Celebrating St. Martha's feast and Deacon Bruce

Celebrating together, eating together...

 For man, eating is a primordial act and the initial acknowledging of the world. Its connection with life is essential, from when the child is a fetus in the mother's womb until death. The act of eating is a reference to man's cultural activity: it involves work, food preparation, sociality, conviviality. In fact, man eats together with others and eating is connected to a table, the place where friendship, brotherhood, alliance and society are born. At the table we not only share food, but we also exchange words and conversations, thus nourishing relationships, that is, what gives meaning to life supported by food. Eating therefore also involves the most extraordinary cultural creation: language. Linked as it is to orality and desire, the act of eating impacts the affective and emotional sphere of man. It is therefore an anthropological symbol of unique significance that captures the human being in his most intimate and hidden depths and places him in connection with earth, with cosmos, with the polis, with society, with the world. For man, there is
no more total assent to everything that surrounds him than the act of eating. It is the human way of saying one's yes, because it is at the same time the ‘yes’ of the body and the soul... Every morsel of bread is in some way a morsel of the world that we agree to ‘eat’: by eating, in fact, we assimilate the world into us and transform it.
For the Bible, food is like the elementary sacramentum through which the love of God reaches man: he receives creation from the Creator and reciprocates by blessing Him. The convivial community, expressed by the sign of the breaking of bread, therefore flows from love, but through the mediation of the goods of creation. Now, according to the discourse on the bread of life in John 6, Jesus is the bread of life in a double sense: as the Word of God made flesh, the Lógos who perfectly reveals the Father, and as Eucharistic food and drink. This means that "eating the flesh of the Son of Man" cannot be separated -from the point of view of the "eater"- from "coming to Jesus" (6,35.37.44.45), or from "believing in Him" (6,29.36.40.47). The life of God and the life of man meet in love, in agape, the food that truly nourishes man and the reality that constitutes the life of God: "God is love" (1 John 4,8.16). The Eucharist is the sacrament of charity, of agape, in which God's gift to men is the complete message of his love for them and the source of their loving each other as Christ loved them. The community that is born from the Eucharist is made up of "donors", of those "capable of giving" because they themselves are "recipients of gift", in a circuit of donation that has its origins above, from God; it is made up of "those who love" ("Love one another": Jn 13.34) as they themselves are "loved" ("as I have loved you": Jn 13.34).