Skip to main content

Feed Without Measure

It is November outside among the trees, and the trees have pushed off their leaves like young expected to fly.  And though they flutter and twist in the wind, they fall into huge, dead piles.  Unfortunate children!
I have a chunk of dark rye leftover from the last food bank visit. I put it outside for the squirrel.  Monday when I turned my back the squirrel was opening the package of tortillas.  I waged my finger at him and he moved back 3 feet and stood up. I looked at him and gave him two tortillas.  I have been feeding him since.  Fortunate child!
I went to the food bank, waiting in a line for it to open.  It was a diverse line, black white, Asian, Hispanic.  Immigrant and non-immigrant. My thoughts drift back to my first encounter with hunger in America.  I was almost 13.  I had been watching TV news and reading the newspaper, paying attention to the civil rights movement.  When I saw the civil rights demonstrators mistreated on television-that was the first time I cried for anyone but myself.  Black people I learned, were not only discriminated against, but they were poor.  I learned from the nuns that we should love the poor.
And then the poor were there.  The children that lived up the street--one boy my age, Catholic, but in public school--and his younger siblings.  Their father, I think, drank up the paycheck.  He didn't earn enough for several children and his wife had left.  The kids visited me because they were hungry and I feed them. They were all thin and there house had little in it.  I knew that hunger was real.
As I waited in the line I sang to myself, "The Lord hears the cry of the poor, blessed be the poor."   In the late afternoon I went to the evening mass.  I rejoiced when I went to the temple of the Lord to pray.  I rejoiced because here there was no judgement.  My poverty was not the lack of money, or a job, but that I stood in need of the love of God. I stood in the communion line and I ate the body of Christ and drank his bread and received without measure his love.  I was satisfied and without hunger and wished for a world were we feed each other without measure or reservation.  Thank you God, I am a fortunate child!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Just War and Just a War

One of the thorniest problems man face is when, if every is war justified.  The bible says there is a time for war and a time for peace, but that could be just a bow to the inevitability of war in the fallen world.  If also says that they will beat there swords into plough shares and study war no more.  Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, William Miller and other Catholic Workers often ascribed to pacifism or near total pacifism face with the near impossibility of every untangling the moral consequences of violence from the ends desired in undertaking it. But St. Augustine, faced with a world where Christians were starting to replace pagans as political leaders and Christians we soldiers in obedience to the leaders tried to come up with criteria by which war could be measured.   Augustine knew that the Gospel question on it was complex.  One the one hand Jesus told people to turn the other  cheek and also told Peter to put away his sword and not defe...

Alone but not Lonely

It seems that I am tied into interlocking conversations with people on all sides of me and with my blog readership.  Yesterday I wrote Many Things I Have Been #2  ( http://roominhouseblues.blogspot.com/2011/04/many-things-i-have-been-2.html ) in the morning. .  I wrote other things and did the tasks and errands of my day, including job searches. then in the evening I went to a "Mercy Night" a communal penance service (with private confession of course) in my parish.  I came home near the end of my roommate Scott's Bible study. Scott goes to Mars Hill, a conservative evangelical youth oriented church, and his perspective on some aspects of the bible is very different than my Catholic one, yet we focus more on what we have in common.   After the bible study Scott and KJ, who stayed, got into a conversation on various things.  I told them a little of what happened at Mercy Night. Then KJ asked a question.  I guess he...