern world are clearly out of step.

Yet we also know that the modern world harbors a distinct hostility toward the Catholic Church and the pope. When I say “the modern world”, I mean something like the conglomeration of persons whose financial interests and ideologies coincide with a near-monopoly on communications, the banking industry and much of the political scene worldwide. It doesn’t matter, for the purposes of this homily, whether these person form a coordinated Deep State conspiracy or if the actions and ideologies of this overlordship was destined to arise when we crossed a certain threshold of technology. What matters is that one of the most important institutions, if not the most important institutions standing athwart their ambitions, is the Catholic Church.

Since, as I mentioned, they tend to control many communications outlets and write many of the algorithms that drive the internet, we know of their hostility toward the Church by the ways in which they try to induce Catholics toward suspicion of the papacy and the bishops, toward polarization and a general sense of doom. Anyone who has studied social media can tell you that few things drive mouse clicks more than anxiety and outrage. We even have a name for this compulsive behavior: “Doom scrolling.” But what it means is that every time we follow one more suggested article or video, we are not only potential undermining our faith in Christ’s Mystical Body, but we are also funneling money to the very people who benefit from the weakness in the Catholic Church.

What is it about the Church that the overlord class hates? There are many things. The Church opposes the pet ideologies of the modern world, for starters. But so does Islam. In some ways, Islam is even more medieval than the Catholic Church. So what separates us? I think the answer is obvious. The Catholic Church speaks in a unified way with authority, and she does so because she has one top vicar on earth, representing the authority of Christ, the One mediator between humanity and the One God. The Catholic Church has a pope.

One of the ways that the modern world tries to undermine the pope’s authority is through the language of political ideology. Every one of the pope’s actions is read through the materialistic lens of left versus right. So it behooves us this morning to revisit the nature of the papacy and the gift of authority in the Church, as exercised through the pope and the ordinary Magisterium, and to do so from a deep, theological point of view.

In today’s gospel, Jesus recognizes a special gift to Simon Peter from the Father. This gift is insight into the identity of Jesus. Not only is He the Messiah, the Christ. This is Peter’s confession in the gospels of Mark and Luke. But, peculiar to Matthew’s gospel, Peter adds that the Son of Man, Jesus, is also the Son of the Living God. Jesus tells us that Peter did not deduce this from any human reasoning. The insight is a gift from God the Father, the very Person Who sent the Son on His mission of reconciliation. And so Jesus confirms this gift and deepens its meaning by bestowing on Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Like the other Apostles, he is given genuine authority on earth—the authority of a steward, but still real authority. Since at least the time of Saints Clement and Ignatius of Antioch—in other words, since the generation after the Apostles—the Church has understood that Peter, the Rock upon which the Church is founded, has a special ministry of unity. This ministry has passed down through 2000 years to Pope Leo XIV, the 264^th successor of Peter.

The Church built upon the rock of Peter’s confession is a type of a sacrament of salvation for the whole world. By nature, the Church is both human and divine. When people speak of the Church today, we often mean either the men and women who happen to be living upon earth and who belong to the Catholic Church, or, in some cases, and even more incorrectly, the bishops and priests. In other words, we reduce it to something merely human, forgetting the divine nature of the Church. This is what modernists would like us to do. They might not be fully conscious of this desire; since they don’t acknowledge a divine nature to the Church, they may simply understand the Church as just any other human institution. But we should be very wary not to make this mistake.

Traditionally, the Church’s membership has been divided into three parts: the Church militant, expectant, and triumphant. The Church militant is the part that we can see on earth at the moment, the part that we often confuse with being the Church as a whole. But it is not nearly the entire Church. There is also the Church expectant, the souls that have passed on to the next world, but are not yet fully purified, and are working their way through Purgatory, with the great help of our prayers. Finally, we have the Church triumphant, those souls that already enjoy something of the vision of God. But they are ontologically connected to each of us in the Body of Christ. By virtue of our baptisms, we share the same divine life with them. They are close to us. They are our bulwark against every temptation against fidelity. For they know the Truth and are living in it. The pope is not simply a man, from this perspective. In some way, he speaks in communion with all of the popes who went before, who all exercise the keys as Saint Peter in the current context. We can have confidence that the Holy Spirit will protect us from the banes of apostasy and heresy precisely because we are in union with the entire Church, the communion of saints.

