Walter J. Burghardt£ 
c . c i . - A ^ i t a T 

Qeven 
°{-]ungers 

OF THE HUMAN FAMILY 





SEVEN HUNGERS 
of the Human Family 

Walter J. Burghardt, S.J. 

* 
A Creative Service 

of the United States Catholic Conference 
Washington, D.C. 



© Copyright 1976 
United States Catholic Conference 

All Rights Reserved 







CONTENTS 

1 

2 

3 

5 

6 

7 

FOREWORD 7 

ON BREAD ALONE 
Hunger for Food 8 

TO SET AT LIBERTY THE OPPRESSED 
Hunger for Freedom and Justice 16 

SWORDS INTO PLOUGHSHARES 
Hunger for Peace 24 

¿J TRUTH IS IN JESUS 
Hunger for Truth 32 

YOU DO NOT KNOW ME 
Hunger for Understanding 40 

WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME? 
Hunger for God 48 

BREAD FOR THE LIFE OF THE WORLD 
Hunger for Jesus 56 





FOREWORD 

A "mystery," in Catholic belief, is not a mere meaningless 
riddle. "Mystery" is used in this sense, for instance, when we 
are asked to explain the reason behind somebody else's evi-
dently senseless words or acts and we reply: "That's a mystery 
to me." In such cases, "mystery" suggests absence of meaning. 

It is quite otherwise with an authentic "mystery" in the 
religious sense." Mystery" here does not signify lack of meaning. 
It signifies the opposite: so much meaning, such a divine 
superabundance of significance, that it is literally beyond the 
capacities of human intelligence fully to comprehend the 
"mysterious" truth which is involved. 

This is preeminently the case with the Eucharist. When we 
speak of the Eucharist as a "mystery," we point to the fact that 
here is an overwhelmingly rich reality whose meaning for our 
lives is, humanly speaking, absolutely inexhaustible. 

This, it seems to me, is the central message of both the 41st 
International Eucharistic Congress (Philadelphia, August 1-8, 
1976) and of this collection of essays, first delivered as radio 
talks, by Father Walter J. Burghardt, S.J. The central theme, 
"The Eucharist and the Hungers of the Human Family," is a 
reminder that this gift of God speaks to profound human 
needs, spiritual, emotional and material. 

The more we reflect upon the Eucharist, the more we learn 
about God's love for us and about the loving response we are 
called upon to make. The more we turn to the Eucharist for 
help in living our lives as followers of Christ in the world, the 
more help—light, strength and encouragement—we shall re-
ceive. The more fully we immerse ourselves in the Eucharistic 
mystery, the more closely we shall find ourselves joined in 
union with Christ and with one another. 

I commend this little book to those who will read it, not 
because it unravels the "mystery" of the Eucharist (which 
cannot be done), but because it makes clear how rich a source 
of instruction and inspiration, and how relevant to our lives, 
this mystery truly is. 

Most Rev. Joseph L. Bernardin 
Archbishop of Cincinnati 
President, National Conference 

of Catholic Bishops 

7 



ON BREAD ALONE 
Hunger for Food 

MIMI FORSYTH 



1 
ONE of the most powerful scenes in the life of Christ is the first great act of His public ministry. As Matthew tells it, 
He "was led up by the Spirit into the desert"—apparently the 
barren highland of Judea to the west of the Dead Sea in the 
lower Jordan valley—desert that in the Hebrew tradition was 
at once the place of encounter with God and the abode of 
demons. Why led there? "To be tempted by the devil"---the 
same devil who of old had tempted the first Adam and mastered 
him. For 40 days and 40 nights He fasted—very much like 
Moses—and "afterwards He was hungry." Then the tempter 
came to Him, came with a devilish temptation, to misuse His 
messianic power, to use it to His own advantage: "If you are 
God's Son, command these stones to become loaves of bread." 
But Jesus answered: "Not on bread alone shall man live, but 
on every word that proceeds from God's mouth" (Mt 4:1-4). 

Not on bread alone shall man live. That phrase, torn from 
its original messianic context, has sparked Christian spirituality 
for centuries. It is a preacher's cliché. What marks us off from 
the pagan, from the humanist, from the sensualist is that our 
hearts are in heaven, our souls have taken wing. We do not 
live to eat, we eat to live. Protein isn't all that important; we 
have a food that comes down like manna from heaven. More 
significant than my corruptible flesh is my deathless soul. 

Today our perspectives have changed drastically. Not that 
we Christians deny the priority of spirit over matter. Rather 
that we refuse to cleave the human person in two; we are more 
inclined to see man or woman as a whole, as embodied spirit; 
the body is inescapably man, inescapably woman. And this one 
person, this man, this woman, is in unparalleled peril because, 
to change Mary's words at Cana, "they have no bread." And so, 
in this eucharistic year, when Catholics are focusing on the 

S 9 



Bread of Life, the world is focusing on the life of bread. Man 
may not live on bread alone, but without bread he will not live. 

In this context three questions surge up: (1) Is hunger for 
bread really a major crisis in our world? (2) If it is, why is 
it? (3) What can we who are not hungry do about it? The 
same three issues in different words: some hard facts, some 
basic causes, some suggested solutions. 

I 

FIRST then, is hunger really a major crisis in our world? To this question there is but one answer: a resounding yes. At 
this moment, at least 460 million people are hungry. Not 
hungry just for the moment, as you or I might feel a fitful 
craving for food, might suddenly realize we have not eaten all 
day. No, these 460 million are starving. I mean that this man's 
body is literally eating itself up, feeding on itself. His kidneys 
and liver are functioning badly. He is bone-weary and his mind 
is terribly confused. He has little defense against disease, 
against infection. He has lost a third of his normal weight, and 
when that loss goes beyond 40 percent, he will almost surely 
die. 

Nor are these 460 million the sum total of the hungry. There 
are all those others who have enough calories to live, but lack 
so much else—proteins and other essential nutrients—that 
they cannot function at normal strength, cannot think and 
play, cannot work and pray in a fashion you and I take for 
granted. In their day there is simply no joy; they are too tired 
for joy. 

If all this seems abstract to you, dreadfully cut-and-dried, 
then look at one city. As a national magazine pictured it 
recently, 

Calcutta presents a harrowing vision. The destitute, 
the skin-and-bones starving, the leprous and the 
dying seem to be concentrated there as nowhere else 
in India—or the world. Their numbers, swollen by 
past waves of refugees from Bangladesh, grow daily. 
At least 200,000 of them live in the streets, building 
tiny fires to cook their scraps of food, defecating at 
curbstones, curling up in their cotton rags against a 
wall to sleep—and often to die.1 

If Calcutta seems coldly remote, then fix your eyes on 
America, on the United States. In this land of plenty, 10 mil-

10 



lion Americans go to bed hungry each night, 25 million more 
suffer from malnutrition: all told, one out of every six 
Americans. This is not a naked, abstract figure. It means that 
pregnant women will give birth to defective children, that 
grown men rummage in garbage cans, that elderly women are 
eating dog food. It means that there are North American 
babies, like west African babies, who are too weak to do more 
than whimper, babies whose minds and bodies are already 
beyond repair. 

If all this does not get to you, then do what Arthur Simon 
has done: 

Imagine ten children at a table dividing up food. 
The three healthiest load their plates with large 
portions, including most of the meat, fish, milk 
and eggs. They eat what they want and discard 
the leftovers. Two other children get just enough 
to meet their basic requirements. The remaining 
five are left wanting. Three of them—sickly, nerv-
ous, apathetic children—manage to stave off the 
feeling of hunger by filling up on bread and rice. The 
other two cannot do even that. One dies from dysen-
tery and the second from pneumonia, which they are 
too weak to ward off. 

