Feeding, Being Fed

Feeding, Being Fed

“The question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question.”  Nikolai Berdyaev. Synthesis Today Quote for August 7, 2018 www.synthesispub.com. 

Dan Gold   Unsplash

Certainly Jesus gives us continued examples of his feeding thousands as well as going to eat at the home of others, often with the most despised such as Zacchaeus and Matthew, tax collectors. Jesus feeds others, and he lets others feed him. A role model. For Christians, Jesus leaves us with another meal, the Eucharist of bread and wine, a sacrament reminding us and bringing his presence to us.

When I am having difficulty with someone, I imagine us together at the altar rail kneeling if possible to receive the bread and the wine of the Eucharist. Jesus is with us. I see the person in a different light. Sometimes I can see the Christ within them. 

I have given up trying to understand why eating a meal with someone else can help us to develop a relationship faster than spending hours talking to that person. As we are being fed, we see the person in a different light. Often, we can carry on a deeper conversation when food is present. It is almost as if the food is a natural ice breaker.

I remember my medical practice where I worked with nine other physicians who were very different with different gifts who were advocates for different parts of our practice. Each person wanted his area to be funded and fully staffed. One day we decided to have lunch together once a week to try to work through the issues we had difficulty with at these other decision-making meetings. The situation changed almost overnight. We began to see the needs of each other in our many  areas of interest. We began to prioritize what was really most needed for the patients we were caring for instead of focusing on our own needs.  

Some of us even became life-long friends!

Joanna  joannaseibert.com

Buechner: Miracles

Miracles

“A cancer inexplicably cured. A voice in a dream. A statue that weeps. A miracle is an event that strengthens faith. It is possible to look at most miracles and find a rational explanation in terms of natural cause and effect. It is possible to look at Rembrandt's Supper at Emmaus and find a rational explanation in terms of paint and canvas.

Faith in God is less apt to proceed from miracles than miracles from faith in God.” Frederick Buechner, Originally published in Beyond Words, Frederick Buechner Quote of the Day, August 6, 2018.

Caravaggio The Supper at Emmaus

I believe in miracles. Once a week I go to a room full of people who are miracles. It is a 12-step recovery group of people who once lived a life in an addiction and now are “happy, joyous and free.” They talk about what it was like then and what it is like now. I have heard some of their stories hundreds of times, but each time I see a little more similarities in my story and identify with them. Sometimes their story is so similar to mine that I think they are telling my story. The differences between the similarities and the differences begin to blur.  Everyone in the room is a miracle, and I realize that I am as well, and I leave that place profoundly grateful.

I see other miracles every day. Someone calls or comes for a visit. I just listen and listen. In my mind, I have no idea what to say. Sometimes something comes out of my mouth that seems to help my friend. I have no idea where that idea came from.  I know it was a miracle not of my own making.

Some would call it the Spirit working in our lives.

I see people living many years through cancers that once killed in months in years past. These are all miracles. Indeed, people who find cures are miracle workers. Often, they have been inspired by seeing patients die of that disease, and they are inspired not to see it again.

I remember a conversation with my grandmother when I was a junior in medical school when we were riding in the backseat of a car together. She told me that she could not understand how people cannot believe in miracles when they see a newborn baby. I just smiled, but in my mind, I said, “Grandmother, I know how babies develop. I know all the secrets and the stages of how they come to be born. These are all facts of science.”

Now fifty years later, as I have seen so many sick newborns, I know my grandmother is right. The birth of every baby is a miracle.

I also know what Buechner is talking about when we see Rembrandt’s Supper at Emmaus at the Louvre in Paris. Rembrandt has captured the miracle. So many other works of art that are miracles as well. They connect us to the God of our understanding, Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus in the National Gallery in London, Georges de La Tour’s, The Repentant Magdalen at the National Gallery in Washington DC.

Buechner challenges us to remember the many works of art that speak individually to us and look at them today to see if we can see the miracle and our faith in art books or even better, plan a pilgrimage to see them for real.

Joanna    joannaseibert.com

Pilgrimage at Hayneville

Jonathan Daniels Pilgrimage

“I knew then that I must go to Selma. The Virgin's  song was to grow more and more dear in the weeks ahead.” The Jon Daniels Story, ed. William J Schneider, Seabury Press, NY, 1967; 67-20940.

 Today, the second Saturday in August, people from all over the country will be assembling at 11 o’clock in Hayneville, Lowndes Country, Alabama, to remember the death of an Episcopal seminarian, Jonathan Myrick Daniels on August 20, 1965, as he was protecting an African American teenage girl named Ruby Sales. The pilgrimage starts at the court house where a trial lasting less than an hour found the man who murdered Jonathan not guilty. It moves to the place where previously there was a small country store where Jonathan was shot. The 22 year old pilgrimage then moves back to the courthouse for Eucharist where the bread and the wine are consecrated on an altar that had previously been the judge’s bench for that 1965 sham trial.

Bishop Russell Kendrick of the Diocese of Central Gulf Coast reminded us last year that this march remembering the death of the twenty-six-year-old Daniels took place on the same day as the disastrous march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia a year ago.  The similarities are sometimes too much to bear, remembering that we are still stuck in a place where we were three quarters of a century ago about human rights and recognizing who is our neighbor.

Daniels took a leave from Episcopal Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after he heard Martin Luther King Jr call for students to join him to march in Selma, Alabama, to support the civil rights movement. He had been moved by singing the Song of Mary, the Magnificat, in Evening Prayer, especially the words, “He hath put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the humble and meek.”

Jon devoted many of his Sundays in Selma to bringing small groups of black high school students to church in an effort to integrate the local Episcopal church. They were seated but scowled at. Many parishioners openly resented their presence and put their priest squarely in the middle.

In May, Jon went back to seminary to take examinations and complete other requirements. In July he returned to Alabama, where he helped to produce a listing of local, state, and federal agencies and other resources legally available to persons in need of assistance.

 On Friday, August 13, Jon and others went to the town of Fort Deposit to join in picketing three local businesses. On Saturday they were arrested and held in the county jail in Hayneville for six days until they all received bail. After their release on Friday, August 20, four of them went to purchase sodas at a local country store and were met at the door by a special county deputy with a shotgun who told them to leave or be shot. After a brief confrontation, the construction worker who was a part time deputy aimed the gun at a seventeen year-old young black girl in the party, Ruby Sales, Jon pushed her out of the way and was killed instantly.

Ruby went on to attend the same seminary as Daniels and now heads the SpiritHouse Project in Atlanta, a program using art, spirituality and education to bring about racial economic and social justice.

When we sing or say, Mary’s song, the Magnificat, remember Jonathan Myrick Edwards and Ruby Sales and how this canticle changed their lives.

Is there something in that song that resonates with each of us as well?

Daniels died on August 20th but is remembered on the day of his arrest, August 14th.

Book of Common Prayer, 119.