A special gathering with family and friends often centers around food. Certainly any one of us could eat alone, using food as the fuel that will keep us going. But it is at a table filled with love and companionship as well as lovingly-prepared food that we are really fed down to our souls.
I have the sense that this is the kind of food Jesus is offering us in today’s Gospel. In these weeks after Easter, we linger with the Gospel of John. The Fourth Gospel treats us to John’s poetic peeling back of Jesus’ delicately layered message, repeated over and over again. Jesus tells us he is the “Bread of Life” and if we feed on this bread, we will live forever.
In today’s gospel, we see the confusion of people who can only understand it their way. There are quarrels and people wonder, “How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?” But Jesus calmly repeats his message: “Unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood, you do not have life within you.”
How is it that we can eat his flesh and drink his blood? We can do this because his gift to us is the sacrifice of his very body and blood for us. He died that we might live. He is broken and given to feed our hunger. When he gives himself to us, that gift is real indeed. For those of us who are Catholics, the Eucharist is the sacrament of that gift - it makes real what it symbolizes.
It helped me when I learned that the Greek word for “feed” that John used in this Gospel could more accurately be translated “graze.” Graze on Jesus. Make him the center of our lives. Focus our life on Jesus. Just as we need food to survive, we need Jesus to “graze” upon, to return to over and over, to feed us to our very souls. Whoever “feeds on me will have life because of me.”
John’s imagery is startling but the invitation from Jesus is very human. If we constantly return to the source of our life, he promises us a real relationship with him. Not only will we remain in Jesus but that Jesus will remain in us. In every day of our lives, that invitation is renewed and if we accept it, we will be fed with a life we could not have imagined. Real presence. Real food and drink. Preparing us to really give our lives as food and drink for others.
Maureen McCann Waldron
The most important part of my life is my family – Jim my husband of 47 years and our two children. Our daughter Katy, a banker here in Omaha, and her husband John, have three wonderful children: Charlotte, Daniel and Elizabeth Grace. Our son Jack and his wife, Ellie, have added to our joy with their sons, Peter and Joseph.
I think family life is an incredible way to find God, even in (or maybe I should say, especially in) the most frustrating or mundane moments.
I am a native of the East Coast after graduating in 1971 from Archbishop John Carroll High School in suburban Philadelphia. I graduated from Creighton University in 1975 with a degree in Journalism and spent most of the next 20 years in corporate public relations in Omaha. I returned to Creighton in the 1990s and completed a master’s degree in Christian Spirituality in 1998.
As our children were growing up, my favorite times were always family dinners at home when the four of us would talk about our days. But now that our kids are gone from home, my husband and I have rediscovered how nice it is to have a quiet dinner together. I also have a special place in my heart for family vacations when the kids were little and four of us were away from home together. It’s a joy to be with my growing family.
Writing a Daily Reflection is always a graced moment, because only with God’s help could I ever write one. I know my own life is hectic, disjointed and imperfect and I know most of us have lives like that. I usually write from that point of view and I always seem to find some sentence, some word in the readings that speaks right to me, in all of my imperfection. I hope that whatever I write is in some way supportive of others.
It’s an incredibly humbling experience to hear from someone who was touched by something I wrote. Whether the note is from someone across campus or across the world, it makes me realize how connected we are all in our longing to grow closer to God.