These children represent the human family. . . ,2 

Is there a hunger crisis? Four billion human persons walk 
or lie on this earth. At the very least, one billion go to bed 
hungry each night (some say two billion), at least one out of 
every four (some say one out of twa); and most of them are 
children. Each day 10,000 of the hungry die; but for each 
one who dies, another takes his place. And soon two will take 
his place; for by the year 2000 the human family may well be 
twice what it numbers today. Is the world hungry for bread? 
You tell me. 

II 
MY SECOND questionr This hunger for bread, this world crisis, how has it come to be? Why does it exist? To be honest, I 
do not know. The causes are confoundingly complex, and even 
the experts are at odds. But as I read the experts, I come away 
with four major approaches, four analyses. None of these ex-
cludes the others; but the stress, the priority, within each is 
strikingly different, and it determines in large measure the 
response to the crisis. 

11 



AID 

For Group 1, the villain is nature. Drought in the Sahel, 
south Asian monsoons, a poor harvest in Russia, a drought-
flood-frost cycle in the United States, advancing deserts and 
soil erosion, malaria and the tsetse fly, these and a hundred 
other "acts of God" are, for some, the reason why half the world 
is hungry. The appropriate response? Immediate food relief for 
each disaster, a food-reserve system for future disasters. 

For Group 2, the villain is people. The world is growing too 
fast: two percent annually for the world at large, 2.5 percent for 
poor countries as a whole. This is 70 million more persons each 
year—most among hungry peoples. By 2000, four-fifths of the 
human race will be in poor countries. Our food supply cannot 
keep pace with such increase; each year millions more will be 
hungry. The appropriate response? Massive efforts to control 
birth. 

For Group 3, the villain is productivity. Developing countries 
do not produce enough food, because they do not have the 

12 



agricultural know-how. The rich 30 percent of the world 
produces 60 percent of the food, consumes 50 percent. The 
appropriate response? More research, technical assistance, 
modern technologies, the Green Revolution with its seeds and 
its fertilizers and its mechanization. 

For Group 4, all this is important, but it fails to touch the 
heart of the matter. The villain is our international economic 
order. The food problem is a symptom—symptom of a struc-
ture, a disordered structure, a whole web of unjust relationships 
between rich and poor countries. The development models 
followed in the 50s and 60s, models inspired by foreign-aid 
programs, were detrimental to food production. These models 
downgraded the agricultural sector of societies, sidestepped 
the small farmer, subordinated the soil to the factory. These 
models encouraged "cash crops"—cocoa in Ghana, rubber in 
Indochina, tea in Sri Lanka—crops that served market needs 
of the West but did not feed the people. These models tied 
developing nations to a technology that forced impossible 
importing of fuels and fertilizers. These models are interwoven 
with military considerations, linked with the $250 billion the 
nations spend each year for instruments of destruction. These 
models serve an economic system whose primary goal is to 
maximize profits. The only really appropriate response? A new 
international economic order. 

Ill 
P » RANTED a hunger crisis, given its complex causes, what can 
v * we who are not hungry do about it? To begin with, we 
must recognize a fundamental human right, not simply some 
abstract right to life, but concretely the right to eat. The Synod 
of Catholic Bishops affirmed that right in October 1974; and 
a month later the United Nations World Food Conference 
solemnly proclaimed from Rome that "every man, woman, and 
child has the inalienable right to freedom from hunger' and 
malnutrition. . . 

But this right to eat is not some ethical truth impossible to 
realize. Our secretary of state told the same Food Conference: 
"The profound promise of our era is that for the first time we 
may have the technical capacity to free mankind from the 
scourge of hunger. Therefore, today we must proclaim a bold 
objective—that within a decade no child will go to bed hungry, 
that no family will fear for its next day's bread and that no 

13 



human being's future and capacities will be stunted by mal-
nutrition." 

We must eliminate hunger, and we can; but will we? So 
many obstacles say no. For one thing, food is power. In our 
16 central states there are almost 225 million acres in crops 
worth $54 billion a year. There is latent power here, power 
that can overpower the influence of oil and missiles. From 
Moscow to Cairo they know this. And so our secretary of agri-
culture can chuckle | "When I come calling with wheat in my 
pocket, they pay attention."3 And so we must ask: Will we feed 
the hungry only if they are pro-American? 

I say "we" because North America is now the world's bread-
basket. Only a few countries have enough grain on their own; 
only a handful export grain on a global level; two of these 
dwarf the rest: the United States and Canada. This fiscal year, 
they will export enough grain to feed India's 600 million. In 
the words of an expert, 

North America today finds itself with an almost 
monopolistic control of the world's exportable grain 
supplies, a situation for which there is no historical 
precedent. In a world of food scarcity, where there 
may not be enough food to go around, North America 
must decide who gets how much food and on what 
terms. The governments of the United States and 
Canada have not consciously sought this responsi-
bility . . . but they must reckon with it nevertheless.4 

What can you and I do? We can influence government and 
we can change ourselves. We have a government that is re-
sponsive to its citizens, to us; the end of the Vietnamese war 
proved that. But to influence government means that I must 
know what is going on; I cannot afford to abide in ignorance. 
It shames me that I know so much about Roe v. Wade, Doe v. 
Bolton, the historic Supreme Court decisions on abortion, and 
I know so little about H.R. 9005, Public Law 94-161, the Inter-
national Development and Food Assistance Act of 1975. Both 
are critical moral issues. Can I conscientiously commend a 
presidential candidate if he supports an amendment on abor-
tion and fail to ask him where he stands on the American 
breadbasket? Every American must examine his or her political 
conscience: What do I know about hunger across the world, 
hunger in the U.S.? What do f know about American food 
policy, about American opposition to a new international eco-
nomic order, about the crucial internal struggle between the 

14 



forces of sovereignty and interdependence? Have I ever told 
my public servants where I stand on pending legislation on 
food aid to needy nations? If I know nothing of all this, have 
done nothing, am I not in part responsible for bloated bellies 
and shriveled spirits? 

To change a government, we must change ourselves. The 
Letter of James put it pungently: "What does it profit, my 
brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can 
his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack 
of daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, be 
warmed and filled,' without giving them the things needed for 
the body, what does it profit?" (James 2:14-16). A billion 
hungry stomachs forbid us to eat today as we did yesterday, 
condemn our American garbage cans that could feed Calcutta 
each day, plead like Lazarus in the Gospel for the crumbs that 
fall from our tables. As long as my brothers and sisters are 
starving, I can no longer fill my stomach without discomfort. 

But there's the rub: "my brothers and sisters." Is this the 
way I see the hungry—as if someone I love were starving? 
Isn't it ironic that so many who have no God save man feel 
more anguish for the hungry than so many whose God-given 
commandment is to love others as they love themselves, to 
feed the hungry Christ under pain of damnation? The Bread 
of Life that is the Eucharist should make me solidary with all 
who need bread to live; but too often the Eucharist feeds no 
one but me. 

A eucharistic prayer from the second century speaks of "this 
broken bread" which "was scattered over the hills," then was 
"gathered [and] became one mass," 5 one Bread. We must re-
verse that process. The one Bread we eat must be given back, 
must be transformed into a bread we break for the millions, 
must be scattered again over the hills, into the valleys, through 
the deserts until each brother of mine, each sister, from Appa-
lachia to west Africa, can smile each night and murmur: "I 
am full." 

