Quote

“If man is not made for God, why is he happy only in God? If man is made for God, why is he opposed to God?”

Blaise Pascal

Jan 8, Christmas Season

Not long ago, the newspapers published the picture of a new breed of chickens. Scientists had produced a chicken without feathers. Not a pretty sight I reckon, but an example of how we try to economize and prevent the waste of energy of these chickens in producing useless feathers so that all their energy can be invested in producing a greater quantity of meat in a shorter period of time. One “domestic chicken” today can produce several times the amount of food a “wild chicken” would be able to produce.

We have learnt to multiply food. For some reason, we love multiplications. In fact we call one of the most famous miracles of Jesus, the miracle of the multiplication of bread and fish. However, the gospel does not speak of multiplication. It speaks of sharing, breaking and distributing. The power of Jesus over nature is as obvious as the increasing capacity of technology to conquer the laws of nature. We are learning to multiply and yet we fail to learn when it comes to sharing and distributing. Starving and pouring food down the drain literally can be found side by side.

The real miracle is to learn to divide with compassion as Jesus did when he distributed the food in today’s gospel. The real miracle is to learn to break the bread at our tables as we do it on our altars.