BEING BREAD

 

Being Bread

The Gospel assigned for Sunday, August 8, is from Chapter six of John's Gospel, the so-called "bread of life chapter. It contains these verses:

I am the bread of life. 

Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died;

this is the bread that comes down from heaven

so that one may eat it and not die. 

I am the living bread that came down from heaven;

whoever eats this bread will live forever (Jn 6:50-51)

Gathering the Manna

This first half of the chapter stresses the image of the manna, the bread with which God fed the Israelites in the wilderness. (The next half refers to the Bread of the Eucharist.) In this passage Jesus refers to himself as bread, the food we need for our journey through life. 

There is, though, an underlying lesson: Jesus, the Bread of life, is challenging each of us to imitate him by becoming bread for one another.  We are to nourish and strengthen our brothers and sisters here on earth, we must be God's way of feeding our brothers and sisters with whatever sustenance God wishes to give them. That's who we are -- God's nourishment for one another. 

The second to last chapter of Saint Benedict's Rule for Monks gives some specifics as to how to be food for one another. Here's the entire Chapter:

Chapter 72. THE GOOD ZEAL OF MONKS

Just as there is a wicked zeal of bitterness which separates from God and leads to hell, so there is good zeal which separates from evil and leads to God and everlasting life. This, then, is the good zeal which monks must foster with fervent love: They should each try to be the first to show respect to the other (Rom 12:10), supporting with the greatest patience one another's weaknesses of body or behavior, 6and earnestly competing in obedience to one another. No one is to pursue what he judges better for himself, but instead, what he judges better for someone else. To their fellow monks they show the pure love of brothers; to God, loving fear; to their abbot, unfeigned and humble love. Let them prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may he bring us all together to everlasting life.

This is what every Christian's vocation is all about. I taught this chapter to our novice, Br. Bruno, last Tuesday morning, and then spoke about it again in the afternoon to our freshmen girls: Every Christian's life in  Christ is all about love.  I just got ahead of myself; let me tell you about our girls.

As you may know, St. Benedict's Prep now has a girls' Prep Division. So, during this past week our 43 freshman girls went through the traditional week-long live-in orientation program, which involves sleeping overnight on the gym floor for five nights, learning one another's' names, facts about the history of the school, and the three school songs.

To nobody's surprise, the girls did a great job in every way. Naturally, after teaching boys all my life, I've been learning a few things myself lately. Take what happened on Tuesday.

The Itsy-Bitsy Spider

I'm in charge of teaching the new students the school songs. Tuesday I was teaching the new girls a

song in the auditorium, and they were singing with joyful enthusiasm and I was loving it. Then the world's tiniest spider let itself down on an invisible thread from the ceiling. We're talking a tiny spider, mind you, way smaller than the itsy-bitsy one that climbs up the water spout in the children's' song. So there it was, dangling at my eye level over the heads of the singers seated in the front row when it was spotted. I watched as it let itself drop, floating down to land gently on a girl's shoulder, whereupon she screamed EEK! and bolted from her seat as if she were being attacked by a great white shark. (A rather different reaction than what I'm used to, I confess.) 

We never located the itsy-bitsy spider after she unceremoniously evacuated her seat, but after a couple of minutes we were all able to settle down and return to our regularly scheduled programming. All of the women colleagues and friends I've consulted about this incident have assured me that this is all a normal part of MY orientation to the Girls' Prep Division!  

I enjoyed covering a couple of study halls and sitting and chatting with the girls at lunch, trying to learn some names. I'm well aware that I'm older than their grandfathers, which obviously affects their way of relating to me. I was very much aware that by telling them the stories and teaching the traditional songs I was helping to strengthen their sense of becoming part of a legacy that goes back to 1868.

Freshmen Singing a school song

This morning, as I was meditating on the "bread of life" passage above, I began to realize that I and the others (including student leaders and faculty) who had been encouraging the girls to be bread for each other during the difficult orientation week had actually been modeling how to be bread for others.

Then I smiled as I remembered their lesson to me on Tuesday - about the need to welcome and embrace a whole new way of being a student at St. Benedict's Prep.