I end with a quick note on the gates of hell. Literally, these are the gates of Hades. We hear about these very gates in the works of Homer. Whereas Peter has the keys of God’s kingdom, and determines who goes in and out, the gates of Hades have been definitely breached by Jesus when He descended there after His crucifixion. No one is manning those gates anymore.

We often misconstrue this imagery, seeing the Church as under attack by these gates, and hearing our Lord’s assurance that Hades or hell cannot invade the Church. There is truth to this, but I fear that this interpretation puts us on the defensive, which is not the import of the image. Rather, with the power of the grace flowing through the Church’s sacraments, we have the mission of rescuing all who have been taken captive by the power of death and setting them free. This begins with each of us descending, with Christ, into those areas within ourselves where hell’s power still lurks: those places where we have been hurt, where we harbor resentment or hopelessness, loneliness, fear and anxiety. The power of the keys unlocks everything within us that is captive and sets it free by the power of Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God. To Him be power and glory forever. Amen.

Monks are meant to be companions of Christ, Who was poor and homeless. I’ve always felt it a bit unbecoming for monks to aim for physical comfort in the monastery. Saint Benedict warns monks not to complain about whether the material for their habits is too coarse (though he does insist that the abbot should make sure that they fit right!).  In general, he wants them to accept what is given by the tradition through the community. A bit of discomfort offers me a small opportunity to make a sacrifice for Christ and His Church, and to experience a bit of alignment with those who live in real poverty.

Most places in the monastery are not air-conditioned for the same reason. There’s a general preference in the community for simply accepting the hot weather as part of what nature offers. It makes our food grow, the way God designed. In Chicago, it will be cold soon enough! And we will wear the same habit in December.

In manuals of spiritual theology in recent centuries, “contemplation” took on a technical meaning. Contemplative prayer is that prayer which, strictly speaking, is the product of God’s action on the soul, and is not at all in our power. Contemplation is very nearly the prayer of union with God Himself, or the prayer of union is understood as the highest form of contemplative prayer. Needless to say, we are not capable of uniting ourselves to God; only God can bring about this union. Our task in seeking this union with God is to dispose ourselves by asceticism, by the practice of the lower forms of prayer, by reverent reception of the sacraments, and by meditation on the mysteries of the faith. Finally, there is growth in the theological virtues, especially faith and love, which dispose us to let go of the controls, as it were, and place ourselves in God’s hands, confident of His love.

This is more difficult than it might sound. We can place ourselves lovingly in God’s hands at any time, but we are often still clinging to various attachments. The final movement toward God requires us to let go of these attachments. An attachment works both ways: we are attached to the lower good, but it is attached to our souls. The extrication of our souls from this attachment will therefore often feel like we are losing a part of ourselves. This is why we need the motivation that faith and love bring, to soldier through this experience of dying to ourselves, which is, in fact, a freeing of our truest self from anything less than God. And the goal is proximate preparation for union with God: that is, for contemplative prayer, the culmination of our seeking after God as monks.

This is one meaning of contemplative prayer. The other meaning is both more colloquial and more traditional. It is a broader concept, though it includes the technical meaning I’ve just related. This definition of contemplative prayer, in general, owes more to human action than the technical version, though, along with all prayer, it presupposes the action of the Holy Spirit in our souls. When we speak about lectio divina as consisting of lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio, we are in the right neighborhood. In reading, we grasp the literal sense of God’s Word, and perhaps get a glimpse of the deeper spiritual sense. In meditation, we explore the implications of the Word that we are trying to grasp. We notice connections that allow the Word to permeate our hearts and our awareness, our default understanding of reality. In prayer, oratio, we take this Word and the desire it has stirred up in us, and return something of our own hopes and needs to God. And then in contemplation, we simply allow ourselves to be with the God Who has been working in our souls throughout this process.