1 Time, Dec. 29, 1975, p. 47. 
2 Arthur Simon, Bread for the World (New York: Paulist Press, 1975) 

p. 14. 
3 Hugh Sidey, in Time, Jan. 12, 1976, p. 15. 
4 Lester R. Brown, The Politics and Responsibility of the North Ameri-

can Breadbasket (Worldwatch Paper 2; Washington, D.C.: WorldWatch 
Institute, Oct. 1975) p. 6. 

5 Didache 9, 4. 

15 



TO SET AT LIBERTY 
THE OPPRESSED 

Hunger for Freedom and Justice 

JERRY FILTEAU 



2 
ONE of the crucial episodes in the public life of Jesus took place in His native Nazareth. It was His first return there. 
As was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath 
and stood up to read. Handed the book of Isaiah, He turned 
to chapter 61 and read: 

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, 
because He has anointed me 

to preach good news to the poor. 
He has sent me 

to proclaim release to the captives 
and recovering of sight to the blind, 
to set at liberty the oppressed. . . . 

(Is 61:1-2) 

He sat down; the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on 
Him; and He shook them with a shocking statement: "Today 
this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (Lk 4:16-21). 

I say this is a crucial episode because it forces on the Chris-
tian the issue of human salvation: Why did God take flesh? 
Here three questions surge up: (1) Is there really oppression, 
slavery, injustice in the world? (2) If so, does the Church pre-
cisely as Church have any responsibility to lift it? (3) If so, 
what conclusions can we draw that might spur the Christian 
to concrete action? 

I 
FIRST then, is there really oppression, slavery, injustice in 

the world? The answer stares you in the face, from the 
pages of history and from the front page of each day's news-
paper. 

Take an economic oppression f poverty in an affluent Ameri-

17 



ca. If you define poverty as an absence of adequate food, 
housing, clothing, medical care and other necessities, govern-
ment tables indicate that in 1974 the poor Americans numbered 
24.3 million. But a more realistic standard for measuring 
poverty suggests strongly that the number of poor people in 
America is not 24.3 but 46 million. And if you go one step 
further and put above the poverty level those alone whose 
income insures not only clothing and housing and medical 
care, but food that nourishes, education, transportation costs, 
insurance, occasional entertainment and vacation, America's 
poor roll up to about 60,325,000.1 On these figures, two out of 
every seven Americans are poor. 

And this is North America, the world's breadbasket, not the 
Indian subcontinent, where 200 million eke out life on incomes 
of less than $40 a year. This is not yet Latin America, where 
the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, where generally 
five to 10 percent control half the wealth, the lower third of 
the population five percent. We have not even touched the 
hundreds of millions of farmers across the world who hurt, 
farmers for whom, in Robert McNamara's words, "life is neither 
satisfying nor decent. Hunger and malnutrition menace their 
families. Illiteracy forecloses their futures. Disease and death 
visit their villages too often, stay too long and return too soon."2 

Take a political oppression. Not one country taking over 
another country by sheer force as in Russia's rape of Hungary. 
That does happen. I focus here on what is taking place within 
a society. One example must suffice. South Africa is the richest, 
most highly developed country in Africa. Of its 25 million 
people, blacks make up 70 percent, whites 18, Colored 9, 
Asians 3. But only whites, the 18 percent, may vote in parlia-
mentary elections; only whites may serve in Parliament; only 
whites administer the laws. And the laws, "apartness" laws, 
affect every aspect of South African life. They determine where 
you may live and go to school, where you may work and what 
you may write. They forbid whites and nonwhites to eat in the 
same restaurants, stay in the same hotels, ride on the same 
buses. They divide the blacks into eight separate "nations," 
assign them scattered blocks of land to the east—13 percent of 
South Africa's area. In 1971 the International Court of Justice 
declared South Africa's control over South West Africa illegal; 
but that control abides, firm and unshaken. 

Take a social oppression: the oppression of woman. Despite 

18 



some progress in some areas, woman's situation is still second-
class. In some societies girls are fed less than boys. In the Third 
World most women are still illiterate. In many countries 
women can enter only low-prestige, low-pay occupations labeled 
"feminine," and even here they are paid less than men. 
Forced marriage, at times before puberty, is not uncommon. 
Labor within families is unequally divided between husband 
and wife. Nine countries debar women from voting; even more 
keep them from voting by keeping them illiterate. With rare 
exceptions, political leadership is a male prerogative. Even in 
developed societies that have experienced women's liberation 
movements, sex discrimination has not been eliminated; prob-
ably it has not even decreased, has only shifted from open 
and direct to subtle and sophisticated.3 

And only those who are blind or ignorant would deny that 
down through the centuries woman has been consistently 
downplayed in the Church, kept from contributing her rich 
potential to the world's redemption, prevented from actualizing 
the inspired proclamation that in Christ Jesus "there is no 
'male and female'" (Gal 3:28). 

I have given you a handful of examples—samples of in-
justice, suggestions of enslavement. These are not exceptions; 
the earth is charged with oppression, and all too often the 
slavery is built into a structure, a spider's web ever more 
complex, ever more imprisoning. 

II 
WHAT has God's Church to do with man's injustice? What is the relationship between the evangelizing mission of the 
Church and man's need to be liberated from social, political 
and economic oppression? 

Broadly speaking, Catholics have given three responses to 
the question. (1) The temporal order has no relationship to 
the Church's mission; that mission is sheerly spiritual. The 
Church is a channel whereby the human person has access 
to the higher world of the spirit, can be linked with God. The 
Church's commission is to gather a band of true believers who 
will prepare themselves by faith and hope for the redemptive 
action by which God establishes His kingdom at the end of 
history. (2) Freedom from oppression is an essential part of 
the Church's mission. In the words of Cardinal Stephen Kim 
of Korea, "Only the Church which serves the cause of [the 

19 



poor, the suffering, the oppressed] is the true Church of Christ." 
• This I take to be the thrust of the document on justice that 
issued from the 1971 Synod of Bishops: Social justice is a 
constitutive element of evangelization. (3) The search for 
justice, though not essential to the Church's mission, follows 
inevitably, rigorously, from that mission. This would be the 
position taken by Vatican II in its Constitution on the Church 
in the Modern World: The mission of the Church is not "in 
the political, economic, or social order. The purpose which 
Christ set before it is a religious one. But out of this religious 
mission itself come a function, a light and an energy which 
can serve to structure and consolidate the human community 
according to the divine law."4 This is the posture Paul VI as-
sumed in his inaugural address to the 1974 Synod of Bishops. 

Now, no respectable theologian would say today that the 
Church has no relationship to human fulfillment, has no re-
sponsibility to those whose lives are inhuman or less human 
because social, political or economic structures grind them into 
the dust. But whether social justice is an essential facet of 
Christianity's proper function, or follows from it as the night 
the day, is not just a theoretical puzzle for theologians with 
time on their hands. The philosophical language hides a pro-

ne NEWS 20 



found issue, a question of ultimate concern: What is redemp-
tion, what is salvation? Time forbids detailed discussion here. 
But here, as elsewhere, the Christian has to avoid two extremes. 
On the one hand, salvation is not sheer socialization, person-
ality development, liberation from oppressive structures; it is 
a divinization. The Church's primary task is to see to it that 
the human person is refashioned in the image of Christ; short 
of this there is no salvation. God fulfills us by uniting us with 
Him. On the other hand, any program of evangelization is 
inadequate if the Church does not spend itself to free the 
human person from every inhuman shackle. Oh yes, the 
Church has good news to preach even to those whose situation 
is humanly hopeless; for the good news is Jesus—Jesus alive, 
yearning to make those who are heavy-burdened one with 
Him. But this does not exempt the People of God from the 
ceaseless struggle to transform the city of man into the king-
dom of God—a kingdom of peace, of justice, of love. 

