I'd like to build today something on what we talked about last night on suffering. Not necessarily that it's derivative from suffering, but rather that suffering is really a part of the sacrificial aspect of life, of living in community, of following Christ, of growing up, of growing older, and you know, all of this is certainly involved. I want to do this in the context of St. John's Gospel in Chapter 6. When you read the Synoptic Gospels, of course, you have the recounting of the Last Supper, the words of institution, bread and wine, body and blood of Christ, and so on. You don't have that in St.

[01:01]

John's Gospel. There's no institutional account in St. John's Gospel. What there is at that point in the Gospel is the washing of the feet. And the washing of the feet has to do, again, with what Christ is doing. He's serving. And he says, what I have done for you, you must do for one another as well. Part of that was when he came to Peter and he said he was going to wash his feet, Peter said, you'll never wash my feet. He said, if I don't wash your feet, if I don't serve you, you'll have no part in me. He said, well then wash, you know, not just my feet, but my head and my whole body as well. Peter was an extremist. He really had to outdo everybody. He was very impetuous, perhaps, as well, but sincere.

[02:04]

If we want to have any kind of an account of Eucharist, as far as the Gospel of John is concerned, it's not only going to be in the washing of feet, but going back to Chapter 6, where we have really John's teaching on what the Eucharist is all about. The interesting thing to me is that when you're reading St. John's Gospel in Chapter 6, In the first part we're talking about the miracle of the loaves and Jesus coming to his disciples walking on the water. There are a lot of parallels in this to the Exodus account in the Old Testament. And the interesting thing to me is that when we go back to the Exodus account, the way it is presented to us is that it is basically presented to us as a liturgy. And I think that if we want to understand what John is saying in chapter 6, we have to look at it as liturgy also.

[03:13]

Now, the nice part about doing that as liturgy, and particularly liturgy centered to some extent in both cases on eating, is that it is taking into account not a ritualizing of relationship with God so much as it is a taking of the whole of life and bringing it into relationship with how we live with one another in the presence of God in worship. And that it takes into account all of our life. Not just a part. It's not compartmentalized. It is the totality of what our life is. The Exodus account is a reminder to us of what God did for a people who were in exile because they had been put into a situation of slavery even though they had once been welcomed into the land of Egypt. They're there.

[04:18]

Why they're there? Because of Joseph ahead of them. That's forgotten after some years. They become enslaved. Moses is raised up as a savior for them. One who is going to rescue them from this slavery. Moses, when he is called to go back to Egypt from his own exile, is very reluctant to do so. He puts up all sorts of barriers that he can't do this, I'm not the one, get somebody else, I'm too cowardly, I'm too weak, I can't even speak. And until God is getting a little bit upset with him, to say the least, and is, you know, ready to annihilate him, probably, because he's not being very cooperative.

[05:22]

Finally, he does cooperate, and when he does, when he agrees to go and do what God wants of him, he is committed, and he's committed forever. He's not going to pull back. Once he has given his word to God, he's there, he's with God. You know all the things about the various plagues that take place, and finally, what do they do? They go out from Egypt. They cross the Red Sea, or the Sea of Reeds, and they go into the desert. And this is when they really become a people. is when they get into the desert. It's symbolic, going through this sea and becoming a people in a way they had never been a people before. That's the way it is presented to us. They go into the desert, and in the desert they go through this whole journey of theirs.

[06:31]

It could have taken 40 days to get to where they were going, but because of their doubt, it took 40 years instead. They're fed. They receive water from the rock. they have the quails, whatever, all of these things, that whole story is kind of a ritual in a way, but also it is of liturgy. What they are doing with their life and what they're doing in their worship of God cannot be separated. They are one. At the same time, there is a ritual that takes place, I made reference to that before, the ritual of the yearly Passover, a reminder of what God had done. They're going back and they're taking that event of the past, which is historical, but which has its effects now because it's the same God. It's the same God who is working with them. It's the same God who is doing for them now what God had done back then in the original Passover.

