People are searching for Jesus. When they find him, Jesus challenges them as to why, “You are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate loaves and were filled.” Jesus challenges them further, to follow his Way, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger.”
People kept poor will always know spiritual and physical hunger; as in Jesus’ time, so too in our own. The challenge to follow the Way of the Bread of Life and to be ourselves the Bread of Life remains. It is a most vital challenge for farmers. Farming is a vocation physically reflecting the Gospel’s witness to be the Bread of Life. Farmers across the world dedicate themselves to nourishing their brothers and sisters. They struggle though to be nourished themselves, spiritually and physically. The struggle has been particularly hard for farmers in Cuba who have been organizing and joining street protests this past July. The struggle is due to the U.S.’ media and capitalist resort entities, Cuba’s own colluding dictators, and their combined inept Covid-19 response. Across the world, these forces and many more are starving farmers out of their vocation. These many forces are addressed and resolved in the recent book, Rethinking Food and Agriculture. It identifies six impediments to a vocation of caring for the land and people and shows six ways to move through them for our collective nourishment. One, we are impeded by a materialist knowing of nature. It separates and makes superior people over nature as it separates and makes superior scientific knowing over intuitive or wisdom knowing. Our Way through can be together, to know “nature as organic, interconnected and alive” and includes us. Two, we are impeded by the materialist’s value of domination over lesser nature and people that focuses on ownership, production, technology, and markets all gamed for plunder vs. scarcity. Our Way through can be together, to accept nature is abundant, as are we, as shown by “peasant(s), women, and indigenous communities and activists around the world.” Three, we are impeded by materialism’s dominant industrial production-consumption cycle that is unsustainable; “ecologically, economically and socially.” Our Way through can be together, to create regenerative “food webs,” “soil,” “landscape and watershed health.” Four, we are impeded by capitalists’ control over resources for purposes of wealth yet are “unaccountable to society or nature.” Our Way through can be together, to “develop alternatives to the corporate food regime” and to “decentralize power, wealth, and resources” “back down to the grassroots.” Five, we are impeded by capitalists promoting diets of processed foods, sugar, sodium, and poisoned animals which cause obesity in tandem with malnutrition. Our Way through can be together, to live on plant-based foods that are inherently nutritious and beneficial for our health, that of animals, and the earth. Six, we are impeded by a wealth control structure that stifles and destroys challenges to it. Our Way through can be together, to build people power making “radically transformative structural change in the food and agriculture system” and in “existing grassroots social movements.” If we do not make our Way through these impediments together, then, one by one, we shall be separated, dominated, unsupported, controlled, poisoned, and ineffective. Apart, the impediments are killing us. Together, we are the Bread of Life.
“The trees complied with the woodsman’s request and agreed to provide the woodsman with a handle for his axe to be taken from just the one ash tree, who had begged them all to say, “No.” The woodsman began to use the axe. And then, one by one, felled them all. An old oak, with the axe cutting at its skin, lamented, ‘Together, we could have stood for ages.’” (Aesop)
Prayer: Spirit of Communion, we live and grow together
Question: What is the rethinking I need to do about food and agriculture?
August 1, 2021 Gospel John 6:24-35 Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time