Corpus Christi: Bread for the Wilderness (Luke 9: 11-17)

They were in a lonely, deserted place. Yet Jesus did not send the people away. Instead, He asked them to sit down. He took what was there, so little, so ordinary, blessed it, broke it, and gave it. And all were satisfied. That moment has never stopped echoing through time. Today, we find ourselves in many such deserted places. Cities shattered by war, skies filled with smoke, children lost to senseless violence. We see mothers clutching empty arms in Gaza. Iran and Ukraine. We hear the earth crying under the weight of floods, fires, poisoned rivers, and forests stripped bare. The wilderness is no longer far away. It is here. It is now. The memory of one such wilderness still stirs the heart of the world.

Fifteen days after the atom bomb destroyed the city of Hiroshima, Fr Pedro Arrupe, S.J., then a young Jesuit novice master, walked the ravaged streets with medicine and food. His hands moved between bodies and wounds, but something deeper was being asked of him.

“He came across a hut of tin and poles where a big house had once stood. In the hut he found a young Christian girl named Nakamura San. Her whole body was one big wound, full of burns and pus oozing out. When Fr Arrupe sought to clean her wounds, the flesh just fell off, rotten and swarming with maggots. Fr Arrupe knelt by her side, dumb with horror and compassion. It was then that Nakamura opened her eyes, and with eager joy she asked him: ‘Father, have you brought me Holy Communion?’ Fr Arrupe nodded. With tears of joy the fervent girl received the Bread of Life. Soon after she breathed her last.” (At home with God by Hedwig Lewis, SJ.)

This is the mystery we dare to believe: that even when the world burns, even when children die, even when nature groans, Christ remains with us.

Teilhard de Chardin once wrote, “The Eucharist is the universe being made into the Body of Christ.” Not only the bread on the altar, but the vast and trembling cosmos is drawn into His embrace. And if this is so, then every part of creation carries a sacred echo of His Body. The soil cracked by drought, the ocean thick with plastic, forests razed by greed, the lungs of children filled with dust, the rivers that can no longer sing—these, too, are His wounds. The Body of Christ is broken again in creation, suffering quietly in the silence of the Earth. Yet from these very wounds, love still flows. He is not absent from these broken places. He is there, waiting to be recognized, to be reverenced, to be lifted up. All of us carry the DNA of God. The whole cosmos does. And so, the brokenness of the world is not beyond Him. It is within Him. And within us.

- Lilly Pushpam PBVM