Walk forty days and forty nights.

By F. Luis Casasús, General Superior of Idente missionaries
Commentary on the XIX Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 12 2018,  Paris.
(1st book of Kings 19,4-8; Letter to the Ephesians 4,30-32.5,1-2; Saint John 6,41-51.)

1. Desire for control. One of our great moral difficulties is our desire of having complete control over our life and the lives of others. This control includes the ambition to understand everything around us, all the events in our life. This is why the Jews murmured about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” and they said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? One person’s desire to have control over another is the main reason for domestic violence and dating violence, bullying, envy and abuses of superiors, leaders and authorities. Gossiping and many forms of disobedience have also their roots in this desire of control, that is enhanced today by an ever-growing individualism. It is a reaction that is common when we feel insecure: about ourselves, in a relationship, after a loss or an abandonment…We try to control others and create a world that feels safer to us. This desire for control leads us to crazy and absurd situations. Once upon a time there was a stonecutter who was bored and unhappy with his job. One morning, as he was cutting stones, he saw the king pass by. He prayed to God: Lord, please make me that king because I am tired of being a stone cutter. It seems good to be king. The Lord made him a king instantly. While he was a king he was walking along a road one day, he found the Sun much too hot that he was perspiring heavily. He said to God: It seems the Sun is more powerful than the king. I would like to be the Sun. Instantly, the Lord made him the Sun. As he was shining brightly one morning, he found that the clouds were blocking his sunshine, then he thought to himself: It seems as though the clouds are better than the Sun because they can obstruct my sunshine. So he said: I want to be the clouds. He became the clouds. Later on, he became the rain that poured down on the earth causing a flood. He said: I’m now very powerful.

Then he noticed a big rock that blocked his flow. He said to himself: It seems the stone is more powerful than I am. I want to be this stone. Then he became the stone. One morning, a stonecutter started to cut him to smaller pieces. He said: it seems the stonecutter is more powerful than I am. I want to be stonecutter. Then he instantly became what he originally was. We have no control over our eagerness to control, it cannot be destroyed. With the indispensable assistance of prayer, we can either choose to act on it or not.

This is precisely what we call fasting from passions. And our desire for control is one of the most dreadful passions for two reasons: Firstly, it is born of our attachment to the ego and secondly, it has immediate and negative consequences for our neighbors.

* Fasting is not optional. Is part of our oblation, an opportunity for our offering; I will fast: – for the people I have hurt and those who have hurt me, that we may all be healed. – for all those persons who forgave me and whose confidence in me has enabled me to grow. – for those people who never received from me a testimony of God’s love. * Fasting is not individualistic: Fasting and prayer are a team and are extremely powerful weapons to really help in the conversion of our fellowmen: The disciples asked Jesus, ‘Why couldn’t we drive that demon out?’ He replied, ‘This kind can come out only by prayer and fasting’ (Mk 9:27-29).

They are truly complementary: Prayer means dialogue with the divine persons and fasting is renunciation of dialogue with passions. Do we believe it? Or rather we rely on our good will and apostolic experience? If I do not fast from my passions and I allow myself to dialogue with them (about the consequences, the greater or lesser importance of my self-indulgence, etc.) then I am stealing something which belongs to my neighbor: the oblation I should be offering for them. I remember the case of a well-meant young person who acknowledged he only had a difficulty: his lustful looks on women. We were talking about the incompatibility between his “small weakness” and being an apostle. He honestly made efforts to fast from this and I can say that his spiritual and apostolic life visibly changed. He gave me a great lesson; I knew the theory, but he implemented it. Not only was he interested to find out more, he was also docile and humble to learn.

2. The lesson of Elijah, Paul and James. Interestingly, in the First Reading, God was asking Elijah to eat, not to deprive himself from food…just the opposite: Eat and drink well! Elijah was complaining and even wishing he were dead. He had no control over his life because he was being pursued by his enemies, and they were hunting him down to take his life. We face the same struggles: some people will not like the way we work, for them we will always be too fast or too slow; in their view, we talk too much or never enough; we receive false accusations, ingratitude and destructive criticisms. Sometimes all the work is pushed to us, and no one would help us; on other occasions, we experience the limitations of the advanced age. If in some way we are successful, we better prepare to deal with jealousy and all kinds of envy. In these situations, it is not true that we think of a way to throw in the towel?
Elijah’s attitude was exemplary, but not perfect.