This is the vision that emerged from the 1974 Synod of 
Bishops in a significant statement on "Human Rights and 
Reconciliation." Said the bishops in common: 

Human dignity is rooted in the image and reflection 
of God in each of us. It is this which makes all per-
sons essentially equal. The integral development of 
persons makes more clear the divine image in them. 
In our time the Church has grown more deeply 
aware of this truth; hence she believes firmly that 
the promotion of human rights is required by the 
gospel and is central to her ministry. 

This is not some newfangled theory of salvation. It stands 
in splendid consonance with the Old Testament and the New. 
The God of Israel ceaselessly tells His people—through Isaiah 
and Hosea, through Amos and Micah and Jeremiah—that He 
is weary of burnt offerings, solemn assemblies, the melody of 
harps. He does not want rivers of oil, their feasts, even their 
first-born. He asks for their steadfast love and that they 
execute justice (cf. Is 1:11-18, 42:1-4; Hos 2:18-20, 6:6; 
Amos 5:18-25; Mi 6:6-8; Jer 7:5-7). 

But the justice God asked was not an ethical construct: Give 
to each what is due to each, what each human person has a 
strict right to demand. Justice was a whole web of relationships 
that stemmed from Israel's covenant with God. They were to 
father the fatherless and feed the sojourner, the stranger, not 

21 



because the orphan and the outsider deserved it, but because 
this was the way God had acted with them: "for you were 
sojourners in the land of Egypt" (Dt 10:18-19). In freeing the 
oppressed, they were mirroring the loving God who had de-
livered them from oppression. In loving the loveless, the un-
loved, the unlovable, they were imaging the God who wooed 
Israel back despite her infidelities, betrothed her to Himself 
forever (cf. Hos 2:14-23). For Israel, the practice of justice 
was an expression of steadfast love, a demand of steadfast 
love—God's love and their own love. Not to execute justice 
was not to worship God. 

This is the tradition that sparks the ministry of Jesus (cf. 
Mt 12:17-21, 23:23). In harmony with Hosea, He wants not 
sacrifice but compassion (cf. Mt 9:13, 12:7). And the just 
man or the just woman is not primarily someone who gives 
to another what that other deserves. The just man, the just 
woman has covenanted with God; this covenant demands that 
we treat other human persons as God wants them treated in 
His covenant plan, treat friend and enemy as He treats them. 
And He "makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, sends 
rain on the just and on the unjust" (Mt 5:45). 

The early Christians seem to have grasped that. If anyone 
is hungry or athirst, naked or a stranger, sick or in prison, it 
is always Christ who clamors for bread or water, Christ who 
cries to be clothed or welcomed, Christ whom you visit (cf. 
Mt 25:31-46). And the First Letter of John is terribly uncom-
promising: "If anyone has the world's goods and sees his 
brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does 
God's love abide in him?" (1 Jn 3:17). 

Ill 
Now once we admit, with the Synod of 1974, that "the pro-motion of human rights is required by the gospel and is 
central to [the Church's] ministry," we confront my final ques-
tion: What conclusions can we draw that might spur the 
Christian to concrete action? 

First, Christians dare not wash their hands of politics. Not 
that the Church becomes a political party. Rather that injustice 
and slavery are so tied to structures, including governments, 
that to surrender political activity to political "plumbers" is to 
surrender the oppressed to their slavery. Politics should be the 
collaborative effort of good men and good women to fashion 

22 



for their brothers and sisters conditions of human dignity, of 
human decency. 

Second, for Christians to slave collaboratively against slavery 
is not to invade the secular. In large measure, underdevelop-
ment and unjust dependence, whether in South Africa or in 
North America, are situations of sin, social sin—sinful be-
cause they keep God's images from that full humanness which 
is part of incarnational life, that divineness which is com-
munion with God. To enter that arena is not an option but an 
obligation. 

Third, the quest for justice is crucial for Christian spiritu-
ality. That remarkable theologian of hope, Jürgen Moltmann, 
paradoxically insists that the Church can discover its identity 
only to the extent that it associates, identifies, with the God-
forsaken of this world, whose exemplar is the Godforsaken of 
Golgotha. If you want to liberate from oppression and mean-
ingless existence, you must first recognize that "the glory of 
God does not shine on the crowns of the mighty, but on the 
face of the crucified Christ."5 

Fourth, such a Christian spirituality calls for spiritual Chris-
tians. It demands of me a eucharistic spirituality, where the 
Christ of Holy Thursday not only feeds me. More importantly, 
He does with me today what He did that night with the bread | 
He takes me, and He blesses me, and He breaks me, and He 
gives me. The broken bread—then as now, Christ or I—the 
broken bread is a force for oneness; but then as now, Christ or 
I, the bread must be broken. Otherwise it cannot be given— 
especially to those who are themselves broken. 

Fifth and finally, once we are given to others, we shall find 
that it is they who give to us. Given to the oppressed, we shall 
be lifted from our own oppression, our slavish centering on 
ourselves. In the broken we shall find our own healing; in the 
Godforsaken we shall find God. 

1 Cf. Mariellen Procopio and Frederick J. Perella, Jr., Poverty Profile 
1975 (Washington, D.C.: USCC, 1975) pp. 12-13. 

2 "The Gap between Rich and Poor: A Widening Chasm," Social Edu-
cation 38, no. 7 (Nov.-Dec. 1974) 634. 

3 Cf. Constantina Safilios-Rothschild, "The Current Status of Women 
Cross-culturally: Changes and Persisting Barriers," Theological Studies 
36 (1975) 577-604. 

4 Vatican II, Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, no. 42. 
5 Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (New York: Harper 8c Row, 

1974) p. 327. 

23 



SWORDS INTO 
PLOUGHSHARES | 
Hunger for Peace 

CIRIC 

24 



3 
WHEN first I mulled over ideas that touch the hunger for peace, it was Christmas. Once again I was struck by the 
Christmas paradox (some would call it a flat contradiction). 
One side of the paradox was sung by Christ's angels, His 
messengers, the midnight of His birth: "Peace on earth to men 
with whom God is pleased" (Lk 2:14). Peace. The other side 
of the paradox was preached three decades later by Christ 
Himself: "Do not imagine that I have come to bring peace to 
the earth. I have come to bring a sword, not peace" (Lk 12:51). 

I 
As I write these fines, not peace but the sword again hangs over the world. In Angola, Soviet-backed and pro-Western 
forces are battling for control of oil-rich land. In Lebanon, 
Christians and Moslems are murdering one another with aban-
don. In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants continue 
to lust for one another's blood. In the Mideast, Israelis and 
Arabs are hunched over a tenuous truce. In the Philippines, 
martial law still prevails, still imprisons on political principles. 
New York City is afraid, tense over a bomb that shattered an 
airport and scattered limbs across a congested area. Atomic 
stockpiles grow beyond belief; a cataclysmic world war is not 
beyond thinking; and all the while the vast majority of the 
world's four billion are yearning for peace, a peace that never 
seems to come, a peace that is consistently a prelude to war. 

