The crowds in today’s Gospel reading are hungering to know God and to learn how to be his not just in terms of a Law – which seemed formal, external, and not really life-giving in their experience.  The bread and fish which Jesus provides for them is only symbolic of the life that he gives them with his words. 

And as simple as a meal like that is, there is an inexplicable abundance left over once they have temporarily been filled: there is far more than they even began with.  We may think that we have only crusts to offer those who hunger, but if we give generously in God’s name (and consciously so) God will see that it nourishes them – and that we ourselves are blessed in our giving (Luke 6:38). 

More profoundly, I have come to believe that our deepest hunger can be resumed as a cry to “see me, know me, love me.”  The problem is that people do not really love themselves, and so I believe that anyone who claims to love me just doesn’t know the real me or, alternatively, that anyone who actually does really know me cannot possibly love me... 

When I look at God, then, it is incredibly difficult for me to believe that he can really know me as no one else could even dream of doing and, at the very same time, in the very same act, he can really love me as I so desperately need. 

Let us follow our hunger to Jesus, who does know us, who does love and feed us, who is the Shepherd and Savior our God has sent to all of us and, most particularly, to each of us, to me...