+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
All this talk of bread in the Gospel readings lately has got me rethinking my low-carb diet, that I’ve had for a year or two. Bread is the staff of life, after all, though I did read that earlier this year the food pyramid got inverted, so I don’t know anymore. Anyway, coinciding with our grain-heavy Gospel readings, yesterday was the now sadly obscure English Christian first-fruits festival of Lammas Day, or “loaf mass” day, which in many places would have been transferred to the following Sunday (today). So we should be having a procession to the nearest bakery to bless the bread; in some places in England they would use part of that newly blessed, substantial bread for Holy Communion. I am not personally a fan of that practice, albeit for practical rather than strictly theological reasons. I’ve never doubted that leavened bread could be used instead of unleavened wafers in the Eucharist (Eastern churches have used loaves since the earliest days of the church), but it can get very messy.
In one of those moments of synchronicity or Providence, as I was getting ready to write this sermon about Jesus feeding the five thousand “in a lonely place”, I read a piece from this week’s edition of the New Yorker from the critic Kelefa Sanneh titled “The Myth of the Food Desert.” My initial response to the provocative title was to think “well, make that case to all the people who, until a few weeks ago, could walk to the Great Scot on Main Cross!” But, of course, the essay itself was much more careful than the headline. There may indeed be food deserts, and there are certainly “food swamps”—places where you can get enough bare calories from fast food or dollar stores, but without what you or I might consider “wholesome.”
There is, however, an assumption that the primary problem everywhere is “access” which, according to Sanneh’s piece, may not be the case (as it was for the five thousand). Apparently it has been shown that just because well-meaning middle class people like me have long assumed that opening a store with whole, minimally-processed foods (maybe with some organic, vegan, free range and sustainable options thrown in), and subsidizing it through either government or charitable funds, should fix the problem, this will not immediately lead people to choosing those options over potato chips and microwave burritos. As somebody who loves to cook and who cares about eating relatively healthy food I may not relate, but if you really want to eat mostly junk food, you’re probably going to eat mostly junk food.
None of this is meant to minimize the difficulty of those who genuinely face what has come to be called “food insecurity.” That is a real problem. I’m grateful to live in a community with so many resources—like the City Mission, Chopin Hall, and Christian Clearing House—that help meet those needs, and I’m proud to be part of a church that supports those vitally important ministries. We also live in a society with an opposite sort of problem, borne of the relative luxury and convenience of being the wealthiest people to ever exist: a form of decadence which allows us to choose that which is not only less good for us, but which is positively unhealthy, and mostly get away with it for a while (the eventual poor health outcomes are not initially apparent to the person subsisting entirely on chicken nuggets and Kraft Dinner).
Let’s turn from talking about literal nutrition, though, and toward the matter of spiritual sustenance—the water and wine and milk and bread and good, fat things of which I believe the Lord was speaking through the prophet Isaiah. These the five thousand consumed upon that Syrian shore just as surely as the had their fill of literal bread and fish, acquired without money and without price. Good, nutritious spiritual food is abundant and ubiquitous under the New Covenant of Christ Jesus, found both in the Sacraments of the Church and in the divine teaching of Scripture. It can be acquired freely, without money and without price.
But do we avail ourselves of it? Or are we rather subsisting on the spiritual equivalent of junk food?
I hope that it’s the former, and I believe that at least insofar as we are considering what we do on Sundays week in and week out it mostly is. Even if my sermon on any given Sunday may sometimes be wholesome or may at other times be like a bit of candy to give you a spiritual sugar rush (I hope I don’t do that too often, but I probably do sometimes), at least we are receiving a healthy diet of scripture readings, prayers which have been proved over the years, hymns with actual theological content, and—most importantly of all—food and drink which we are promised sustains us on the way to everlasting life. This is not to say that the sweet treat or savory crunch of affect and religious enthusiasm is always amiss. It can be a great amuse bouche or desert course, but it can’t be the whole meal. So, I think we do a relatively good job in our little corner of Christendom as far as that goes on any given Sunday.