But war is not limited to bombs and commando raids, to 
napalm and intercontinental missiles, to man's inhumanity to 
man. Millions of human persons are hungering for peace 
within themselves. I am one person, yet so often I am at war 
with myself. For some, it is the deep-rooted conflict St. Paul 

25 



described with rare insight in his letter to the Christians of 
Rome: 

My own actions bewilder me. What I do is not what 
I want to do; I do the very thing I hate. . . . It is not 
the good my will prefers, but the evil my will disap-
proves, that I find myself doing. In my inmost self I 
delight in God's law; but I see in my lower self 
another law at war with the law of my conscience, 
enslaving me to the law of sin which my lower self 
contains (Rom 7:15-23). 

For others, it is not sin that tears them in two. Their schizo-
phrenia is that they do not know who they are; so often they 
are two persons, confused and confounded, tormented and 
distracted, unglued and unhinged. Or they are nobody: Hearts 
shaped for love feel utterly unloved, unneeded, unwanted. And 
so, in place of peace there is that ultimate disharmony which is 
despair; the life I live is not worth living, it is not life at all. 

A third war, a special kind of "world" war, severs us from 
nature, from all that is not man or God. It has come to a head 
in ecology. The land we have ploughed and plundered, the 
chemicals that feed our life and heal us, the air we breathe 
and the ground we walk, the very wealth of our world threatens 
to strangle us. The earth which God commissioned the first 
man and woman to touch with their magic, to link to their love, 
this earth the first sin turned hostile to us. And ever since we 
have enlarged the enmity that severs us. It is as if we began 
either with God's blessing in Genesis, "Subdue the earth" 
(Gn 1:28), or with God's anathema, "Cursed is the ground 
because of you" (Gn 3:17), experienced to our dismay how 
reluctant nature often is to serve us, vowed that with our 
know-how and our power we rational creatures would enslave 
the irrational and then carried our vow relentlessly to its logical 
conclusion. Only, the slave has turned on its master; cold 
reason is no longer in control; out of the nonhuman we have 
fashioned a monster, and the monster is at our throats. It is 
as though the things we see and hear and touch and taste and 
smell each day were divorced from the God who shaped them 
and, more frighteningly still, hostile to the men and women 
who use them. We are at war with our very environment. 

A fourth facet of humankind's hunger for peace has to do 
with God. Here, I submit, is the most radical rupture of all. At 
this instant there are literally millions of men and women who 

26 



say in their hearts, "There is no God." Millions more say, "There 
is a God," but they exile Him effectively from their daily living. 
And there are the uncounted millions whose experience of God 
is an experience of absence: God does not seem to be there. 
They simply do not find Him in crib or creation, on a cross or 
in His human images, in the proclaimed Word or "where two 
or three are gathered" in Jesus' name. For all of these, what-
ever peace may be there, it is not the peace that Christ left to 
His disciples (cf. Jn 14:27), "the peace of God which passes 
all understanding" (Phil 4 :7). 

II 
IN THIS frightening paradox—war in a world that hungers for peace—what can a theologian say, whether to those at war 
or to those at peace? In one sense, I have nothing to say. 
Nothing I say will end war on any of its four fronts. Nothing 
I say will miraculously link the Lebanese in love, reshape a 

27 



schizoid personality, establish equanimity between ecologist 
and economist, make God perennially present to such as sense 
only His absence. But perhaps I can make a small beginning, 
suggest some of "the things that" for a Christian "make for 
peace" (Lk20:41). 

First and foremost is the profound affirmation of St. Paul: 
"He Himself is our peace" (Eph 2:14). This is not pious poetry. 
Christian peace, at its most basic, is a relationship, a new kin-
ship with God, in Christ. Here Paul is limpid: "Remember that 
you were . . . separated from Christ . . . and strangers to the 
covenant of promise, having no hope and without God in the 
world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have 
been brought near in the blood of Christ. . . He has recon-
ciled Jew and Gentile "to God in one body through the 
cross . . ." (Eph 2:12-16). This is peace. 

But Christian peace—being God's friend, being brother or 
sister to Christ—loses its power if it remains on the level of 
abstract theology. It must grasp me, shake me, thrill me as 
once it thrilled a perceptive sister who shared her excitement 
in a swift poem titled "Discovery": 

It's this that makes 
My spirit spin, 

My bones to quake, 
My blood run thin, 

My flesh to melt 
Inside my skin, 

My very pulse 
Create a din— 

It's this that makes 
My spirit spin: 

That Heaven is 
Not up, but in!1 

The peace of Christ, like the kingdom of God, is within you, or 
it is not yours at all. 

But if the peace of Christ is to be within you, it must, 
strangely enough, go out to others. As it takes two to make 
war, so it takes two to make peace. That is why ISaiah could 
proclaim: "Peace is the fruit of righteousness," of justice 
(Is 32:17), and Vatican II: "Peace is the fruit of love."2 Which 
suggests that war—whether with man or with God, with the 
earth or with myself—may be the fruit of unrighteousness, 
of injustice, of hate. Which suggests an examination of con-
science along the four fronts of war, on its four faces. For 

28 



if I am as honest as I want my neighbor to be, I dare not 
lay unrighteousness and hate solely to' Satan's charge, solely 
at the feet of my enemy, solely in the heart of the politician— 
in Moscow or Washington, in Cairo or Cape Town. I must look 
within, to see if the seeds of war are planted in my heart. 

We were told by God's Son that our love for others would be 
the sacrament, the visible sign, that He is among us; this is 
how the world would recognize Him. To some extent it does. 
That once cantankerous journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, tells 
movingly how he put Mother Teresa on a train in Calcutta: 
"When the train began to move, and I walked away, I felt as 
though I were leaving behind me all the beauty and all the joy 
in the universe. Something of God's love has rubbed off on 
Mother Teresa."3 

Brazil's archbishop of the poor, Helder Camara, has called 
forth from a Methodist missionary a tribute that should be 
true of all Christians: "Being with him, watching him, listen-
ing to him, one is less and less aware of him and increasingly 
aware of the reality to which he points—a God who cares 
about the little people of the earth."4 Decade after decade in 
our own country, Dorothy Day has opened "houses of hospi-
tality" for the hungry, the heavy-burdened, the down-and-out. 
Now 78, jailed eight times, she still reflects from Manhattan's 
Bowery the face of the crucified Christ. And there are the un-
told thousands across the world, hearts without headlines, 
whose daily lives are sacraments of God's love, bring peace 
to flesh and spirits at war. 

And still it is true that, by and large, the world does not 
recognize Christ, because the world does not see Him in our 
love. Whole cities could live on the garbage from our dumps, 
on the clothes we wear once, on the luxuries we have made 
necessities. Black and white are threatened with bloody combat 
because we have been, still are, as color-conscious as our un-
believing neighbors. For so many of us, a court of law is far 
more effective than the Sermon on the Mount. We, too, rape 
the earth, pillage it, refuse it the reverent care required of 
responsible stewards. There is no evidence that we Catholics 
drink less, lust less, hate less than the men and women who 
never eat the flesh of Christ or drink His blood. I am afraid 
many of us who claim to be Christlike are rather what St. Paul 
called the pagans of his day: We are "faithless, ruthless, piti-
less" (Rom 1:31). 

