The Creighton University Retreat Center in Griswold, Iowa (not too far from Omaha) is a largely wooded retreat center. I used to have the pleasure of facilitating retreats there for the teachers of Creighton’s Magis Catholic Teacher Corps. There is something about the woods that uniquely evokes an awareness of God’s creation. The trees’ canopy takes invisible sunlight and turns it into visible beams. It takes the invisible wind and turns it into the sights and sounds of rustling leaves and whistling branches. It takes the very reality of creation and surrounds you with it; towers over you with it, drawing your gaze upward. The trees bring about these sensory experiences.

Trees, it seems, have been central to human experience since the very beginning, as we see in the first reading. There were many trees in the Garden of Eden, including the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God meant for the trees in the garden (well, all but one) to sustain humankind with their fruit and beauty and begged the question of Adam and Eve – the same question that we today face – Of what shall we eat?

Daily, we are faced with the decision of what we should eat. Beyond the obvious necessity of physical sustenance, I mean that we must decide what feeds our very soul. What do I ‘take in’ that sustains and drives my innermost self? Where can I find this real food? In a very real way, Jesus addresses this question in today’s gospel from Mark. Jesus is moved with pity because the crowds have nothing to eat. I can’t help but think that beyond the crowd’s obvious physical hunger, Jesus knew how starving they were for true food, the sort of which had been guarded by the cherubim and the fiery revolving sword since the Fall.

This story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes that is all too common, and yet no less extraordinary because of it, answers the question Of what shall we eat? when we see it with its eucharistic significance (as we’re told in the note on this passage) and in light of salvation history. In so doing, we realize that the story points to the Eucharist and that the tree, itself, again takes center stage. In God’s mercy, he gives humanity another chance to make the right choice; to choose not the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as our forebears did, but to choose the tree of life – the tree on which Jesus was crucified. Whereas everything was lost to Adam and Eve upon eating from the forbidden tree, by eating the fruit of the new tree of life – the body and blood of Jesus crucified – everything is given.

This new tree of life, just like the trees at Creighton’s retreat center, makes the invisible visible and draws our gaze upward. It takes the invisible love of God and shows this love visibly in the body of Christ. The source of our faith at the summit of Calvary. The summit of our faith in the source of all creation. God, himself; our true food; our refuge.