[07:39]

So, they are participants in the original Passover because of what God is doing right now. That's their liturgy. That's kind of the context of what we have in St. John's Gospel now. Jesus goes out from one place into a deserted place, and the crowd of people follow him, and he teaches them, he speaks to them, a living word. For us, liturgy is not simply a remembrance of a past event, but it is an encounter with the living God. A living God acts now, in accord with what God had done before. So here they are in the desert. After teaching them, they're in the wrong place for getting, you know, getting to the A&P. They've got to have some food and they don't have any food.

[08:43]

So there is this whole thing of the multiplication of the loaves. But he tells the disciples, he says, you feed them. He says, well, yeah, I've got enough to feed them with. So he has them all sit down. He feeds them the multiplication of the loaves. Here they are, a people who are being fed. A people who are experiencing an event which is similar, it is reminiscent of what God had done for the people in giving them water and giving them meat to eat and so on, giving them the manna in the desert. All of this is a reminder. of what God has always done for God's people. See, here is liturgy again. Here is this sharing of something. Well then, the people are very impressed with what he has done. They're very impressed.

[09:44]

They say, you know, this man is really quite good for our economy. And so they want to come and take him and make him their king. But that's not his plan. That's their plan. Because they see something good for themselves right now. It's sort of like when Peter is sitting in the boat and Jesus is preaching from the boat to all of the people. He says, let's go out fishing. And so they go out fishing after some persuasion. And they get such a catch of fish that the other fishermen of his group have to go out and bring some of these fish in as well. And you would think, you know, that Peter says, you know, this guy can, you know, he can even catch fish at noontime when the sun is high and the fish are low.

[10:45]

He would be really good for our economy. But that isn't what happens with them. They go back to shore, they abandon everything and they follow him. That isn't what these people in the desert are going to do. These people in the desert want to come and take him and make him their king, their worldly king. That's not his purpose. His purpose is something else. So he runs away. He goes off into the wilderness someplace where they can't find him because he doesn't want that to happen. The plan that they have is not the plan that he has. He doesn't want that. He doesn't come back. So the disciples get into their boat and they cross the sea to go back to where they had come from. And all of a sudden, in the middle of the night, here he comes to them walking on the water. And that's a very frightening thing for them.

[11:47]

But again, it is a part of their life. They've seen what he did. They heard his word. They heard his preaching. They saw the multiplication of the loaves. They also saw that he wasn't about to come and be made king in any kind of a civil sense. So they're kind of confused by all of this. But when they see him coming to them, walking on the water, all of this has to be a part of what they're perceiving. And they invite him into the boat with them. Now, I think there is some significance in that. Liturgically there's significance in it, because liturgy is to reflect our lives. What we do in liturgy is what we do in our lives. We're offered this, we're offered the food, the word, the bread, the wine, whatever it might be.

[12:48]

We are offered this, but we have to give our consent to it. We have to invite Jesus into the boat with us. So these are not things that we can just simply say, there's a ritual out here, it's liturgy, and now we go and do something else. This is part and parcel of who we are. The God that we're looking at in all of this is not a God who is terribly comforting in many ways. It is a God who is very demanding. And I think that in some ways maybe the God that is demanding is not the God that a lot of people today are looking for. For instance, I'm all in favor of teaching people how to meditate, how to do Lectio, how to pray. But I think that a lot of what we have come across in meditation techniques and so on are for the sake of bringing peace and quiet internally to us.

[13:56]

I'm not opposed to being peaceful and quiet internally, but you can't substitute that for the wrestling that we have to do. the wrestling with God, the wrestling that we have to do in our relationships with the people around us. There's a wrestling. There's a discomfort in allowing God to enter our boat. There's a discomfort in allowing God to slowly but surely reveal in us what it is we need to recognize as barriers to our relationship with God and to one another. There's an interesting book called The Solace of Fierce Landscapes by Belden Lane. And one of the things he said in that book was this, I'm increasingly uncomfortable with current images of God found in books and workshops that mix popular psychology with a theology wholly devoted to self-realization.