For all the tyranny we espy therein, what does Russia or 

29 



South Africa find in America, in us, to shake it, to make it 
marvel and cry, "Look how they love"? The seeds of war are 
within us, from the jealousy of Cain to the hate in my own 
heart, from the commerce that makes a jungle of the world to 
the ghettos we have structured for the Jew and the black, from 
the dishonesty of the little clerk to the tyranny of the big cleric. 
And even where we are not positively sinful, there is so much 
that makes us crawl back into our small, selfish shells. It re-
minds me of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's remarkable effort to 
capture in poetry the meaning of St. Christopher for our age. 
She wrote in part: 

Christopher, we die 
Not for lack of charity; we lie 
Imprisoned in our sepulchers of stone, 
Wanting your gift, O Saint, your gift alone. 
No one will take the burden of the whole 
Upon his shoulders; each man in his soul 
Thinks his particular grief too great to bear 
Without demanding still another's share. 

But you—you chose to bear a brother's load 
And every man who travelled down your road 
You ferried on your back across the flood 
Until one night beside the stream there stood, 
Wrapped in a cloak of storm, a child who cried 
And begged safe passage to the other side— 
A child who weighed upon your back like lead, 
Like earth upon the shoulders of the dead— 
And, struggling to the bank while torrents whirled, 
You found that on your shoulder leaned a world. 

No wonder that the burden was so great: 
You carried in your arms the monstrous weight 
Of all men's happiness and all men's pain, 
And all men's sorrows on your back had lain. 
Even their sins you carried as your own— 
Even their sins, you, Christopher, alone!5 

The problem is, we are "imprisoned in fear"; we "do not 
heed the cry" Christopher "once heard across the stream."6 

But, paradoxically, unless we heed the cry of others, heed it as 
the cry of Christ, we shall never find peace. There will only be 
war—not only war among men, but war with the earth, war 
within our inmost selves—yes, war with God. 

There is a story I first heard from that remarkable Dutch 
priest Henri Nouwen. Once there was a very old man who 

30 



used to meditate each morning under a large tree on the banks 
of India's Ganges River. One morning he opened his eyes to 
see a scorpion floating helplessly in the strong current. As it 
was pulled closer to the tree, the scorpion got caught in the 
long roots that branched out into the river. The more it 
struggled, the more it became entangled in the network of 
tree roots. 

Immediately the old man stretched out on the extended 
roots, reached out to rescue the scorpion. As soon as he touched 
it, the scorpion jerked, stung him. Instinctively the old man 
pulled back his hand, lost his balance. Then once again he 
stretched out along the roots. But each time he came within 
reach, the scorpion stung him—so often and so badly that his 
hands became swollen and bloody, his face was distorted by 
pain. 

A passerby spied the old man stretched out on the roots, 
struggling with the scorpion. He could not believe his eyes. In 
disgust he shouted: "Hey, stupid old man! What's wrong with 
you? Only a fool would risk his life for an ugly, useless crea-
ture. Don't you know you may kill yourself to save that un-
grateful animal?" Slowly the old man turned his head. Looking 
calmly into the stranger's eyes, he said: "Friend, because it 
belongs to the nature of the scorpion to sting, why should I 
give up my own nature to save?" 

1 Sister Mary Ignatius, "Discovery," Messenger of the Sacred Heart 
77, no. 2 (February 1942) 58. 

- Vatican II, Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, no. 78. 
:i Quoted in Time, Dec. 29, 1975, p. 48. 
| Ibid.., p. 56. 
1 "Saint for Our Time," in The Unicorn and Other Poems (New York: 

Pantheon, 1956) pp. 45-47. 
«Ibid. 

31 





4 
IN THE first three essays on the hungers of the human family, I had no doubt that I was talking about real hungers-^ 
hungers here and across the world. At least 460 million are 
starving: there is hunger for food. Poverty afflicts perhaps 60 
million Americans, in South Africa 18 percent of the popu-
lation dominate the rest and the world's women are still an 
oppressed class: there is hunger for justice and freedom. War 
racks Angola, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, imperils the 
earth: there is hunger for peace. 

But when I title this chapter "Hunger for Truth," am I not 
being naive? Oh, not in implying incredible ignorance in the 
world, from slums to universities; that much can be docu-
mented. Naive rather in assuming within this ignorance a 
hunger of the human family, a thirst for truth. Is this anything 
more than a pious Catholic rhetoric, conceived in Rome, nur-
tured in parochial schools and delivered queasily to an in-
credulous world with a cliche from Augustine: "Thou hast 
made us for thyself, O Lord; and our heart is restless until it 
rests in thee"?j 

As happens so often, the profound problem here is a word, 
a sort of weasel word. I mean that remarkable monosyllable 
"truth." I can recognize bread, and my stomach growls when 
it is empty. I have a sense of justice, a feel for freedom, and 
the world's enslavements, economic and social and political, 
cry aloud in the streets. War rarely hides .̂ts blood-flecked face, 
and I know when I am at peace with God or myself, with the 
earth or my brothers and sisters. But truth is not so patent. 
And what is truth's opposite, its antagonist? A lie? A mistake? 
Ignorance? Before I can declare that the world is hungry for 
truth, I must disclose what I mean by truth. 

33 



I 
rriHE problem is, the very word "truth" has a history, a 
A dappled ancestry. Thinkers have struggled with it since the 

dawn of Western philosophy six centuries before Christ. This 
is not the place to recapture that struggle. But I think it fair to 
say that, on the whole, the search for the true has been a 
search for the real. For some—from the early Greeks, through 
Augustine and Aquinas, down to the Neo-Scholastics—that 
effort to discover the real has been an effort to discover what is, 
something that exists whether I think of it or not, to see how 
I can lay hold of that "something out there," link my little 
mind to objective reality. 

Others—call them existentialists if you will—have little use 
for this kind of truth, objective truth, universal truth, reality 
"somewhere out there." Such reality is superficial; such truth 
is of no personal value. Truth in the real sense has to be 
practical and subjective. Truth reveals itself to me as real only 
as I exercise an extraordinary liberty: the liberty I have of 
accepting myself in the authentic human situation. Real truth, 
therefore, is personal truth: the truth by which I live and to 
which I commit myself. 

And there are those for whom the only truth is pragmatic 
truth. It may be a proposition that, once admitted, leads to 
satisfactory results. Or it may be the Marxist thesis that the 
only reality is matter; all our thoughts, desires, and activity are 
the result of economic needs; truth is simply conforming my 
knowing to that which here and now promotes evolution 
towards a classless society. 

These "schools of truth," and a score more, I do not intend 
to evaluate. Not that they are unimportant; quite the contrary. 
Without this ceaseless quest of human reason, our day-to-day 
living would be far less human, far less alive. In fact, in its 
extent and its intensity, in its agony and its ecstasy, the philo-
sophical search suggests an insatiable hunger of the human 
spirit. I bypass this source because there is another wellspring 
of truth still more rewarding. It is a different approach to 
truth, a notion of truth founded on religious experience, 
founded on encounter with God. It is the biblical notion of 
truth, Old Testament and New. 

Old Testament truth is remarkably rich. Basically, it has to 
do with being stable, proven, reliable, dependable, trustworthy 
The true peace of which Jeremiah speaks (Jer 14:13) is a 

34 



secure, lasting peace. The true road of which Abraham's 
servant speaks (Gn 24:48) is a road that will surely lead to 
its objective. And this kind of truth, this truth that makes for 
confidence, is a quality that characterizes God, is expected of 
man and is to be found in God's revelation to man. 

