The Feeding of the Multitude: beyond our human inadequacy to our human priesthood

Just as in the Baptism of Jesus we learned that to be human means that we are beloved, the feeding of the multitude offers to us the truth that to be human, we are priest.  

Imagine yourself Jesus, this carpenter’s son from a hick town near Jerusalem looking at the crowd who, despite your efforts to get away from them, has followed you.  There are maybe 15 THOUSAND of them, men and women, some of them with kids.  Imagine that it all started with caring about one person, touching them gently, looking into their eyes and touching them with the love and sympathy that welled up inside you, flowed out from you as naturally as the tears from the normally quiescent wells just behind your eyes. 

I can touch this ONE, you’d thought.  And when that one worn man seemed to unwither at your touch, like a brown plant grown somehow green again, you’d though it pretty neat, to have happened to have touched him just as he’d somehow come out of whatever had been wrong.  It couldn’t have been you….

And now here you are, after that one becoming two, and those four, and eight, sixteen, thirty-two…fifteen thousand.  You find your eyes looking at the ground, trying to find there some escape from what is facing you.  But their eyes call to yours, and soon you are looking into theirs.  They are, it strikes you, all different, and yet so like the eyes of that first withered man.  But now the wells behind your eyes seem to have been drained, and you are too tired to stop your brain from considering the time of day and the distance from the nearest town, and you hear your own voice say to your companions, “How can we feed them?”  Before they even hear your spoken words, you hear their unspoken echo. “How can I possibly feed all these people?  Oh, my GOD!”

If you’re with me, if you’ve been able to imagine with me coming to this point of logical, valid sense of our inadequacy, we can look together at what choice is held out to us.  We can choose the paralysis of inadequacy or we can take the next step toward our own humanity.  We can decide to accept the priestly function to which we are all called as humans. 

I believe that just as in the Baptism of Jesus we learned that to be human means that we are beloved, this feeding of the multitude offers to us the truth that to be human, we are priest. 

We return to the story, facing our own inadequacy.  We are in the moment of mental math aware that we are not equal to the task.  It is too great for us, beyond our logical capability.  And so we ride on the cloud of the story, watching what happens next.  Jesus looks up to heaven.  Just as his gaze was called from the ground of his self-doubt to the eyes of the people in the crowd by compassion, his eyes were called from them to the heavens by his need for help, and his faith that help was there. 

He could have been drawn back to the ground of logical self-doubt, accepting his limitations.  Some of his apostles invite him to do this, to accept the feeding as unrealistic, unreasonable, unexpected.  But he allowed his gaze to be lifted up, and his aspiration with it.

And guided by that vision, he did the priestly thing.  The blessed the paltry, inadequate all that he had, and without being distracted by the inadequacy of its appearance, began doing what needed to be done.  He began feeding all those people.

To be human is to accept our belovedness, and not merely as a platitude, but as a practice.  The practice of belovedness calls us to accept ourselves as priest, not because we are given by the world or our church some garment or title, but because we are given by our creator spirit the truth of this gift, of being able at all times of our life to look up, beyond the call of compassion to the call of faith, and in that call of faithful compassion to bless the measly, inadequate all that we are given, and by blessing, breaking, and sharing it, to find that it is indeed more than enough.

Exhaustion: the Sign of One Heart Loving

In “Love on the Run” I mulled the challenge of my friend whose cancer gives him a life expectancy of “five weeks or five years.”  How does he love?  If he loves (his wife and kids and grandkids and friends) as if he has five weeks, will he be exhausted if he lives to week 6?  And if he loves as if he had five years and finds himself dying in one, will he regret his moderation in loving?

One of my kids reminded me that love is not an individual act, but the dance of a relationship.  She wrote “I feel that to love means freely, getting exhausted and that's when your beloved picks you up.” 

The common koan “the sound of one hand clapping” came to mind when I realized my limiting love by isolating the one attempting to love.  A koan is a Zen riddle that, being unthinkable, stops us from thinking so we can simply be present.  But while we know that it takes two hands to clap (only a fool would try to it with one) we commonly try to love with one heart alone.  I believe that my daughter pointed out to me the foolishness of my thinking.

I am blessed in companioning with my friend in his living with cancer, because he accepts my companionship, listens and shares, and together we grow in our capacity to love and be loved.  

A few weeks ago I had visited for the third time my brother who moved far from family into the woods in another state.  I’ve admired a great deal about him and during the forty years of our adulthood, we’ve had a sometimes challenging but respectful and loving relationship despite significant lifestyle differences.  We share an older brother who similarly isolated himself from family and died at age 60 after years of drinking, smoking, and finding a place of joy in part-time work while continuing to fight demons of resentment and disillusionment, much of it related to family.

So when this brother moved into the woods, I wanted to do all I could to go and visit him, to let him know that he was important to me, that I supported his dream.  Perhaps the word that right or wrong describes this desire of mine was to “validate” him in his new venture.  Now that seems arrogant, but I get ahead of myself.

A few weeks ago we had a family reunion near his place, but far enough (and noisy enough) that he could justify not attending, or joining as little as possible.  So I talked with him about coming up and staying with him rather than camping with the others, so we could spend some time together as well.  With a couple of our kids, we enjoyed a loving visit, lots of conversation, and delight in the beauty of the place he’s made for himself. 