[15:05]

They seem to reverse the first question of the catechism I studied as a child, declaring that the chief end of God is to glorify men and women and to enjoy them forever. I really don't want a God who is solicitous of my every need, fawning for my attention, eager for nothing in the world so much as the fulfillment of my self-potential. One of the scourges of our age is that all our deities are housebroken and eminently companionable. Far from demanding anything, they ask only how they can more meaningfully enhance the lives of those they serve. You know, we have become the gods who have this god wrapped up in a neat package that we can carry around in our back pocket and pull out and notice now and then. That's not the god of liturgy.

[16:08]

That's not the god of our life. It's not the god of our life either as monks or as Christians. There was another interesting thing in Report to Greco by Nikos Kazantzakis, where he talks about a crisis, perhaps, in his life as he's going through the desert and meeting a monk. who is a hermit. He says, My life had degenerated until it became unbearable. I was suspended between heaven and earth, swinging from one to the other and rejected by both.

[17:13]

I went to an old ascetic who lived far from monasteries in a cave dug into a cliff jutting over the sea and had him confess me. What shall I do, Holy Father? Give me some advice. The old ascetic placed his hand on my head. Be patient, my child. Do not be hasty. Haste is one of the devil's snares. Wait calmly with faith. How long? Until salvation ripens in you. Allow time for the sour grape to turn to honey. And how shall I know, Father, when the sour grape is turned to honey? One morning you will rise and see that the world has changed. But you will have changed, my child, not the world. Salvation will have ripened in you. At that point, surrender yourself to God and you shall never betray Him.

[18:20]

He goes on in another part to say this, Ever since that day I have realized that man's soul is a terrible and dangerous coil spring. Without knowing it, we all carry a great explosive force wrapped in our flesh and lard And what is worse, we do not want to know it. For then, villainy, cowardice, and falsehood lose their justification. We can no longer hide behind man's supposed impotence and wretched incompetence. We ourselves must bear the blame if we are villains, cowards, or liars. For although we have an all-powerful force inside, We dare not use it for fear it might destroy us. But we take the easy, comfortable way out and allow it to vent its strength little by little until it too has degenerated to flesh and lard.

[19:30]

How terrible not to know that we possess this force. If we did know, we would be proud of our souls. In all heaven and earth, Nothing so closely resembles God as the soul of man. I think what we need to know is that in the liturgy of chapter 6 of St. John's Gospel, we are facing a God who is making demands on us. We're facing a God who says, all of this false image that you have of yourself, all these things that you have built up throughout your lifetime, have been wonderful ways of guarding yourself against God intruding on your life. And God won't intrude even though God is inside. It's sort of like the story of creation in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo's great painting.

[20:41]

of God with his hand out like this, Adam with his hand out like this, and their fingers apart. Not touching, because God lets go. and lets us, because that's the meaning of our freedom. It's the meaning of being made in the image and likeness of God, to be able to give ourselves voluntarily to God. And that's exactly what the liturgy always calls us to. This is what Jesus did in feeding this crowd of people. Multiplication of the loaves. He feeds them. What is their response going to be? Their response was to say, you are advantageous to us in this world in a civil kind of a way, we want to make you our king. He runs from that. That isn't what God is here for. God isn't here to fulfill our every desire. God is here to help us to look inside and find out what is going on inside, because once we discover what's inside and we break through some of the barriers, some of the images that we have built up of ourselves, we discover the God who's there.

[21:57]

It's interesting that one of the great mystics made a statement like this. He said, we're not God, but we're not not God. It's amazing what it means to be the image and likeness of God, but we hide that because if we ever come to it, if we ever come to know what that means, there's an awful lot of things on the outside that we're going to have to put away, or they will fall away, and we won't know who we are. But God will know who we are and will reveal to us, we will really discover, in fact, who we are. What's happening in all of this in chapter six is that the disciples are getting to know what it means to follow Christ. It isn't the road to glory, not in this world. That isn't what this is for. They find out that for Jesus, his relationship to the Father and to them costs him his life.

