WORLD DAY OF PRAYER FOR THE CARE OF CREATION

Pope Francis has instituted September 1st as the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation. We thus join the Orthodox Church in prayer for the future of nature and everything that inhabits it. In line with his last encyclical Laudato Si', on “Caring for Our Common Home,” the Pope invites us to join in conscious and active protection of the Mother Earth. With the encyclical he adheres to concerns from environmental groups, researchers and various groups for our environment.

This is then opportunity to review our thinking and our actions regarding the care for Creation. Are we aware of the practices and policies harmful to the environment? Can we commit to transforming this situation? Can we change prsonal habits in order to reduce consumption of water or energy, use public transport or car pool, not waste food, recycle ... Some of our habits can be changed to be more consistent with a more sustainable environment.

REFLECTION

THE BREAD OF LIFE DISCOURSE (II)

Martí Colom




“Is this not Jesus?”

 

Following the meditation published a few days ago, we continue reflecting on the Bread of Life Discourse, which extends itself for most of chapter six of John’s Gospel and we have heard at Sunday Mass during the past few weeks.

In verse 6:24 we are told that one of the resistances that Jesus found in those to whom he proclaimed the Good News was based on nothing less than in his closeness to them. He identified himself as bread from heaven and they responded murmuring, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother?”

They ask themselves, filled with wonder, how can he bring us something new if he belongs here, if we have always known him, if he is one of us?

Beyond these questions (which begin with the mention of Jesus’ name, as if his well-known identity was the strongest argument to discredit his message), there is a deeply rooted tendency not just of those who listened to him 2,000 years ago, but even of many today: the tendency to think that when God manifests Himself in our lives this will necessarily happen by way of extraordinary signs and spectacular events completely foreign to our daily experience. We refuse to accept that God may come to us tip-toeing, through ordinary people, through those we have closest. Yet, this is exactly what happens.

Perhaps many of us are more in debt than what we would like to admit to superstitious and magical ways of thinking, out of which we automatically associate God’s presence to the super-natural and everything that is grandiose, foreign and incomprehensible. It seems to us that our daily experience simply cannot be the scenario or the means for God’s action.

Jesus, of course, comes to challenge this mentality and to claim back the richness and sanctity of everything ordinary, and to suggest that his own closeness to those he lived with (in short, his humanity) it was not, neither then nor now, an obstacle for him to be living bread for all.

If we try to be his followers we must understand that each and every one of us is also called to be bread of life for others: from our simplicity, from our rootedness to our own cultures, from our personalities more or less integrated, even from our many limitations, from our fears and hopes.

A careful reading of this passage, finally, will help us to discover God’s footprint in places where we perhaps were not looking: in the father and the grandfather that give me advice, in the children who question my ideas, in the wife whom I love, in the sick person that I visit, in the friend to whom I open my own heart, in the neighbor that helps me, in the coworker I see every day, in the brother with whom I pray together and in the poor person who I perhaps tend to ignore instead of finding, in him as well, my bread of eternal life.

 

 

 

REFLECTION


THE BREAD OF LIFE DISCOURSE (I)

Martí Colom

 

 

Food that endures forever

In the Sunday Masses of these last few weeks we have heard portions of the “bread of life discourse,” in which Jesus insists over and over again that he is food for all. It is a long section of John’s Gospel, one that begins after the scene in which Jesus feeds a crowd with five loaves of bread and two fish (Jn 6:1-15) and then covers the rest of chapter six until its ending (6:71).

I would like to reflect a bit upon two moments of this chapter.  The first is Jn 6:27, when on the day after the multiplication of the loaves Jesus talks to the same crowd he has fed and tells them: “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life”.

Beyond the more spiritual (and certainly appropriate) interpretation, according to which with these words Jesus wants to underline the importance of living with our eyes fixed on horizons that go beyond the present world, it seems to me that the text also allows for a more practical or “earthly” interpretation.

Jesus sees the crowd: they have gone after for him because they had been given to eat. He immediately understands that a relationship of dependency has been created between the crowd and himself. They are, let us remember, the same men and women from whom he moved away because “they were going to come and carry him off to make him king” (6:15). Jesus knows that no dependency is good, that the Father wants us to be free, autonomous. That is why he encourages them to work for the bread that endures forever. “The food that perishes” is the nourishment that others have to give you, for you do not know how to generate it. Someone offers it to you, you eat it and right away you need to extend your hand again asking for more. The food that endures forever is the nourishment that one knows how to produce, which therefore allows someone to be autonomous. The food that never ends is analogous to the interior spring of living water that Jesus promised to the Samaritan woman (Jn 4:14), which will free her from having to go to the well day after day. Jesus is inviting those around him to discover their own dignity, to experience God’s presence in themselves, and thus to understand that they have no need of any king, chief or charismatic leader with answers to every question, since they have in themselves the potential to move on, in their own right. To make this discovery is to find the bread that endures forever.

This passage can thus shed light over the way in which we live our faith and carry out our ministry. It can help us to understand that every time that we, as priests, religious or committed lay people create dependencies from those whom we serve towards us, then we are using criteria that are very different from those of the Gospel. Our mission is the same mission that moved Jesus: to help those we serve so that they can discover their own capacities to grow and evolve (as difficult as this may be). To proclaim the Gospel is, above anything else, to help individuals become aware of their own worth as loved sons and daughters of the Father. That is why our message is a liberating one: because it implies the realization of God’s presence in oneself –the living bread that endures and the spring of water that never ends.

Obviously, it will then be desirable that from a situation of healthy autonomy we may be willing to link our lives to the lives of others, forming community with them. It would indeed be very sad if we were to use our newly obtained autonomy to lead selfish and individualistic lives, with an air of “since I am capable to provide for my own needs, then I am interested in no one else.” But this is a risk that we must run, because what is undeniable is that only free persons, working for the bread that endures forever, will be able to create a Christian community worthy of this name. Individuals who are dependent on the bread that perishes may form tribes, clans, gangs, sects or caricatures of family, but never authentic communities living the Gospel of Jesus.

In a later reflection we will meditate on the other moment of the bread of life discourse that we wanted to comment.

 

 

 

HAITIANS IN THE CROSS HAIRS

On June 17 a registration period established by the government of the Dominican Republic for thousands of undocumented Haitians, living in the Dominican Republic, ended (It is said that there are 300,000 to 500,000 affected by this registration requirement.) All undocumented Haitian immigrants were required to register in Dominican government offices. To that end some were able to provide, at least, some type of current documentation from their country.  Many, however, had no documents whatsoever.

Beginning now and in the immediate future, those men, women and children, who do not have any document can be taken by security forces to hundreds of trucks destined for camps located on the other side of the border.  It seems that these people will have to leave with what they are wearing; they won’t be able to take their belongings.

How sad and hopeless it is to see the faces of anguish and fear of the people and families directly affected by this situation. They are men, young people, mothers and children that have established their lives in the Dominican Republic with much work and effort, many for a long time. It is distressing to see the extreme vulnerability with which they live these days. It is also infuriating that Dominican as well as Haitian people and institutions take advantage of someone else’s desperation to obtain some benefit by means of different corrupt practices.

The Dominican authorities have guaranteed the respect of human rights and civility in this process. We are left to trust in this good intention and that in the middle of this very delicate situation wisdom, justice, and respect for the dignity of all will prevail.