Today’s readings: Isaiah 55, 1-3; Romans 8, 35.37-39; Matt14, 13-21.
In today’s gospel, Jesus pities those who even while searching for him and following him, were lost and in “a lonely place”, with no belonging, with no true points of reference in life, even with no true spiritual nourishment. This is religion at its worst. Perhaps it is the mainstream inherited religion in the West which we struggle with no little fatigue to pass on to the emerging generations.
In religion, as we many a time perceive it, there is so much that is futile, that leaves us ultimately untouched and on a superficial plane. Freud may very easily be proved right if we examine our traditional and conventional ways of relating to religion and to God. To be religious, he affirmed, is to be trapped in childhood – taking comfort in an illusory protector and refusing to grow up.
Unfortunately, this is characteristic of the religion we were brought up with in our culture. No wonder that in the wake of the crisis of Modernity the issue about the relevance of faith, of religion, of the need to belong to a church has been recurring. As long as Christianity and religion in general are thought of in terms of an intellectual luxury, questions about the nourishment they can provide in life remain.
For centuries, faith and religion in the West have been identified with culture and have been transformed in something that is cultural and conventional. Faith needs culture, but can never become a culture. Whenever it does, it loses its sense of provocation, it loses its prophecy. It becomes the religion of the masses, something it was never meant to be.
It is only in the wake of the shake-up we’ve been through that today, and particularly in our cultural contexts, things are being sifted. As John Michelthwait and Adrian Wooldridge write in their book God is Back, “For a growing number of people, religion is no longer taken for granted or inherited; it is based on adults making a choice, going to a synagogue, temple, church or mosque. Deciding not to go at all – a category that stretches from lazy stay-in-bed agnosticism to passionate atheism – is part of the pluralism that characterises our culture today”.
In today’s Scriptures, faith is presented as nourishment and healing. It is not food for thought but food that nourishes. There can be many different ways of perceiving and living the faith and of experiencing ultimately the force that faith can inject in us. Reading from St Paul’s letter to the Romans today about “the trials through which we triumph” and that “nothing can ever come between us and the love of God” can give an inkling of what faith in the Lord can really be about.
While in the wake of the implications of secularisation in our contexts we continue to enter into what can easily be futile debates, supposedly to uphold what once in the culture we breathed were sacred principles, elsewhere faith and religion are still issues of life and death.
What has been happening in Mosul, Iraq, these days is a case in point. In Mosul, the new caliphate declared by a Sunni Islamist group - the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) – is offering Christians three choices: convert to islam, pay the poll tax if you want to reside in a Muslim country, or the sword. Many Christians there, are taking the fourth option – evacuation.
And it is not only in Mosul that Christians or other religious minorities are going through this. What is happening in these parts of the globe should, of course, be an eye-opener for the rest of us if we really wish to come to terms with what faith is about. Isaiah warns about forms of religion that can be irrelevant to what we really need in life: “Why spend money on what is not bread, your wages on what fails to satisfy?”
It was a timely admonition Isaiah was addressing to religious people for whom religion had simply become a comfort zone. It is by and large the same admonition Jesus is addressing to the disciples in today’s gospel and to the Church in our times when he definitely redirects their way of dealing with people in their pastoral needs: “Give them something to eat yourselves”. When confused and hungry, people need compassion not doctrine, what satisfies the heart, not the mind.