[23:02]

And what they're finding out is that it's going to cost them their lives. It's going to cost us our lives. If liturgy is doing what liturgy is supposed to do, it's going to cost us our lives. You know, in liturgy, we're given the Word. We're given the body and blood of Christ and the Eucharist. in our liturgy of the hours. We are continually confronting and being confronted by the Word of God that touches us deeply. If we will listen to it, if we will take it in, if we will put down our defenses and let it work. But again, salvation has to ripen in us. Be patient with it. Listen to it. So their relationship to Jesus and to the Father is going to cost them their lives. And following Jesus means allowing Him to get into their boat.

[24:10]

Same for us. And it's threatening. It's a very threatening thing. He knows us from within already and we don't know ourselves from within and it's very threatening to find out who we are. So, what must we do to carry out this work of God? This is the work of God in us. We have to believe in the one that God sent, Jesus. Believing in Abraham and Moses meant abandoning security, trusting God's faithfulness. For them, that's what it was. Abraham left a place, went to where he didn't know he was going. mysterious to him, but he trusted God. That's why he's called the father of faith. He didn't have any precedence. Moses, the same thing. He hesitated, but finally he did it. And he didn't know how this was all going to turn out, but it turned out because he trusted in God.

[25:18]

Our liturgy teaches us to put our trust in Jesus Christ. who leads us to the Father by the power of the Spirit in us. And what his salvation is all about is to bring us back into what it means to be reunited. We started out talking about the God who made all things by the Word. We're being brought back to understand what that Word means. There's a unity in all of creation because it comes from one, one creator only. And we are now in our salvation going back to be that one, the oneness of what this means. Eucharist speaks of oneness, of unity. Keep all of this in mind as we continue through this day.

[26:21]

I want to talk a little bit more about Eucharist tonight. Any comments, any questions, any reflections you would like to share? Any objections? There's something about this comfort zone, you know, that we like. It seems to be the new sort of suffering. that people experience, that whenever something is not comfortable, they equal that with pain. I think there's a big difference between pain and comfort. Yes. But I love it because the American kind of culture is, it's a painless, you know, health and painless well-being, all that, anything that is not that dead, evil.

[27:28]

Well, sometimes it's the lack of confidence, you know, but I find it's a sign of, wasn't it a problem? An indicator, but we don't see that anymore. That's good. You know, I think that we're... I don't watch very much television anymore, and I don't think you probably don't hear, I'm sure. But, you know, you watch the news or something like that at night, I do it. And, you know, between every piece of news there's another pill being sold, how to make you feel better. Because we don't like discomfort, anything of that sort. You know, I think that as I reflect on my experience of life, I'm particularly impressed with how good parents deal with their children.

[28:41]

Not necessarily, you know, not getting everything for them that they want and spoiling them and all the rest of it, but the kind of care and concern and self-giving that is necessary to raise children properly. And particularly, I mean, you look at relationship with parents and their little babies, particularly the mothers, of what they are willing to do in order to raise those children, to be healthy children. You know, there's an experience there of sacrifice. There very definitely is. And it can't be substituted for. All of the conveniences in the world aren't going to ease the cost of, I don't mean financial cost, the personal cost of raising children. That's probably one of the best examples of sacrifice and self-giving that we have. is the way it is in parents.

[29:45]

It's unfortunate that we don't have more of them canonized. There's so many of them we probably can't do it. Yes, the emphasis has been so much on our response to God that we've totally overlooked the initial gifts of God, and if we don't invite Him in so to speak, He won't come in a minute. But again, that resistance, we're unaware of it. It's an unrecognized resistance, and an effort, really, with the best will in the world, to be worthy of God and God's goodness and God's will. It's kind of amusing, because it's so completely backward, but that's where we got at.