In this popular sense of contemplation, we can more frequently have experiences that foreshadow the purest prayer of contemplation. An insight about God’s love may strike us as so beautiful that tears come to our eyes. We have nothing to say to God, other than in inward movement of gratitude and perhaps compunction, as we simultaneously become aware of our own sluggishness or lukewarmness. Indeed, I would categorize compunction as very near to contemplation and almost a prerequisite.

Such contemplation can occur in many different ways. In recent years, I have experienced it listening to music. The beauty of certain pieces has struck me inwardly in a new way. One way I could characterize the difference is that when I was younger, the experience of beauty in music would move me, but I was perhaps more interested in being moved by it, perhaps felt a bit special for being “in the know”. The experience today is the utter shock that fallible human beings can produce sounds that reveal true beauty, that open a door to the abundance of beauty that pours forth from the love of God. If humans are capable of listening to their musical materials and attuning themselves so as to channel such beauty, what is God like, Who underwrites this entire experience? The experience is less about me and more about the mystery of the God Whom I am aiming to discover.

Our life is arranged so as to promote the prayer of contemplation. I mean that in several ways. Every Christian is called to contemplative prayer, but few are called to craft an entire existence around it. When our founders were looking for assistance in starting the monastery and in entering into the Benedictine world, they were seeking a strictly contemplative way of life. This is how we found our way into collaboration with Christ in the Desert. In spite of the many obvious differences in our locations and even certain emphases within the life, in both cases, we are communities that do not have an apostolate, nor have we a real industry, though that is new for us.

The difficulty involved in an apostolate is not that it isn’t, ultimately, ordered to contemplative prayer. It is rather that apostolates involve the monk in considerations that are easily influenced by the world. If one runs a school, there are accreditation boards to satisfy, there is the need to train monks to teach, and most likely the need to interview and hire teachers and staff and to oversee payroll and job reviews. Industries have similar constraints. When entered into in the right spirit, these certainly can be sanctifying. And I have a great deal of respect for monks who are able to balance the demands of prayer and the demands of an apostolate, as you know.

The way our life is organized, then, is not simply that we have more free time to prayer. That we do, and hopefully we take advantage of it. But we are also free to follow where prayer leads, without having to look over our shoulder and answer to the requirements of associations that do not have prayer as their goal.

I appreciate very much Dom DeLatte’s observation about certain monks making a sacrifice of themselves for the sake of the community. As I was thinking my way through this conference, the example that came most readily to mind is the work that I do as a fundraiser. When a benefactor makes a large gift, this is a great blessing, but it can also come with obligations. A benefactor may have expectations that we will make decisions about the liturgy, for example, that will prompt him or her to remain a benefactor. We lost some benefactors when we turned out altar around. But the decision to face East was made, I believe, from a desire to live the contemplative life more authentically, especially in our circumstances in a large city. Our own discernment suggested that there was a need for a greater sense of transcendence. In a modern city, which is often hostile to any powers beyond itself, we must have the spiritual freedom to take the steps that will best promote the search for God.

This freedom is perhaps the best place to conclude. God wishes for us to be truly free to seek Him. This freedom is both an interior freedom from vices and imperfections and an exterior freedom from the compulsions of life in an overly-connected world—from any type of coercion in seeking to be perfect disciples of Jesus Christ.

What was the source of her resolution? Surely, the Church tells us, it was because of her great love and devotion to Jesus. Her life at this point was completely focused on Him. As Jesus had purified her of seven demons, her heart was further purified by her love and devotion. Blessed are the pure of heart! For they shall see God. This Beatitude summarizes the monastic life. After the pattern of Mary Magdalene, the monk seeks purification by repentance, and by constant prayer and devotion to God. Even when God seems distant, the monk perseveres. His hope is to encounter the risen Christ, and then, after the pattern of Mary Magdalene, to announce to the world, “He is truly risen!” with the conviction of one who has truly seen Him.

If only removing a house were as easy as picking it up and dropping it somewhere else. In fact, demolition, as you can imagine, is an untidy business. Making the conversion to a garden took many years, as we continually, gradually removed all the broken concrete, glass, pieces of metal and the like. Today, we have a pretty well-functioning garden with decent soil and generally good yields, especially in chard, green beans, and berries.

The lesson here is that soil can be improved, which is good news for us as Christians.

