Dear Parish Family,

The prophet Elisha fed a hundred people with twenty barley loaves, and there were leftovers. Jesus fed about five thousand with five barley loaves and a couple of dried or pickled fish, and there were leftovers. That is God’s desire for us: everyone should find food in abundance. Today’s reality is different. Every three days more people die from malnutrition and disease than from the bombing of Hiroshima, and every year more people die from preventable hunger than died in the Holocaust, even though we grow enough grain in the world to provide every man, woman, and child with a satisfactory diet of 3000 calories.

The Second Reading from Ephesians tells us to “make every effort to preserve the unity which has the Spirit as its origin and peace as its binding force.” The problem with the world is its fragmentation; it lacks unity and peace. The problem is not with God’s providence, for God has provided us with enough food for everyone and more. Since there are so many people in this world afflicted with hunger, Vatican II Council urges all, both individuals and governments, to remember the saying of the Fathers: “Feed the man dying of hunger, because if you have not fed him you have killed him.” (Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, 69).

How do we feed the hungry? Even if we are convinced, and perhaps even obsessed, by Jesus command to do this, how in fact can it be done today?  Given the scope and complexity of poverty and hunger in the world, the tendency is to look over our shoulders, to something massive, to some big agency, to feed the hungry. We tend to feel too small and individually over-powered in the face of hunger’s enormity.

But this can be, and invariably is, a rationalization, an abdication, a way of escaping Jesus’ command. Each of us is called upon personally to do something real and this must be something beyond the normal corporate things we are involved in, paying taxes and giving charity monies to governments and big agencies to enable them to do this for us. We must do something ourselves. But what more can we do concretely?

There are a couple of possible approaches:  Mother Theresa took one approach. For her, Jesus’ command was simple and clear. Each of us should personally, beyond government and other agencies, reach out concretely and touch some poor person or persons. There should be times when we are, literally, taking food to hungry people, working in soup kitchens, giving aid to individual street people, and having a poor person eat at our table. In this view, the demand that we feed the hungry challenges us precisely to reach out beyond ideologies and social theories and irrespective of social structures, like the Good Samaritan, person-to-person, take food to the hungry.

But there is another approach, more abstract though not less critical. In this view, it is less important to feed this or that individual person on a given day than it is to change the social, political, and economic structures that are responsible for that particular person being hungry. This approach is less personal and slower, but can, at the end of the day, be more far-reaching. In it, one attempts to feed the hungry by involving oneself in social justice groups that are trying to change the conditions that produce poverty.

Both of these approaches, in their best expressions, are predicated on some other things in our personal lives: Feeding the hungry, as Jesus asks us to do it, involves a reduction in our own standard of living. To feed the hungry means to consume less ourselves, to be less wasteful, to do some fasting, and to live in a simplicity that puts us in more solidarity with the poor. Feeding the hungry also means prayer. We have some bad habits that only God can cure and thus only the outside power of God can ultimately transform our world. When we pray for ‘daily bread’ may we be also become providers of ‘daily bread’ to the ones who are hungry joining us in prayer!

Fr. Tom Kunnel. C.O.