Give them some food yourselves
In the Adult Education session delivered last Sunday on the Lectionary Readings for the month of June, we made reference to the novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens. It’s about the tendency of modern times (according to Dickens) to eradicate imagination, even beliefs, from the minds of children. Facts are what matter, data derived from scientific inquiry. Stories, poems, this thing called literature, even the Gospels can only mislead people, are never really true or shall we say verifiable – and therefore mess up our thinking. “Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else,” says Mr. Gradgrind who runs a local school, among whose teachers is Mr. McChoakumchild.
Later on in life Gradgrind’s daughter Louisa, miserable without his permission to lighten up her life with the likes of say Don Quixote or the Bible stories of Moses and the burning bush or the Magi following a star, confronts her father: “Father, . . . How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from a state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul . . . the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, oh, Father, . . . with the garden that should have blossomed once, in this great wilderness here?” She struck herself with both her hands upon her bosom.
Then Louisa (i.e. Dickens) says regarding the lost garden, “If it [that garden] had ever been here [in her bosom], its ashes alone would save me from the void in which my whole life sinks.” That’s quite a statement! It’s like saying, “Even if the Bible with all its prophecies and hopes and miracles were ultimately found to be untrue and oblivion our only destiny, still it would have made an otherwise unbearable, hopeless existence bearable, even motivated.” Of course the Bible remains history’s bestseller because it IS all about people of faith, inspired imaginations without which human intelligence would hardly have been challenged to advance as far as it has.
Today’s Gospel episode about the loaves and fishes offers one illustration of how such writing works. It presents us, like so many other biblical episodes, with two different worlds – the world we ordinarily live in and the world Jesus has come to initiate. The disciples illustrate our ordinary world or way of thinking. They see a desert all around them; they see an inconvenient, hungry crowd; they see the impossibility (with 5 loaves and 2 fish) of feeding them; they take the practical route and would send them off to fend for themselves. Is this not the way modern economics works?
And what does Jesus do? He offers us an experience of his kind of world. “Give them some food yourselves,” he says. “The little you think you have is so much more than you think. With a little faith, trust, imagination, courage, love you may find out that there is a lot more to 5 loaves and 2 fish than you calculate – enough to feed the world many times over.”
Now who wouldn’t want to live in Jesus’ kind of world? Louisa would. And every time we gather for the Eucharist, our re-enactment of today’s Gospel, we declare we would too.