That’s because Jesus today tells us that our hearts are like soil, some of it rich, some of it poor. What grows in our hearts is not literally weeds and wheat, but their spiritual counterparts, the Word of God and the habits of mind that are contrary to the flowering of God’s Word. Our Lord gives us several helpful images for understanding the work that we need to do if God’s Word is to take root in our hearts and bear abundant fruit.

The first obstacle to the Word taking root is a lack of understanding. This is likened to seed that falls on a footpath, where lots of people trample upon it. It’s important to connect this image with Jesus’s explanation. He says that the seed that falls on the path is akin to the Word falling upon a heart that fails to understand it, so the Word fails to take root.

So understanding is an important thing to seek. It’s not enough to hear the Word. Sometimes we need to take the time to puzzle over it, even to listen to homilies about it.

What Jesus implies here, however, is that the lack of understanding does not come from a lack of intellectual capacity. The point of the footpath is that the seed doesn’t ever settle into the soil because it’s being trampled upon by many people walking by. Surely this must be related to distraction in our minds and hearts, a failure to distinguish between what is truly important and what simply attracts our attention at the moment.

And we have a lot to distract us. We have access to more information than any previous generation. More than that, by means of tools like the internet, it is information clamoring for our attention. We now even have terms like “The Attention Economy” or “Attention Capitalism.” In a paper last year, Georgetown law professor Rai Hasen Massoud warned that, “The attention economy erodes core democratic values, undermining the cognitive autonomy, reflective reasoning, and informed citizenship necessary for healthy democratic societies.”

I’m less interested in the connection with democracy, and more concerned about the idea that all of these entities trying to capture our attention erode reflective reasoning, which seems to be the good soil that we are trying to cultivate. We can’t allow ourselves to fall into a situation where God’s Word is just one more voice clamoring for our attention. We need to take time deliberately, as you are at this moment, to sit with God’s Word and assimilate ourselves to it.

But more of that when we get to the good soil. We still have two examples of poor soil to examine. The second example is the seed that falls on rocky ground. This is the person who does understand the Word, at least in a superficial way. The roots don’t go very deep. Gardeners will know that the weeds that have little root are a cinch to pull up, whereas the ones that have deep roots can be almost impossible to eradicate. God’s Word will drive roots deeper and deeper into our hearts to the extent that we shape our actions in conformity with it.

We will need to go beyond having a grasp of the principles of revelation. The goal is consciously to take on God’s values and desire what He desires, as Jesus always did. Then God’s Word will be very difficult to uproot in us.

This also does require regular work. Routine can be a potential enemy here: we have to find ways each day to choose what God wants because God wants it, and not simply because it is painless or convenient for us at the moment.

Now on to the third example, the seed sown among thorns. Our Lord again has a specific idea in mind: that the thorns, the problematic thoughts growing up alongside the Word of God, are thoughts about worldly anxiety and the lure of riches. In the limited time we have, let’s focus on worldly anxiety. This is the temptation that Jesus teaches us to combat by saying “Give us this day our daily bread,” in the Lord’s Prayer.

God has given us all work to do to provide for ourselves and others, but He ultimately is the one who provides for us, who makes the work fruitful. Anxiety about procuring what we need can lead us to a place, where, rather than pray and listen to God’s Word, we need to get just one more thing done. I’ll pray and worry about my interior when I get everything in order, when I have all of my work done, and that work is determined not by God’s gracious generosity, but by my fear of failing to provide for myself. Work is good, but it is intended to be subordinate, in some way, to our relationship with God, who can easily provide what we need, and knows better than we do what we truly do need.

And so we arrive at the good soil. Let us notice that a thirtyfold yield in the ancient world was considered true abundance. And though a hundredfold yield was not impossible, it was spectacular. This is the kind of good that Jesus promises to those who truly take the time to interiorize His message, the message of love, forgiveness, and eternal life that Jesus came to earth to bring.

So let’s take a little extra time this week and see whether we can’t make some improvement in the soil of our hearts.

Clearly, John is an important man in the Church’s understanding of salvation history, though I think that we often overlook him. Yet Jesus Himself testified that, of those born of woman, no one was greater than John the Baptist.

