The Forever Bread

" Moses said to the people: 'Remember how for forty years now, the Lord, your God, has directed all your journeying in the desert, so as to test you by affliction and find out whether or not it was your intention to keep His Commandments. He therefore let you be afflicted with hunger, and then fed you with manna, a food unknown to you and your fathers, in order to show you that not by bread alone does one live, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of the Lord."  [Deuteronomy 8:2-3].

In the news, recently, is the story about a new food product, touted as "your go-to-meal, so you don't have to think about anything else." --[The New York Times,  May 28, 2014].  It is called Soylent,  a liquid intended to substitute for meals, for those times when we are too busy to eat, or too inclined to binge on junk food.

Soylent is advertised as scientifically engineered to offer all the nutrients one needs for survival.

The reporter who wrote the New York Times article about Soylent, Farhod Manjoo, tried to live on Soylent alone for over a week. He called it, "punishingly boring, joyless, purposely bland, motel-beige carpet hued, gritty, inoffensive and dull, leaching the joy out of food."

The Soylent controversy reminds me of the controversy over manna in the Old Testament. It was described by the Israelites as flakes of frost that appeared each morning like the dew. The Israelites gathered the manna and baked it into 'plain-vanilla' cakes for every meal. And they complained against God for this dreary and boring sustenance.

The basic problem with the same old nutritionally- sound, but bland food, day after day, is the lack of depth, the lack of complexity or joy.

It was like that in my childhood. If I could not eat the four day old leftovers that I was given for dinner, or the mushy cereal day after day for breakfast, I subsisted on glasses of milk and on skipped meals.

The piece of bread with butter, that a girlfriend's grandmother gave me for a snack now and again, began tasting like the most amazing food ever.

I never took food for granted again. By the time I was five, I was figuring out which days I would likely not be fed edible breakfast, or dinner either. That meant that I would have to alleviate the hunger by going about my day, finding food for a good lunch. I also took to hoarding sweets in my room, in case I could not find food that day.

 I was not living by bread alone. I was merely surviving, for the lack of food. Neighbors, teachers were becoming alarmed at how thin I was. I look at old photos of myself, and I am all arms and legs and no substance.

I will never believe that God engineered my constant physical hunger, in order to prove a point, in order to drive me to Him in desperation.

But God DID give me the Grace to seek Him, over time, more and more. When you have nothing else, not enough food, no one to hug you and say, "I love you", only harsh words and neglect, what else DO you have --except God?

It has taken me a lot of time and reflection to realize that my hunger has always been about a lot more than physical famine. My hunger was for Love and understanding.

As I grew up and matured, I figured out that the only enduring source of nourishment is God. He does not cause our hunger, but He is the only One, through His Only Son, who can truly feed us -- heart and soul.

Jesus'  bread gives Life. Jesus'  bread is given so that, "whoever eats this bread will live forever." [John 6: 58]. Jesus' bread gives the Love that can never be taken away. Jesus' Corpus is the "Forever Bread"; always deep, complex, fully satisfying, rich in meaning, enduring, Infinite.

[Related Postings: "Corpus Christi", June 27, 2011; "Holy Body and Blood of Christ", June 7, 2012; "The Body and Blood", June 2, 2013.]

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