But what about Monday through Saturday? It is both my hope and my strong suspicion, having gotten to know most of you over the last decade, that the great majority of you are not taking a complete fast from spiritual sustenance six days a week. I have no doubt that most of you are praying and that you are reading something at least putatively edifying during the course of the week. But I think it is useful for each of us, myself included, to ask himself or herself “am I getting a healthy diet of these things?”
With regard to the soul’s health, I can only speak with any confidence about my own—and as far as that goes, the great physician is not always as forthcoming with his diagnosis as I’d like, so there’s some guess work there, too. Not only am I incapable of taking a stethoscope to anybody else’s soul, I’m not a spiritual director, I’m just a simple parish priest, so what advice I can give is limited to what I know has helped me and what the saints of the church have said helped them. That said, despite being a “religious professional”, I’m not a monk, and I think those practices I’ve found helpful could be applicable to most ordinary Christians, regardless of domestic and professional commitments.
So, what I do is very simple, but I think it’s kept me in mostly good spiritual condition. I pray every day at fixed times and I read the bible every day at fixed times. The backbone of this for me is the daily office of morning and evening prayer, which comes with its cycle of prayers for most needs and occasions, opportunity for silent contemplation and extemporaneous prayer (if you pay attention to the rubrics), and what I like to think of as the “minimum daily allowance” of bible reading. I tend to read more scripture than is appointed over the course of the day (most frequently, bits that the lectionary skips over or references in the assigned readings that take me through more of the depth and breadth of scripture), but the daily lectionary is the minimum for me. Our current prayerbook makes it a bit harder than older ones (harder than it should be, in my opinion) to figure out what to read on any given day. I did a class on this several months ago, and I’m willing to do it again, but for simplicity’s sake, you can go to prayer.forwardmovement.org and this site will simply give you the day’s readings and even place them into Morning or Evening Prayer if you don’t mind praying with a device (I don’t like praying with my phone in front of me, but your mileage may vary).
And I find, as somebody who likes to eat his meals at fixed times, that praying and reading scripture at fixed times helps insure that I get the sustenance I need when I need it. So morning prayer, on days when I’m in the office happens at 8 o’clock, and on other days it’s right after I feed the cats and start the coffee maker, usually around 5 or 5:30 a.m. Evening Prayer is 4:30 p.m. If I have some obligation at that time, Evening Prayer is right after that is finished, before I cook or finish cooking dinner. Each of these takes between twenty and thirty minutes, and that’s with me reading slowly and observing silence, so I think it’s doable for most people. And if it’s not, and I say the following with humility and realizing both that I have no children and that I have a relatively flexible schedule, we could all ask ourselves (particularly in our productivity-obsessed and highly programmed age) “am I too busy?” For me, if I am too busy to pray, I am too busy.
And there are other spiritual dietary supplements I try to take. Whether I’m saying Morning Prayer in the wee hours at home or later in the church, I always make an examination of conscience and of consciousness early in the morning, presenting to God those things for which I need forgiveness and those things for which I am grateful from the previous day, and praying for his guidance in the day to come. When the church bell rings the Angelus I drop what I’m doing and pray the Angelus. (If I hear it; you may have noticed that our bell is ringing, but it’s muffled and quiet right now. We are scheduled to be scheduled to have that fixed.) I try to include books with some spiritual or theological depth into what I read for pleasure, between the depressing literary novels and medieval history.
Anyway, I share all this not to brag about my piety. I’m sure I could be doing more, and perhaps there are among you some that are doing more than I on a daily basis. I share all of it to give you one example of what a healthy diet of wholesome spiritual food might look like. Just as in nutrition there can be a lot of diversity in what a healthy meal looks like (I like Indian food and you might prefer Chinese, but both can work) so too does this principle work with regard to our daily spiritual bread. I like using the lectionary, and you might prefer one of those “read the bible in a year” plans. The point is that we’d all benefit from some daily diet of prayer and scripture reading, and “consuming” those things with intentionality and regularity. Try it, and just as good diet and exercise lead to bodily health, I think you’ll find the same when it comes to the health of your soul.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.