So what is it about this man that is so important, and what does his feast day mean to us?

To understand this, we need to understand what is important about the prophets, for John was a prophet, indeed the greatest and last of the prophets. In popular understanding, a prophet predicts the future. This isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s a partial understanding.

The prophets do point to the future, but more specifically, to a future intervention by God—which is to say, toward God’s judgment. In the icons above the altar, we see Christ returning as king and judge, and see that John is pointing to Him. And this awareness of a coming judgment has immediate implications for the present.

When we call to mind that God will judge us—our culture, the rich and the poor, the great and small—our consciences are engaged. We have to ask ourselves: what does God make of my life? Am I prepared to receive God, or are there choices I’m making, duties I’m avoiding, that will make me want to avoid God? Is my culture one that celebrates God or rejects Him, and to what extent am I compromised by that culture?

We see, early in the gospels, John the Baptist pricking consciences. People come to him and ask, “What do I need to do to be prepared to welcome God?” In John’s gospel, we see that Saint Andrew, the brother of Saint Peter, was first a disciple of John the Baptist. When the Son of God appeared, John pointed to Him and said, “Behold the Lamb of God,” and Andrew left John to follow Jesus. Throughout the book of Acts, we see the apostles going out from Jerusalem and frequently encountering groups of people who were disciples of John, who were waiting to receive the news of the gospel and the baptism of fire and the Holy Spirit.

One last point about John is that he embodies the Beatitudes. He was poor in spirit inasmuch as he always points away from himself toward Jesus, the Son of God. Again, in the fourth gospel, he says that Jesus must increase and he, John, must decrease. He hungered and thirsted for justice, and was persecuted to the point of death for the sake of righteousness.

John the Baptist was also meek. He came from a family of priests, and in his day, the priests were often politically very well-connected. But he left the privileges of the priesthood aside to go and live as a poor man in the desert, praying and watching for God. And by these renunciations, his heart became pure, and he was given the grace of seeing God. That is to say, John was the one who witnessed the Holy Spirit descend upon Jesus at His baptism.

So we see that the Church’s celebration of John’s greatness is no mistake.

That leaves the question of what it all means for us. By our baptisms, we are called to become prophetic people. Like John, our mission is to point away from ourselves toward Christ. By a holy life in imitation of John, we bear witness to the fact that God will come to judge, and by this witness, to call those around us to be prepared.

To do this effectively, we may need to find ways to separate ourselves from the perks and conveniences that our culture offers us, since these conveniences often entangle us that culture’s overall mindset, which is largely oblivious of God and the things of God.

By gathering here today, we have taken a good first step: setting aside time to celebrate the gift of God that we have in John’s example, and to prepare ourselves to see and receive the Son of God in the Holy Eucharist.

This doesn’t mean lying about others’ shortcomings. It means being honest about what it’s going to take to love that person in his or her reality, rather than loving what we wish he or she would be if only our superior insight would be heeded. In my experience, this is more readily done when we know how profoundly God loves us despite our own failings, remembering that we have not earned our friendship with God. While we were God’s enemies, His Son died for us.

This brings me to an important conclusion: the necessity of meditation on the life and actions of Jesus Christ. We will notice, for example, that He did not help everyone He found. He often asked what the person needed before He helped, even though He would have known what that person needed. He could be very patient with sinners but also quite forthright with those who assumed their own righteousness or spiritual competence. He acted with authority where it was called for and, as a human being, submitted even to unjust authority. He sought out our salvation rather than His own safety and, by His humility and obedience, rescued us from death. We should ask Him frequently to fill us with His Holy Spirit, that we may know the difference between true goodness and its counterfeit. To be Him be power and glory forever. Amen.

(Here is the Introduction to the whole series. Here are The First Precaution Against the World and The Second and Third Precautions Against the World. Here are Part 1 of the Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh and Part 2 of the Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh. Here are The First, Second and Third Precautions Against the Flesh. Here is The Introduction to Precautions Against the Devil. Here is The First Precaution Against the Devil and The Second Precaution Against the Devil.)

