CowPi Journal

In Come to the Feast, Fr. Richard Fragomeni uses a visual experiment to help describe the Mystical Body of Christ:

In my hand I have a loaf of bread, can you see it? Look carefully at this loaf. What do you perceive? Nourishment. When you see nourishment, what do you see concretely? Seeds. When you see seeds, what else do you see? Yeast. Those microorganisms are right here. What else? Flour. We need to have a farmer. So there’s farmer in here, and a miller in here. And a mill and water. See it? We know all this, but sometimes we’re so sleepy and unaware we don’t see, our inward eyes are shut. We see salt, sugar, butter, and when we see butter, we see cows, … grass, heat—and, of course fire. And when we see fire, we see ovens. To have seeds, we need soil. Now we can see soil. And in the soil we have … worms. See the worms? If we are awake, we can see worms. Besides worms what else in the soil? Fertilizer. What kind? Organic and inorganic! If you’re awake, you see everything that is there. Sooner or later the whole digestive system is in this bread. Because the cycle will happen again. This bread doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from everywhere.

In one sense it is everything. If the mandatory label listed the real ingredients, we would know it contains air, sweat of the brow, our grandmothers, with all their memories. Where is this bread to go? It should go to all hungry mouths. To the poor, the children, the struggle in Bosnia, unlikely destinations unless we know all the ingredients.

We can even see the sun. When we see the sun, we see the stars and the black holes, and the whole cosmos. The scientists tell us that matter is neither destroyed nor created so there are atoms and molecules in here from our ancestors. Can you see? Now, hold this all together and stay awake. Hold everything you see in the bread in your hearts, because over all that the church says, “This is my body. …This is the body of Christ. It is the bread of life.”

Everything belongs.

Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up; and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. (James 5:14-15)

Fr. Richard Fragomeni in his wonderful little book, Come to the Feast, makes a deeply profound comment on the Sacrament of Anointing the Sick (emphasis added):

[There is] a deeper meaning of the Sacrament of the Sick. I don’t think the Sacrament of the Sick is just something we do to sick people. We don’t anoint the sick because we want to do something nice for them, even to heal them. I think the sacrament celebrates sickness as a place of revelation of our need and God’s gift. We see in the sick and suffering a witness to their ability to see the overwhelming gift of God in the absence of the usual support. They plunge into suffering and come up with new insights into who God is and what life is about, and they emerge more grateful for life. That’s the paradox. We anoint them because they are prophets. Anointing the sick is a prophetic anointing. We anoint the sick as if they were Christ on the cross. They are to be a sign for the church that even when they are in the desert with only stones to eat, they are grateful, they know a presence of God in an absence. When you see that, you know it.

Sunday’s Gospel reading at Mass was about the rich, young man in Mark 10:17-30. I suspect that a lot of people, especially Americans, get a little uncomfortable with this passage, as well as they should.

Many forget that the second half of the reading presents Jesus with a teachable moment for his disciples to learn that wealth was not a reward from God for living a righteous life.

The verse that jumps out at me is: “Jesus looked steadily at him and loved him, and he said, ‘There is one thing you lack. …’” In other words, what is the one thing holding you back from entering the kingdom? What is the one thing each one of us must let go?

Maybe it is wealth? Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s something else? It depends on what you are attached to, the thing you put between God and yourself.

Maybe that guilty twinge many feel at hearing this passage is the devil whispering in their ear, distracting them from the one real thing that they need to let go.

Nothing in nature sucks. It is a vacuum, a difference in pressures.
So instead of saying, “This sucks!”, say, “This is vacuous!”