Going to the beach isn’t exactly the best place to go midway through an effort to constrain one’s once again increasing girth. One might think that being vegetarian would help, but let me assure you that it does not.
Sure, I’m eating a veggie burger, but it’s hard to feel that vegetarian virtue when I’m getting it with a fried egg, fried mushrooms, cheese, and a side of fries the size of the average rabbit.
I’m back to pushing myself to exercise more, which is good for me, and paying more attention to what I eat, mapping out my daily calorie counts against the medically determined expectation for what a man of my height and age needs. In kilocalories, or what we just call calories, that’s around 2,450 a day to maintain life.
The average Spaniard takes in around 2,600 calories a day. The average Japanese, 2,100. The average American? 3,700. We eat thirty percent more than we need. And it shows.
Seventy-four percent of the U.S. population is technically overweight. The diet and weight loss industry in this country is a $135 billion dollar enterprise, one that was recently upended by the arrival of GLP-1, which is on track to hit 65 billion in sales this year, with nearly 12% of the population of the United States currently using Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 agonists to constrain and suppress appetite. It’s clearly something that I’m not alone in struggling with. We consume too much, and exercise too little, and when you’re surrounded by an endless groaning table of synthetic deliciousness, it’s hard not to yield to that siren song.
Here in this country, we clearly have trouble with food, trouble coping with our fear of of absence and the presence of consumerist "abundance." Rather than taking just what we need, we seem unable to constrain ourselves. Are we fearful we’ll not eat tomorrow? Are we soothing some broader anxiety about our place in the world, or our futures?
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The story of the loaves and the fishes is a simple story about our fears and our food, one retold by all of the Gospels, but it’s got a couple of unusual and noteworthy elements. First, it’s really rather amazingly simple. Like so many of the tales that rise from our recountings of the life of Jesus, it’s visceral, a fundamentally graspable and elemental thing, the stuff of the everyday.
The context of the tale in Matthew is one of mourning. Jesus has received the news that John the Baptist, his cousin and a prophet of the coming of the Kingdom, was murdered by Herod. Jesus needed some time alone, and so sought out a place to be in private for a while, taking a boat to an unnamed location.
But Jesus being Jesus, and the word about him humming about in the world, a crowd gathered.
They wanted to hear this prophet, this teacher, this wonderworker, and perhaps to be healed. Again, Jesus being Jesus, he had compassion on them, and healed and tended to them. The day was growing late, and the disciples, seeing the throngs, were eager to wrap things up and send folks on their way. That, and they were worried, because out there in the wild, there was no way they could ensure everyone got fed. Let’s call it, they said, so’s that folks can find their way to nearby villages.
How can we know they’ve got food? We have a little food, sure, but they might not. They are anxious about the gathering, anxious that hungry crowds might lose sight of their message, anxious that there will not be enough.
Which, Jesus knew, there was.
In the face of their anxiety about what they had, Jesus told them: give it away. Break the bread. Cook the fish. Share it with a blessing.
The start of that miracle was the act of not worrying about it, and sharing graciously.
We who have so much poured out to us, and in whom so much potential lies, we need to trust that sort of miracle. This does not come easily for us, particularly as we’ve acclimatized ourselves to expecting more, more and always more, always hungry, never filled.
Some miracles are just right there, ready to happen, just waiting to be seen and acted upon. The joy of life, of growing and giving and sharing from whatever sweetness we have been given? That’ s the deepest of miracles. But first, we have to be able to see it through the thickets of our anxiety, and the depths of our grasping.
The story of the loaves and the fishes is a simple story about our fears and our food, one retold by all of the Gospels, but it’s got a couple of unusual and noteworthy elements. First, it’s really rather amazingly simple. Like so many of the tales that rise from our recountings of the life of Jesus, it’s visceral, a fundamentally graspable and elemental thing, the stuff of the everyday.
The context of the tale in Matthew is one of mourning. Jesus has received the news that John the Baptist, his cousin and a prophet of the coming of the Kingdom, was murdered by Herod. Jesus needed some time alone, and so sought out a place to be in private for a while, taking a boat to an unnamed location.
But Jesus being Jesus, and the word about him humming about in the world, a crowd gathered.
They wanted to hear this prophet, this teacher, this wonderworker, and perhaps to be healed. Again, Jesus being Jesus, he had compassion on them, and healed and tended to them. The day was growing late, and the disciples, seeing the throngs, were eager to wrap things up and send folks on their way. That, and they were worried, because out there in the wild, there was no way they could ensure everyone got fed. Let’s call it, they said, so’s that folks can find their way to nearby villages.
How can we know they’ve got food? We have a little food, sure, but they might not. They are anxious about the gathering, anxious that hungry crowds might lose sight of their message, anxious that there will not be enough.
Which, Jesus knew, there was.
In the face of their anxiety about what they had, Jesus told them: give it away. Break the bread. Cook the fish. Share it with a blessing.
The start of that miracle was the act of not worrying about it, and sharing graciously.
We who have so much poured out to us, and in whom so much potential lies, we need to trust that sort of miracle. This does not come easily for us, particularly as we’ve acclimatized ourselves to expecting more, more and always more, always hungry, never filled.
Some miracles are just right there, ready to happen, just waiting to be seen and acted upon. The joy of life, of growing and giving and sharing from whatever sweetness we have been given? That’ s the deepest of miracles. But first, we have to be able to see it through the thickets of our anxiety, and the depths of our grasping.
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