Calorie

That’s just a unit of energy, the calorie. It’s what we sometimes look for in what we eat and when we want to burn off what we’ve eaten. It’s the stuff that keeps us breathing and living, the thing in the fuel that keeps our engines humming. Wondrously, all the energy that is created and used up in this little planet of ours comes from only one filling station: the sun. Some of that energy leaks out into space in the form of longwave radiation. (Don’t ask me where and how the sun ultimately gets its calories from the universe.)

Eventually, the fire in this star of ours will run out. (Don’t worry. It will take millions of years before that happens.) Closer to home, we know that wear and tear will ultimately take the warmth out of our bodies. We too will eventually cease to breathe and live. And that’s just a matter of years or decades downstream. It will happen despite jumpstarting and plugging prodigious amounts of energy into our body system. (Don’t ask me why we can’t just replace the batteries and wires in our bodies and simply push the restart button.)

All this is just to prod us into pondering what it is that keeps us alive. The stories of this Sunday do that. The readings about hunger and desertion in the desert, about manna and Jesus as bread from heaven invite us to ask what it is that ultimately keeps us going even if we know that we are going to be gone someday.

If you are a non-believer, you will want to play safe and be simply clinical or agnostic about the whole thing and say it is the calorie that keeps us going. (Finding out what charges up the calorie or what energizes energy can be cumbersome.) If you are a believer though, you might take risks and be foolish enough to suppose that we are meant to live with God forever. And for such fools of the faith, the calories that matter are not necessarily the calories we ingest.

There is heartbreak in his voice today when Jesus tells the crowd chasing him, “you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled. Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” Those words could very well be the lament of a lover to her beloved. You were not looking for me; you were only looking out for yourself. How could you have missed the sign? How could you have missed the giver for the gift?

Perhaps it is impermanence that compounds our blindness and doubt and ensuing hunger. The first reading from Exodus reminds us of how deadly hunger can be. Israel is there in the wilderness, in an in-between time and place, not much different from where we are now. Uncertain and insecure about the future, they end up doubting their deliverance and hungering for the permanence of what they had just escaped from. Would that we had died at the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt as we sat by our fleshpots and ate our fill of bread! But you had to lead us into this desert to make the whole community die of famine!”

If hunger keeps coming back, it is because the fullness does not last. St Ignatius Loyola, the master of discernment, saw early on the value of this interplay between hunger and fullness, between desire and fulfillment. He appreciated how fullness itself and its duration had many variations. From experience he knew that there were thoughts and fantasies that gave him spectacular highs but were nonetheless transient. He also discovered certain desires that yielded highs that would not dissipate as fast as the rest. From these stirrings in his soul, he learned to sift out the movements that were fleeting from those that drew him closer to God.

If we are to look and work for bread that endures for all eternity, it will help to cultivate this practice of discernment. Such a habit entails sharpening our sensitivity to the waves of hunger that toss us around, and training ourselves to be honest about the duration and quality of fullness in our lives.

It is this habit of discernment that enables André Dubus to see fullness in a sandwich:

“A sacrament is physical. And within it is God’s love; as a sandwich is physical, and nutritious and pleasurable, and within it is love, if someone makes it for you and gives it to you with love; even harried or tired or impatient love, but with love’s direction and concern, love’s again and again wavering and distorted focus on goodness; then God’s love too is in the sandwich. A sacrament is an outward sign of God’s love, they taught me when I was a boy, and in the Catholic church there are seven. But, no, I say, for the church is catholic, the world is catholic, and there are seven times seventy sacraments to infinity.”

So there you have it. Even the little things we offer each other in love can contain the calories that count and keep us going. Even in something as perishable as a sandwich, there is eternity and permanence to be found.