Ten years ago, a man named Andy George decided to try and find out by making a chicken sandwich completely from scratch. This meant growing, harvesting and grinding wheat, slaughtering a chicken, collecting salt water to extract salt, growing and pickling cucumbers, pressing sunflower seeds to extract the oil to make mayonnaise, and, last but not least, milking a cow and making his own butter and cheese.

This process took a mere six months and cost Mr. George $1500.00. Even worse than the cost: the sandwich didn’t taste all that good, at least according to his less-than-amused family members, who shared it.

And of course, there still was quite a bit of work that predated Andy George’s foray into deep agriculture. He didn’t have to domesticate a cow or a chicken. He used an electric fan to winnow his grain and an electric blender to grind it.

What all of this says is that we are very dependent on a whole series of systems in order to eat well. In fact, it’s a kind of miracle that we can go to the store at all and buy bread, deli chicken slices, pickles and onions, mayonnaise, and cheese.

Every meal is a faint glimpse of human unity and cooperation, and unconscious yearning of men and women for a common, shared life.

By calling it a miracle, I mean to imply that behind it all is a mysterious God Who has made the human race in such a way that we can cooperate and provide for one another, with systems too complex for anyone to fully understand…except God Himself.

Every meal is a sign of God’s bountiful love. But since everything happens so routinely, we can easily miss out on the wonder of it all.

It is a good practice to take a moment before we eat to ask God to bless all the persons whose work made the meal possible: from the farmers to the cheese and bread factories, meat processing plants or butchers, truck drivers and grocers.

The Israelites, after they left Egypt, suffered a bit from the myopia that often afflicts us when it comes to eating. Egypt was one of the most sophisticated civilizations of the day, and this meant that they could provide a variety of foods for delectable consumption. The Israelites forgot that much of this luxury was produced on the backs of foreign slaves. We all have selective memories sometimes.

The bigger problem was their inability to trust that if God were to lead them forth, that He would know how to provide nourishment for them. He did this through the miracle of the manna, the bread that came down from heaven.

And Moses tells us that this sign was about more than making regular provision for the people. It was a visible reminder that we depend on God for everything. We live by God’s Word.

This is the same Word through Whom all things were made, and the same Word that became flesh to walk among us. The Greek term for Word is logos, and like the Hebrew word for Word, davar, it has a much broader meaning than simply “word”. Our English term “logic” derives from logos, so that when we say that through the word of God all things were made, we are saying that God’s creatures participate in a king of logic, a rationale, a purpose.

This is why things like food distribution can work in spite of the complexities being beyond human comprehension. All things are governed by God’s Word.

God oversees and underwrites our lives. I’ve already said that the fact that we are able to eat each day because of the manifold activities given by God for men and women to carry out is a kind of miracle. This is the case for the sustenance of our natural life. What we celebrate today is the sustenance of our supernatural life. The life given to us in baptism is now nourished and grows by the gift of the Holy Eucharist.

No longer do we discern God’s Word through the insights we get into the complex interaction of God’s creatures. Rather the Word comes to us very directly, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity under the appearance of bread and wine. We discern His presence by faith rather than by deduction.

It has long interested me that the elements consecrated at the Eucharist are not “natural” in the sense of being directly taken from the fields or vineyards. They are the product of human artifice, just like our everyday food. Someone harvests the grain, someone grinds it, someone adds water and bakes it until it becomes bread, a symbol of the entire human cooperative project. And then God receives and blesses this offering. Our project is no longer human only, but all of our natural human projects have now been taken up into the divine project of salvation, the reclamation of humanity from sin and dispersion.

Many grains and many grapes go into the production of the bread and wine that become the Body and Blood of the Only-Begotten Son of God. He is bringing unity out of our diversity, showing what true unity and cooperation are, and not only unity with our fellow men and women, but unity and cooperation with God Himself.

And today, we will take this message out quite literally to the world, maybe just a small portion of our neighborhood, but the symbolism is that of a grand cosmic vision. As we process with Jesus, we are a sign of His desire to gather all peoples into one. We will be a silent invitation to everyone we meet to return to God, to discover in Jesus Christ the answer to our deepest longings for life and love.

The one who feeds on me, says the Lord, will have life because of me.