He asked God to take his life, he placed his life in the hands of God, but just asking Him to put an end to his life. The answer of God, as is always the case, was astonishing and powerful: He gave Elijah the necessary food to walk forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God. We know well that the bread symbolizes the presence, the word and the strength of God. Yahve gave him a precise and unique mission, just for him, just for that moment. God really took Elijah’s life…for something great and totally unexpected at that critical moment. This episode of the Old Testament announces what Jesus confirmed in word and deed: We do not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.

And this is another important aspect of mystical Aspiration (we were talking about Aspiration last Sunday): Think of a tornado, or a vacuum cleaner, or a whirlpool in the ocean…these are examples of an irresistible attractive force nearly impossible to overcome. In our spiritual life, it is closely linked to Affliction. Imagine you are really hungry and you are about to eat your favorite meat dish. Suddenly, you realize that 20 persons are around you, looking at you with anxious eyes because and all of them have been starving in the last three weeks. Unless you are emotionally disturbed, you cannot resist, you will somehow share your meal and your urge to eat becomes secondary, now you are moved by and you share in the strongest compassion, the Affliction of the divine persons.

This is what happened to Elijah, and what Jesus is telling us today: You have more fortune than your ancestors, they ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. He says in today’s Gospel text: No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day. The Father draws us to Jesus so that his word will shape or lives and we can serve our neighbors as a companion along the way, as a fellow pilgrim.

Cleaning the house, shopping, studying, writing, preaching well or being over-the-top workers are laudable (and obligatory) activities. But they can easily become our comfort zones, preventing us from being true spiritual companions of our neighbors. Remember, companion = “one who breaks bread with another” (in Latin com ‘together with’ + panis ‘bread’). If I am docile to the Holy Spirit, He will tell me where my neighbor’s deep generosity is hidden, He comes to enlighten us with wisdom to see the deeper treasures of our fellowmen. The contemporaries of Jesus kept a distance with him and murmured about him. No one would ever complain against a companion, one who shares in bread, tasks and suffering.

Most of us try to convert others to the faith through reason alone: It will be good for you to attend Mass, you have to pray more, you have to meditate the Gospel… reasons are important because our faith is not irrational or capricious. But appealing to the hidden generosity, to the talents of people, to the heart, is more effective than appealing only to the head. This is a mark of a true apostle. We celebrated the Feast of St. James and we recalled how he followed the footsteps of Jesus and he immediately sought the company of close collaborators, Athanasius and Theodore. They felt themselves called to help St. James because he did not know about the customs, beliefs, habits, of the tribes in tribes in Galicia and the apostle did not hesitate to ask for their help.

This is also highly visible in St. Paul’s concerns about the church of Ephesus. He is not talking to the active and hard-working Ephesians about some new endeavors, but encouraging them to seize a unique opportunity for that multicultural and diverse community: to demonstrate that unity is possible with (and only with) our openness to Christ’s love.

Allow me to conclude by returning to the issue of Affliction. Saint Paul says today that we should not grieve the holy Spirit of God, with which you were sealed for the day of redemption. Yes, we share in God’s suffering and we can change it, increase or decrease it …what a privilege and what a miracle! This is because “we have been sealed”, we have been marked by fire, like cattle, and we know that we belong to God, He is closer than we realize and we cannot deny it even with our senseless and irresponsible actions. The joyful spiritual stigmata in our being cannot be deleted. Are we ready to take advantage of this honor?

Tips to make the most of the Holy Mass
2. And with your spirit.

This is the response to The Lord be with you. Think about the way the word ‘spirit’ is being used. It means the whole of us. It sums up all that makes us truly human. Made in the God’s image, we are creatures with a spirit with a soma and a psyche. This phrase, whether in Greek or in Latin, was quite strange to the ancient world. It appears only in Christian writings. It already forms part of greetings at the end of some of the Pauline Epistles: The Lord be with your spirit. Grace be with you (2 Tim 4:22). We are responding to the priest: We do in fact acknowledge the grace, presence, and Spirit of Christ in your spirit.

With this words we acknowledge the Spirit’s activity through the priest during the sacred Liturgy. We are referring to the “spirit” of the priest, the very core of his being, where he has been ordained to offer the sacrifice of the Mass. We are acknowledging that since God works through the priest who is offering the Mass, ultimately it is Jesus Christ who is the head of the community gathered for the Liturgy, and it is his Spirit who is the primary actor in the Liturgy, regardless who the particular priest celebrating Mass may be.