Tenison Woods and MacKillop Centre News: Not on bread alone

Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit through the wilderness, being tempted there by the devil for forty days. During that time he ate nothing and at the end he was hungry.

Luke 4:1 - 2

In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs food is a basic survival requirement that must, like other physiological needs, be satisfied before higher order needs can be addressed (safety, belonging/love, esteem, then ultimately self-actualisation). Bread is a staple for much of the world. Made from whatever grain is available, bread is a symbol of nourishment. The manna in the desert given to the Hebrews was seen as ‘bread from heaven’.

In our tradition, bread fulfils not only a fundamental, physical need, but in the Eucharist, bread seeks to satisfy our ultimate and highest needs – self-knowledge, acceptance, understanding, encountering the divine.

Grain is harvested, crushed and broken to be made into flour. The flour is leavened with yeast, kneaded and rolled, baked, cooled, broken and shared. Bread is made by human hands, by human intervention. Because it is such an earthy food, it is not surprising then that the image of bread should have such a rich history in our language, our thinking, our theology, our community stories. In linguistics, a word such as companion is made up of two Latin words com – together with, and panis, bread, which together initially meant ‘one who breaks bread with another’.

In Luke’s Gospel (4:1 – 13) Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days. There he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing, and after that time he was hungry. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, Man does not live on bread alone.”

This conversation plays out the tension between the bread that provides physiological nourishment and the bread that gives everlasting life. One that fulfils the immediate need to satisfy hunger, the other which is that bread shared at the heavenly banquet. If the stone was made into bread, it would merely satisfy the lowest of our human needs, we need more than this kind of bread, we need that true bread of life.

As Lent begins there is an opportunity to reflect on what our most fundamental needs are beyond those raw, physical necessities; how do we lift ourselves beyond these to become fuller and deeper participants in the divine life? Again, our ancient tradition invites us to enter this season through prayer, penitence and almsgiving, and most particularly through the Table of the Lord. The same Table to which take plain, simple bread and from which we are offered the ‘Bread of Angels’ (Ps 78:25).

Welcome back to a new school year!

Peter Douglas

HEAD OF SCHOOLS, NORTH

Welcome

Welcome to Richard who joins our northern team as principal at Star of the Sea, George Town! ‘Old’ – but new to our TCEO team at MacKillop is Tricia Phillips as Team Leader, Pastoral Care and Wellbeing.

A humbled heart

by Ron Rolheiser

In The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri Nouwen suggests that one of the main things that has to happen in order for us to come to conversion and purity of heart is that we must move from being judge to being repentant sinner.

From judge to repentant sinner, what is being suggested here? Psalm 50 haunts the heart with the refrain: “A humbled and contrite heart you (God) will not spurn.” Our problem is that, despite considerable sincerity, our hearts are rarely humble and contrite. The norm is judgment of others, anger at them, and a certain moral smugness and self-righteousness.

Rarely are we on our knees with our heads against the breast of a forgiving God, contrite about what we’ve done and left undone—our betrayals, our sins, our inadequacies. Most of the time our posture is that of the judge. Our own faults are rarely at issue as we adjudicate others’ need for contrition and pronounce judgment on their faults.

Our own judgmental attitude and self-righteousness is, most of the time, hidden from us. In our own eyes we are never the hypocrite, the one sitting in judgment on somebody else’s life. No. We are the honest ones, the compassionate ones, the humble ones.

Yet, that is rarely the way we are seen by others, especially by those closest to us. Almost always they feel judged by us and almost always they see in us a self-righteousness and a moral smugness that offends them. People around us are only too aware that we are much more the judge than the repentant sinner, even as we ourselves are little aware of it.

Thus, for example, if our temperament puts us at home in liberal circles, there is a good chance that we nurse a fair amount of anger against our more conservative and traditional brothers and sisters. Invariably they will appear to us as morally smug, holier-than-thou, complacent, timid, rigid, dogmatic, fundamentalistic, power-hungry and intellectually backward—and yet as claiming the moral and religious high ground.

Moreover, we feel that they are judging us, believing that we no longer pray, that we have sold out in terms of sexual morality, and that we are not really Catholic and Christian in the true sense.

And this double awareness—of their hypocrisy and of being judged by them—will dominate our self-awareness much more than will any self-criticism or awareness of our own duplicity, sin and betrayals.

Little are we aware that they, the conservatives, feel judged by us, that they feel us as intimating that they are stupid, backward, sexually hung-up, racists, sexists, blind to justice, legalistic, naive of real human experience and fundamentalistic. Little are we aware that they, whom we label as holier-than-thou, consider our attitude as “holier-than-thou.”

The converse is just as true: If we find our home among those of a more conservative mindset, there is a very good chance that we harbor a lot of anger against our more liberal sisters and brothers—against feminists, against social justice groups, against a lot of artists and against theologians. Invariably they will appear to us, precisely, as morally smug, as posturing (more-sensitive-andinclusive-than-thou), as intellectually arrogant and bullying, and as claiming, in pharisee fashion, the religious and moral high ground.

And we will feel them as judging us, believing that we are intellectually backward, fundamentalistic, unenlightened, hung up on sex, insensitive to the needs of the poor, a racist, a sexist, a dinosaur from another age.

Little are we aware that they, on their part, feel so judged and put down by us. That they perceive us as the bully, the power to be feared, the person who is anti-life, the dealer of unfreedom and death.

Strange how each of us so clearly sees the judgmental attitude in the other and yet is so unaware of how brutally judgmental we ourselves are. One man’s prophet is another man’s fanatic; one woman’s freedom fighter is another woman’s terrorist; and one person’s pro-life struggle is, for another person, the dealing of death!

What is true here in terms of the self-righteousness and self-blindness that exists within our ideological circles is perhaps even more true within the ordinary give and take of our daily lives. We are invariably judge, never repentant sinner.

Conversion begins when we stop standing as judge in order to kneel as sinner. When we are humble and contrite of heart we will not be spurned by God—nor by each other.