How Do We Feed the Hungry?

 Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

It’s almost as if Isaiah had read Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel, for he tells us how to be a light for the world. Six simple and concrete things he tells us to do, and the first is “Share your bread with the hungry.”

And how do we do that? Do we empty out our wallets for every beggar we meet? That might make you seem heroic to the beggar, but, as you quickly discover, it has implications for your other financial obligations down the road. Not to mention the next three beggars you meet.

So what are we to do? Do we just send every poor man to an agency or give them the number for Saint Vincent DePaul? And what of the poor folks who are addicted or homeless or just running a scam? Do we become cynical or despair of every being able to help anyone? How do we “share our bread with the hungry?”

That question first hit me between the eyes almost 36 years ago when I was in graduate school at Catholic university, where I spent most days doing research and writing my dissertation. The one time I took off for myself was Saturday mornings, when I would take the Red Line to Union Station for breakfast, buy a Washington Post and think neither about Liturgy nor Theology nor Neophyte Vesture while I ate an obscenely large breakfast. It was great fun.

Except for the escalator.  For, when you emerged from the Metro all the pan-handlers of Washington D.C. would gather at the top of the escalator and you had no choice but to pass through their midst.  They were aggressive, too.  Grabbing and poking so much I was afraid for the contents of my pockets.

But I was also afraid for my soul, ‘cause I’d heard what Isaiah said, and I didn’t want to be that priest rushing off to his big breakfast while the half-dead beggar was screaming his name.

So, at first, I would take out five one-dollar bills and fold them tightly (so they looked like tens) and I would distribute them like a prince passing among his serfs.  But then I worried that five bucks wasn’t much, (it was a drop in the bucket) plus they might well well spend it on drugs or drink, as on food.

So I went to MacDonalds and got five five-dollar gift certificates, and I started to hand those out as I ran the gauntlet of the forgotten.  But then I heard from Mitch Snyder (who ran the local shelter) that some of the guys were selling the five-dollar certificates for  two dollars cash, which they’d use on drugs.

So I went to a wise old priest I knew, and told him I was so frustrated I was thinking of staying home on Saturdays and working on my dissertation.  At which he asked simply, “You’re going to breakfast?”  “Yes,” I said.  “Well why don’t you invite one of them to breakfast?”

Amazing.  I did.  And I met some of the most interesting people I have ever known.  Tom was a physicist who now lived underneath the bridge by the train tracks.  In his late twenties he had started seeing things and now he would get physically ill when he slept inside a building too long.  Then there was Gerry, who had been in Seminary and later fell into a bottle, which led him all kinds of bad places.  And there were so many more whose names I have now forgotten…but not their faces and not the beauty of their souls.  Their suffering souls.  Stripped and beaten and left for half-dead by the exigencies of life.  

And somehow we are called to feed them. Not just their stomachs, but their aching hearts and their confused minds and their emaciated bodies. And most of all we are called to love them an see Christ in them. It’s not easy, and anyone who tells you there are easy answers is lying to you. 

But somehow, in some way, we must find a way to share our bread with the hungry.

On Uppity Corinthians

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

In the days of Saint Paul, Corinth was the truck-stop of the Eastern world. Just look at a map. The Isthmus of Corinth is a four mile strip of land that joins northern Greece to the Peloponnese, with the Ionian and Adriatic seas on either side of it. In fact, in Paul’s day, he would have walked a long stone-paved road along which they would drag small ships on rollers, from one sea to another.

That’s why Corinth was the center of banking and shipping and became a melting pot of Greeks, Romans, Jews, Syrians, Egyptians, sailors, merchants, slaves, and freedmen, 

It was a booming port city, wealthy, cosmopolitan, and fiercely competitive. All of which meant that the city was what my grandmother would call “stuck-up,” and quite impressed with itself. Social rank, rhetorical polish, education, and patronage networks mattered enormously. To “be somebody” in Corinth meant being impressive: skilled in speech, connected, admired, and upwardly mobile.

And so, when Paul started a Church there, he noticed rather quickly that this one-upmanship started to creep into peoples behavior in church. Christians began aligning themselves behind different leaders—“I belong to Paul,” “I belong to Apollos,” “I belong to Cephas,” as if they were choosing to belong not so much to a Church as to a political party!

Which is why Paul begins this morning by reminding these stuck-up Corinthians that “not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.” No, he tells them, God did not choose you because you were so big and powerful and impressive, but because you were little and weak and foolish. God chooses “the foolish to shame the wise, the weak to shame the strong, and those who count for little in the eyes of the world.”

Perhaps that’s why we love, Saint Thérèse or the Little Flower so much. She never preached to crowds. She never founded a movement. In fact, she never left her convent and by the standards of history, her life was so small that hardly anyone would have noticed at all.

She was born in an out of the way French town and entered a Carmelite convent as a fifteen year old kid. And the community she entered wasn’t all that impressive. It was a place of cold corridors, scratchy habits, sore knees, and women who often drove each other crazy. Thérèse was often sick. She was often misunderstood. She was often ignored. For years she scrubbed floors, folded laundry, and sat in the choir behind sisters who sang better and prayed longer than she did.

But discovered something that no one else noticed: that God is not impressed by how big and important you are. The only thing that matters to him is whether you are loving. “Do little things with great love,” became her motto. “Do little things with great love.”

Thérèse once wrote of a sister in her convent who used to drive her crazy. She was noisy, fussy, and always bumping into the young nun. So Thérèse decided to pray for the nun who drove her crazy, to smile at her and to hold her in her heart. 

Later on, the noisy nun would write, “I always wondered why Thérèse liked me so much.” She had no idea it was an act of heroic charity.

Thérèse dies of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four. No crowds. No headlines. But after her death, something astonishing happened. Her simple autobiography spread across the world like wildfire. 

People began to pray to her. Conversions followed. Vocations were born. Hope returned to the despairing. Within twenty-eight years, the Church declared her a saint, and soon thereafter, a Doctor of the Church.

All because God choses “the foolish to shame the wise, the weak to shame the strong, and those who count for little in the eyes of the world” to teach us all.