A FAST FOOD THANKSGIVING - PART II

Thanksgiving season is a time to give thanks for spiritual bread.

We are reminded of Jesus’ reply to the tempter. Yes, man does not live by bread alone – our daily bread. But even more, said Jesus to the multitudes looking for the fast food lunch, “do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life….” John 6:27

Thanksgiving notwithstanding, if you are like I am, you could probably do with a little less physical bread and a little more spiritual bread. I am reminded of a story told by Beverly Sills, the onetime famous soprano of New York’s Metropolitan Opera.

Sills tells of one opera where her leading man, Sherrill Milnes, in the course of rehearsals and performance, was required to carry her across stage thirty times. She apologized to Milnes about her weight. He said he didn’t mind. “I was a farm boy,” said Milnes, “accustomed to hoisting five hundred pound bales of hay.” “Somehow,” says Beverly Sills, “our love scene that night lacked its usual ardor!”

If many of us need to lose a little physical weight, most of us need to add some spiritual weight, as it were, to our souls. And yet, many people seem to want a fast-food, drive-thru, take-out, ground-up religion that requires no intellectual chewing. They want instant McNuggets of religion and instant whoppers of religious inspiration, pre-packaged, pre-processed, and available at no-pledge, fast-food, mass-produced prices. And who knows what nutritional value it contains? But Jesus suggested working for the bread that leads to eternal life, not just gulping it.

Jesus would advise us to turn toward the Word of God for truth. Seek out those writers who feed mind and soul with the great adult themes of sacrifice, ecstasy, pain, joy, suffering, death, triumph, morality, generosity, love, integrity and devotion to higher values in the face of all odds. As Jesus said, we live spiritually by the Word of God. Great things begin to happen when we take seriously that Word.

In his book, Man’s Search For A Soul, psychoanalyst C.G. Jung, has written that of the many, many people he had counseled from all over the world, one of the basic needs he uncovered was that of “finding a religious outlook on life.” That was especially true of people over thirty-five. And said Dr. Jung, “none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.” (p. 265, quoted in Interpreters Bible, Vol. 8, p. 564)

This Thanksgiving we may well have gathered in restaurants, stadiums or TV rooms to gulp our food in a fast-food Thanksgiving. But fast or slow, Jesus advises us to be thankful for truly good meat and bread and drink for the body. But even more he advises us to work for the spiritual bread which satisfies mind and soul – the bread which pushes back greed and graft, which forestalls discouragement and despair, the bread which nourishes us for life eternal. And as those first century disciples said to Jesus, so we would say, “Lord, give us this bread always.”