In the Old Testament, truth is a quality which properly 
belongs to God. God is a "God of truth" (Ps 31:5; Jer 10:10). 
But not in an intellectualist sense. The God of truth comes to 
consummate clarity in the context of the covenant and His 
promises. Moses puts it splendidly to Israel: "Know that Yahweh 
your God is God, the God worthy of trust who keeps His 
covenant of love forever with those who love Him" (Dt 7:9). 
The oath He swore to David is a "sure" oath, inviolable; He 
will not depart from it (Ps 132:11). In His gracious covenant 
God is never found wanting. And this same sense of truth as 
fidelity characterizes the word of God. David confesses it: "Thy 
words are truth" (2 S 7:28); and when the psalmist sings to 
God "The sum of thy word is truth" (Ps 119:160), he tells us 
that what is essential and basic in God's word is that His word 
is irrevocable and everlasting: God will never go back on His 
word, He will always perform for His people His wonderful 
works of salvation. 

Now this "God of truth" demanded "men of truth" (Ex 
18:21; Neh 7:2). Truth they must speak (Ps 15:2); truth they 
must seek (Jer 5:1) ; in truth they must walk (3 K 20:3). But 
not in some rationalist sense. Men of truth were not, in the 
first instance, intellects in conformity with objective reality, 
but persons unswervingly conformed to God's will. Oh yes, they 
had to know God's will; but this was not enough: to be men of 
truth, they had to do God's will, live lives pleasing to God. Men 
of truth were the people of God who were faithful to His 
covenant, faithful to His law—yes, men and women who were 
faithful to one another (Gn 47:29; Jos 2:14; Za 7:9) . 

Besides a God of truth and men of truth, the Old Testament 
unveils a third facet of truth: revealed truth. At times it is 
"true teaching," which priests must transmit (Mai 2 :6) , for it 
stems from God. At times it is the law, which must be obeyed 
(Ps 25:5, 86:11), for it comes from God. Truth here is God's 
providential plan, God's unwavering will, not utterly under-
standable, even by the just, before judgment time (Wis 3:9). 

In impressive fashion, the New Testament reflects the Old. 
St. Paul's formula "God's truthfulness" (Rom 3:7) is God's 

35 



faithfulness, His fidelity to His promises; and for man, a life 
of truth is a life of righteousness, of justice, the kind of life 
Paul expects to find among Christians (Col 1:6; 2 Cor 13:8). 
But something new has come into being i For the truth of the 
law, we now have "the truth of the gospel" (Gal 2:5, 14). For 
Paul, truth is the word of God he preaches, God's mystery 
revealed, to be accepted by faith, to be lived in love—not an 
abstract set of propositions but the person of Christ (2 Cor 
4 :5 ) : "truth is in Jesus" (Eph 4:21). 

And yet, for all the richness of Paul, it is in John that we 
discover a theology of truth. For John, truth is not God's own 
being. Truth is the word Christ heard from the Father, the 
word He came to proclaim, the word that should lead us tg 
believe in Him (cf. Jn 8). This, John insists, is a fresh truth, 
a new revelation: "The law was given through Moses, grace 
and truth have come through Jesus Christ" (1:17). In Him 
God's self-disclosure has reached its fullness: He is "full of 
grace and of truth" (1:14). In fact, the thrilling newness of 
Christianity is that Christ is Himself the truth (14:6)—not 
precisely because He is God, but because, as Word made flesh, 
He has in Himself the fullness of revelation, He makes the 
Father known (1:18). It is summed up remarkably in that 
glorious sentence, "I am the way and the truth and the life" 
(14:6) . The three nouns are intimately linked. Jesus is the 
way to the Father because, as truth in flesh, He conveys to us 
the revelation of the Father in what He says and what He is, 
and in this way communicates to us the life of God. And He 
can be the truth for us as man because He is at the same time 
the Word "nearest the Father's heart . . . the only Son" (1:18). 

But the truth of God does not come to a standstill once the 
flesh of Christ is no longer tangible. After truth in flesh re-
turns to the Father, "the Spirit of truth" (14:17) descends 
upon the community. Why? To bear witness to Jesus (15:26), 
to lead His disciples to "truth in its entirety" (16:13), to help 
us grasp its true meaning (14:26). Because such is His cease-
less function, such His role in our coming to faith, the Spirit 
Himself can be called "the truth" (1 Jn 5:6) . 

In consequence, a Christian's task in John's eyes is to "be 
of the truth" (18:37). But this is possible only if the Christian 
who has been born of the Spirit in the surrender of faith 
abides in the word of Jesus, allows all his actions to be guided 
by the truth of the gospel, works with and loves his brothers 
and sisters by the power of the truth within him and adores 

36 



the Father with a worship inspired by the Spirit of truth and 
by the truth of Jesus (cf. Jn 4:23-24). This is the truth that 
makes for Christian freedom (8:32)—freedom not from ne-
cessity but from sin.1 Truth is not so much, therefore, a com-
plex of statements or ideas, not really speculation about the 
world or salvation; rather an address of God to man in con-
crete encounter, and man's response to that address—an ad-
dress and a response inseparable from the person of Jesus, 
who is Himself .the truth and the way to the truth.2 

II 
Now once we have taken our conception of truth not from philosophy but from Scripture, not from reason but from 
revelation, the hunger for truth becomes a religious issue. But 
the basic question remains: Is there really within the human 
family a hunger for the kind of truth the Bible describes? In 
one sense this can be questioned. How many Christians dot 
this earth? Perhaps a billiont—no more than one person out 
of every four. The rest—three out of four—have never heard 
of Christ, or have heard of Him but see no reason to confess 
Him or once confessed Him but no longer care. Where, then, 
is this alleged hunger for the truth that is Christ? 

I am not concerned with statistics; nor shall I argue that the 
hunger for biblical truth is a subconscious yearning of every 
man or woman. I am concerned with those of you who con-
fess Christ and how you understand that confession. My focus 
here is faith; for the way you understand Christian faith will 
determine in large measure whether you hunger for the truth 
that St. John thundered. 

What is faith? Many of you remember, some of you must 
still say, the Act of Faith with which I grew up, the Act of 
Faith in the catechisms and prayer books of the recent past: 

O my God, I firmly believe that thou art one God in 
three divine Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. I 
believe that thy divine Son became man and died for 
our sins. I believe these and all the truths which 
the holy Catholic Church teaches, because thou hast 
revealed them, who canst neither deceive nor be 
deceived. 

This Act of Faith is a response. I say yes, a firm yes, to all 
that God has revealed, insofar as this revelation, this set of 
revealed truths, has been communicated to me through the 

37 



Church. Now this manner of formulating my faith, this way 
of expressing my belief, stems from a very specific vision of 
what revelation is and when God reveals. In this vision, reve-
lation is primarily propositional: There is one God in three 
Persons; the Son of God became man and died for our sins, 
and so forth and so on. And these propositions reproduce or 
reflect what God said through Christ when the Lord walked 
this earth and what God said through the Spirit while the 
apostles personally preached the gospel. 

This vision of revelation calls for a corresponding kind of 
response. I mean an intellectual assent, an affirmation of the 
mind, a judgment: There is one God in three Persons; the Son 
of God became man; Christ died for our sins. This is impos-
sible without grace, of course, but it is still an act of the in-
tellect. A love-laden affirmation, perhaps, but still an affirma-
tion that such-and-such is true. I say yes to a proposition, a 
truth, disclosed by God centuries ago. This is, at rock bottom, 
my act of faith. 

