My mother never really got over her own mother’s death. Every time she thought of it she shed a tear. Mam was sixteen when her mother died. If she spoke, one of the things she’d often say was. ‘ It was awful to walk into the back of the house when I was coming home from work and be heading into the kitchen and not to get the smell of baking’. Her mother was a great cook. When her mother was alive every time she came home there was a warm smell of baking to welcome her. I suppose I discovered the significance of that when I’d be about to put the key in the door in my own home and before I get the key out of my pocket the warm waft of mam’s home-made brown bread would lift my heart.
The bread had no recipe, it was a handful of this and a cupful of that. It was as unique as she was herself. Dad and I would be rushing to get to the butter first to allow it to melt in chunks onto the freshly baked hot bread. Today’s readings mention bread. Elisha feeding an army, and Jesus feeding the multitude. Today we read about it with our eyes on the missalette and we hear it as it’s proclaimed. I wonder what it was like to be there and to smell the fish frying and to smell the barley loaf as it was handed it to you. If you were hungry, how nourishing the smell alone would be before you had even taken a bite. And then the taste of it – what does a barley loaf taste like (Nice to know that they were good to gluten intolerant people back then!). How good was that feeling when the bread and the fish eventually hit the belly and your hunger was appeased.
We depend a lot on our senses of seeing and hearing, and we probably think less of our other senses of touch, taste and scent. Mind you, for a few weeks here many of us wished we didn’t have a sense of smell as somewhere underneath the sacristy floor there was a dead rat and literally every moment we could smell a rat. However, now it is a joy to go in and breathe in knowing that the air is not heavy with decay.
When we use all our senses we see and feel a lot more. This, I suppose, is obvious but it applies particularly to life with God. I find a line in this Gospel very reassuring and when you enter the Gospels trying not just to see and hear but even scenting the scene, tasting it and even touching aspects of it well it comes alive. I love the way Jesus does a runner! It’s not what you’d expect but isn’t it fascinating. It reminds me of story from a priest colleague from Limerick, and he told of a conversation at the dinner table one evening, about a new priest in the next parish in the days when churches were full and busier than they are today. He said the new priest had mass over in thirty minutes unlike the minimum of forty (if you were lucky) in the local parish. Then he went on to say a man would have to be in the church at least ten minutes before the mass started to get a seat so popular was the new priest! How Irish is that … you’d be spending the same amount of time in the Church but the fact that you’d only have to put up with the priest for less time, it was worth waiting ten minutes! But here we have Jesus doing much the same … he was in the midst of a Eucharistic moment and he did a runner!
This is where you use all your senses to get into what he was at to understand his sitz im leiben (life situation) as the scripture scholars would say.
To explore this situation, I want you told hold onto three words; fear, anxiety and awe. He was afraid of what the crowd were doing to him. Giving him earthly adulation. Maybe it was tempting and he was afraid he’d get to like it. But somehow he wasn’t prepared to pay the price because there was something more important to him – even more essential to him. So he wasn’t running to get ahead of the queue in the Jammer or Maroney’s (The Lombard). I think like us all he was dealing with, and facing his fear and anxiety, and he couldn’t do it in the crowd that was causing it all.
He was dealing with his fear – fear is the real and actual fear of something – you can see, taste, touch, hear even smell it – fear is part of who we are and we have to deal with it. Anxiety – maybe Jesus had a bit of that too. Anxiety is anguish without any real and evident cause. We can’t see, smell, taste, touch or hear it but, as far as we are concerned, it is real and it catches hold of us, and in some senses it is worse than fear as it can dig deep into us. Fear and anxiety rule the world at the moment and many say that it is a loss of the sense of the sacred that is at the heart of this. One characteristic of a mystic is that they don’t suffer from fear and anxiety. Awe is a gift of the Holy Spirit but it is a profound respect for what is sacred, unfathomable and unmanipulable. Jesus wanted to rid himself of fear and anxiety not by running for the Prozac jar or getting some weed, but to sit in the presence of his father and to be in awe of the love that they shared. It’s a sad thing that some, or even many, forms of religion dealt in fear due to unenlightened leadership, and in many ways it ruined the gift of God to us. There is no fear in awe described by one theologian as ‘a dizziness at the immensity and unfathomable nature of the sacred, often linked with a sense of how small, vulnerable, and finite human beings are.
The bakers of bread whom we remember today knew these things. Fear and anxiety serve no purpose, let’s be in awe of the process of life as they knew it. Let’s not be afraid of the dizziness of the sacred and let’s not be afraid of being unimportant as Jesus showed us in todays Gospel. At our Eucharist this evening let’s contemplate the words of Blessed Carlo Acutis that the Eucharist, what we do here this evening is ‘our highway to Heaven’.