Three days after returning home, I was happy to see a letter from him in our mailbox, anticipating a reprise of the good times we’d shared.  Instead was a brief note that said he’d had more than enough of me and that I was not welcome in his house.   Since then, both of my letters to him have been returned unopened.

Arrogant.  I think my attempts to love as an act were arrogant.  Perhaps I’m learning that love is not an act by a lover, but presence to another that sometimes results in a loving relationship.  Love does not emerge from the will of a lover, but from the relationship between or among people present to each other. 

Now by some irony, I have just one hand for the next two weeks.  A bicycling injury resulting in a broken shoulder has my right arm in a sling following surgery.  I am coming to experience the need for help to do so many things that I thought within my power, simple things like mowing the grass or taking a shower or driving the car.  Things much easier than loving.

Love on the Run: We don’t run a sprint the way we run a marathon.  But how do we pace our love?

I’m blessed, these months, with a precious gift I’d never wish for.  I’m accompanying a friend my age with aggressive, incurable brain cancer.  On Tuesdays I spend time with him while his wife can focus on her own needs, free for awhile from the need to care for him.

With a disease survived by 50% in the first year, my friend wants to consider himself among the 5% who survive for more than five.  Prior to his diagnosis, he’d been unusually fit and trim, finding in cycling most of what he had found as a runner when his joints were younger.   While his body is heavier due to prescribed steroids and a diminished exercise regimen, his spirit seems as light as ever.  He lives with hope and determination and gratitude.

I don’t know how he does it, how he makes decisions with this one-to-five year window.  And I don’t know how he paces his love. 

When my dad was gradually wearing out with congestive heart failure, Kathy and I would make the drive from Detroit to Chicago at shorter and shorter intervals, not only to see him, but to support my mom, who was his caregiver.  With our own kids grown and out of our nest, Kathy and I were free to focus on this relationship, and from the moment we arrived on Friday evening until we left on Sunday afternoon, we loved in a sprint.  We had that luxury.

Once while I was patiently helping my dad, he looked into my eyes – contrary to his habit of looking away – and said, “Johnny, you’re so good to me.”  But before I could process my internal response into an appropriate and honest reply, he added “Why can’t your mother be like this?”  I didn’t need a second to process this.  I immediately laughed a staccato “HA!” and watched the confusion form on his face.  “Dad, mom has to love you all the time; I get to love you for awhile and then go back home!”  He seemed hurt by that, that I found loving him so intently to require recovery.   I, sprinting through the weekend, could love him hard and strong and incessantly.  My mom, on the other hand, had to pace herself for a much longer run.

At any given moment, a sprinter is running faster and harder than a distance runner.  But the sprinter would not be able to finish the long race, exhausted well before the end.  Each different race calls for a different style of running, and each different situation calls for a different style of love.  My friend retired after a very successful career as an engineer.  Perhaps his dispassionate application of logic toward a desired end moves him to pace his love for the distance.  I don’t know.  But I am confident that if he finds the finish line approaching sooner than he now thinks, he’ll adjust his pace of loving accordingly, and sprint to the tape.

NEXT – Overloving and withdrawal

DIS R-E-S-P-E-C-T

The Queen of Soul was right in calling for respect.  Perhaps “Respect” remains an epic hit because it resonates with the wailing song in each of us that call for the same thing, the same respect.

As the daughter of a preacher, she’d appreciate the story read in thousands of churches this Sunday.  The established religious leaders look at the son of a carpenter as he is teaching, and ask each other how he could possibly have anything of value to offer.  The story ends tragically with the death of the protagonist.   And it’s all because of, you guessed it, disrespect.

The story is called “The Rejection at Nazareth.  Here’s a link.  http://www.usccb.org/bible/scripture.cfm?bk=Mark&ch=6&v=49006001

But in carrying out this assassination, the bad guys were guilty of disrespecting themselves as well, and disrespecting the God they claim to serve.  At it is our own unvoiced wailing cry for respect that calls us to account for ourselves, not as a victim like the carpenter’s son, but a perpetrator like the powerful.

Respect, I’ve often quoted my college Philosophy professor Vaughn Adams, means to “look again.”  Had those hearing Jesus “looked again” at him, looked past their prejudices about sons-of-carpenters, they might have found the brilliant thinker and inspiring speaker who could speak to their hearts, and the caring man who could have become their friend. 

I spend Tuesday evenings preparing and serving dinner at a shelter for homeless people, and follow it with a class on "mining" their value.  You might simply call it “resume preparation” but that would indeed be superficial.  The evidence of their worth is often buried under years of disrespect, from others and eventually from themselves.  I go because I know that unless I do, I’ll fall into the same shallow thinking as the ones in the story. 

Perhaps the kind of disrespect illuminated in this story is that of thinking someone is without capacity.  And a closer look at the story exposes three lacks of re-spect. 

First, disrespecting others, we allow ourselves the sloppy habit of referring only to what we already know about who the person has been.  In this, we foolishly only consider only the past, and only the part of the past that we know and that has gotten through the tight filter of our biases and fears.

Second, we disrespect ourselves by seeing the other as a threat to our own intrinsic value, subjecting ourselves to the same history-bound, static consideration of our own value, devoid of growth, learning, or development.   We fail to reframe our worth as companion, and instead build up our defenses, foolishly attempting to establish our worth by devaluing the other.

Finally, we disrespect the unseen grace of God or human spirit to work in the other, and to work in ourselves.   

Jesus found his value in finding the value in others.  I guess you can call that soul!

  FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.