[30:47]

There's two sides there. It's the one of not allowing God in because of what God will reveal about us to ourselves. And the other part is that we will not let God in because I'm not yet worthy. And I will work my way up to being worthy and then I'll invite God in. Of course, that's backwards too. It can't happen that way. Every day I wake up in the morning with a minus 100 and hope to work my way up to zero. You know, so that there's nothing wrong, and then God will find me inhabitable. Some of that is just simply, you know, it's recognizing that salvation is not of my making, and then opening myself and saying, okay, come on in, where I'm at. God won't leave me where I'm at. That's the painful part. Religion seems to be, if I understood it correctly, not divorced from reality.

[32:07]

And reality is not. It's something separate from God. Reality is not something separate from God. Right, right. You may have death going around you, or death in your life, or things going on in your life. If I understand you correctly, the exodus counts, you know, as one of bringing God into it, inviting God into it. The other half of it, the danger and the monastic life, the sheltered life. But the other half of it goes big. You know, it's all God and like, there's nothing, you know. God almost like separated from what's going on around me.

[33:13]

It seemed like a beautiful thing when they put both of them together. Yeah. Yeah. That was a... interesting, mysterious theory or teaching on liturgy, where Otto Kassel, who was a monk of Maria Lach in Germany, talked about the core reality of a historical event being present in today's liturgy. And there was a lot of controversy about that, and trying to say exactly what that in fact meant. I think finally he got down to the point of saying that the historical event is an historical event, and as historical event, it cannot be repeated.

[34:30]

in this moment, but the core reality of that event is the eternal God, who is also present in this moment now, with us. So what we're celebrating, you know, we read the gospel, and we reflect back on all of these events of salvation history, only to discover that that salvation history, came to an end about two and a half seconds ago. And now, two and a half seconds ago again, you understand. So salvation history is something, the event of God is continuing to go on. And the event of God is happening right in this moment, right now, and it will happen this afternoon as well. This is the eternal God that we are encountering in liturgy in order to teach us that the God of history is the God who is with us presently. And what my prayer has to be is that mindfulness of God in my life now.

[35:36]

I can be mindful of God with me in a time of formal prayer, but eventually how that ripens in me, how the sour grape becomes honey, is when I can go out and take care of the sheep and know that this is a salvation event. God is in this as well. And so it comes to a point, finally, that there's no distinction between liturgy and life. And when I start making a distinction between liturgy and life, then I'm divorcing myself a little bit from God, who is always present. But, you know, let that grow. It will grow if we let it grow. I'll probably now stay with God, stay in your unconscious, so that no one plays with me.

[36:59]

Now, I think, I guess, what we're maybe striving to find is how to integrate God into our experience and not think about concepts of God. It can be deeply personal, it can serve as a challenge to come along. For me, that's what a challenge is, to see God. I've never had a lot of time to close my eyes. I don't want to see that God, I want to experience that there's something here. He's addressing a binder of angels. It's a family experience. I'm very hopeful right here. You know, being in the boat with Jesus. Rock the boat too.

[38:01]

I think that's good for us. I got something I've done for personal comfort somewhere. Oh, I want to soothe comfort. Remember to salute. Praise the gods. That's new. It's very comforting, you know, to be able to conceptualize God in some way or another. I think that if atheists have any ministry towards Christians, It's that atheists call us on our concepts and say, what you are saying about a god is nonsense. And they're right.

[39:02]

Because you can't put it into words. Aquinas says, we know by analogy. But even the analogies are so far from what God is and from who God is that in some way we just simply have to open ourselves to what God has allowed to be said about God and not start creating images. God doesn't have a name. We really don't have a name for God. Even Yahweh is not God's name. It's a descriptive thing, the one who is, God who is. But the minute we start thinking that we've got God pegged, we find out God's behind us someplace, not in front of us. Yeah, I'll tell you about that. Eugene McKay had a thing in Blackfriars recently, that actually God is a pagan name.

[40:07]

That's not how God has revealed himself at all. yeah that's good so we will put together and do the dishes and we'll be able to eat and so on thanks thank you

[40:32]

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