Jesus claimed, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They kept saying: “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph?”
A friend of mine who runs a business that produces rivets and related products returned recently from the annual Oshkosh airshow in Wisconsin. The show assembles old and the latest aircraft from around the world – including famous warplanes from WW II. My friend attends this event because he makes the rivets and repair kits that continue to hold planes together.
While he was there this year he met a ninety-five year old former fighter pilot who flew a P 51 over Japan on the last air assault made before the war ended. He had other adventures as well, like getting shot down twice. When he heard my friend made rivets, this old pilot, who spent his career amid the strictly scientific terminology of aviation technology, surprisingly began to raise rivets to a much higher level of meaning.
From his advanced age he began to lament the discord that makes our world uncertain of its future. It’s as if the world has been falling apart and needs some riveting. Rivets hold things together, keep the fuselage and wings of a plane from flying apart due to the vibrations of its violent engines and its constant collision with the wind. And what with the way our world is constantly under stress – with groups like ISIS for one example and even the racial tensions in our own country or even the tensions within the church – it feels like the rivets: the good will, the tolerance, the guidance of reason and faith are coming loose. We’re heading for a crash.
Well I was amazed. I never thought a guy so familiar with technology, aerodynamics, the practical world of fasteners could have the imagination to turn a rivet into a metaphor! Suddenly it wasn’t just a thing, a fastener applied to the fabric of an airplane to hold the plane together; it was a word that could be applied to anything that contributed to human solidarity: kindness, understanding, honest communication, friendly gestures, all ways of keeping us intact, united, aloft. Indeed riveting as a verb began to mean more than just applying a fastening tool to metal bolts inserted into aligned holes to link up pieces of metal (in the manner of Rosie the Riveter). Riveting, as a word, could be used to describe the effect of eloquent speech upon an audience – unifying their hearts and minds – as in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Or it could be used to describe the effect of a movie on fascinated viewers.
We are so used to ordinary speech, words meaning simply what they practically or logically describe. But that doesn’t stop us human beings from finding in ordinary words a capacity to say so much more than we think they can. For instance a morning star is not uncommonly seen if you get up early enough. But to us kids who used to recite the Litany of Loreto – the morning star was the Virgin Mary, herald of a new day! Gertrude Stein is famous for saying “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” – meaning that’s all it is! But that’s not all the word rose meant to that Irish balladeer who wrote Oh no, ’twas the truth in her eyes ever dawning, / That made me love Mary, the Rose of Tralee.
And now, after all that, if words can mean more than they literally say – may that not suggest that you and I, despite what physics, biology, genetics, race or IQ may say, are so much more than all that? Even as Jesus in today’s Gospel may describe himself, whole and entire, as bread, celestial nourishment – in the manner of William Blake who found infinity in a grain of sand and in every passing hour the lure of eternity.