Contemporary theologians are trying to enrich this vision. 
To begin with, they are dissatisfied with a concept of revela-
tion that puts the emphasis on propositions. What God dis-
closes is not primarily propositions but a person. Revelation is 
not a book, though the Book reveals him. It is not a pope, 
though Pope Paul might interpret him. The revelation is the 
God-man. 

Moreover, Catholic theologians are insisting more and more 
that God continues to reveal Himself to His people. In Gabriel 
Moran's succinct rhetoric, 

A God who once spoke but now speaks no more is 
not only uninteresting but unintelligible. . . . The 
Christian may perhaps judge as egocentric and blas-
phemous the remark of Rousseau, that if God wanted 
to talk to Jean-Jacques then why did He go speak to 
Moses. Yet the question is not wholly irrelevant.3 

The point is: If I am to say yes to God now, God must some-
how speak to me now. The reason why Christianity is cease-
lessly contemporary is the thrilling fact that God is disclosing 
Himself now—to the individual believer and to the whole Peo-
ple of God. He does so in the signs of the times, through the 
struggle for freedom and the yearning for bread, through the 
Christian encounter of husband and wife, in the Eastern con-
templative and the God-fearing Jew. 

38 



This vision of relevation—God opening Himself to me now 
—calls for a corresponding kind of response. I mean the re-
sponse of a person to a Person: "I myself, entirely myself, yield 
myself entirely to you." This is not to pooh-pooh propositions, 
downgrade dogma, betray truth. Within a faith that is Chris-
tian, doctrine is precious. Christ Himself, revelation in flesh, 
put subject and predicate together: "The Father and I are 
one." It is rather to recapture unforgettable facets of biblical 
truth. I am a man of truth to the extent that, in response to a 
God of truth, a God faithful to His promises, I live a life of 
truth, a life in harmony with the covenant. I am "of the 
truth" in the measure that I respond with a love-laden yes to 
the truth that is Jesus offering Himself to me in love. That re-
markable French personalist Jean Mouroux was utterly correct 
when he concluded from St. John: "The proper object of re-
vealed truth is love, or more exactly, He who is the bond be-
tween truth and love. Love is the content, the very reality of 
the whole of Christian truth. . . ."* 

If there is no hunger for truth in the human family, we are 
much to be pitied. For the burden of my message, the heart of 
the Christian gospel, is summed up in a song I first heard six 
years ago and have never forgotten: "Love is the truth we are 
searching for." 

1 Cf. Ignace de la Potterie, S.J., "Truth," in X. Leon-Dufour, ed., 
Dictionary of Biblical Theology (2nd ed.; New York: Seabury, 1973) 
pp. 618-21. 

2Cf. R. Bultmann, "aletheia," in G. Kittel, Theological Dictionary of 
the New Testament 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964) 232-47. 

3 "The God of Revelation," Commonweal 85, no. 18 (Feb. 10, 1967) 
500. 

4 "The Nature and Structure of Christian Faith: A Systematic Re-
flection," in Toward a Theology of Christian Faith: Readings in Theology 
(New York: Kenedy, 1968) pp. 74-75. 

39 



YOU DO NOT KNOW ME 
Hunger for Understanding 

JOSEPH DUERR 

40 



5_ 
LONG years ago, in New York City, I walked into a funeral parlor. The wife of an acquaintance had died, and I 
wanted to pay my respects, express my sympathy. Not know-
ing what to say in such circumstances, I mumbled a stilted 
phrase or two, then turned quickly to kneel at the coffin and 
murmur a prayer. At that moment another priest came in—a 
burly, ruddy man whose life seemed totally taken up with 
begging from those who had and giving to those who had not. 
He strode tall and straight to the sorrowing husband, put his 
arm around the man's shoulders and said with inimitable con-
viction: "Old man, I'm sorry." The gentleman told me after-
wards : "When Father Delihant said that, it was just as if the 
heavens had opened." Those strong arms, the tears in his eyes, 
the simple words on his lips conveyed an inner understanding 
—an understanding that carried with it comfort, strength, 
peace. 

It is this kind of understanding I wish to discuss. I am not 
talking about understanding in the sense of sheer knowledge 
or intelligence, the ability to comprehend and judge, the power 
of perception, the capacity to form opinions. I am speaking of 
that understanding which involves a special kind of personal 
relationship, marked by an innerness that comes through to 
another as empathy. I mean an "understanding so intimate 
that the feelings, thoughts and motives of one are readily 
comprehended by another."1 It is this quality Jesus possessed 
preeminently; it is this quality we must recapture if our world 
is ever to emerge from its barbarity. 

41 



I 
T H I S quality of understanding Jesus possessed, precisely as 

a man, as human. It shows up all through His public 
life: with the woman caught in adultery, in danger of stoning; 
the sinful woman who touches Him, to the scandal of His 
host; the Samaritan woman at the well, to the amazement of 
His disciples; the women of Jerusalem who weep for Him on 
the way of the cross. It shows up in all those passages that de-
scribe Jesus as having "compassion"—a Greek verb that has 
to do with our inward parts, our entrails, our bowels, our 
emotions, our heart—a word that is a wedding of mercy and 
affection and sympathy and fellow feeling. This powerful 
verb is used over the sick who reach out to Jesus, a crowd that 
is hungry, a mother whose only son has died, a king's servant 
dreadfully in debt, a boy cruelly tormented by an evil spirit, 
two blind men sitting by the roadside, a leper begging to be 
made clean, a man left half-dead by robbers, the prodigal son. 

To all of these the Lord reached out, for each His heart was 
torn. Not a sweet, sickly, syrupy, sentimental feeling; He 
understood. Not because He was all-knowing God, but because 
He was all-human man. As St. Paul sang so lyrically (Phil 
2:6-8): 

Though of divine status, 
He did not treat like a miser's booty 
His right to be like God 
[His right to appear like Yahweh in glory], 
but emptied Himself of it, 
to take up the status of a slave 
and become like men; 
having assumed human form, 
He still further humbled Himself 
with an obedience that meant death— 

even death upon a cross!2 

He was so exquisitely human that He was attuned to all that 
was human: not indeed to adultery but to the adulteress, not 
to leprosy but to each leper, not to a dead Lazarus but to his 
sorrowing sisters. In fact, this was His humanness: He vi-
brated to, resonated to, the loves and hates, the hopes and 
fears, the joys and sadness of each person who touched His 
life. 

What is particularly pertinent here is that Jesus refused to 
let His actions, His miraculous actions, become automatic. I 

42 



think of that moving scene in Mark (5:25-34). A woman 
whose life has been bleeding away for 12 years pushes through 
a tremendous crowd, comes up behind Jesus, touches His gar-
ment. She feels in her body that she has been healed. Jesus 
is aware that power has gone forth from Him; He quickly 
asks: "Who touched my garments?" The disciples are amazed, 
almost amused: "You'see the crowd pressing around you, and 
yet you say 'Who touched me? '" But He keeps looking around, 
till the woman comes in fear and trembling and tells Him the 
whole truth. And Jesus explains to her what has happened: 
"Your faith has made you well; go in peace. . . ." He is not 
curing a disease; He is healing a person. And so He wants 
eyes to meet; He wants to see a face; He wants to explain what 
has really happened in the depths of her heart, her faith in 
Him that brought healing. So far she has only "heard the re-
ports" about Him (Mk 5:27); He wants her to know Him. 

Jesus' understanding reached a kind of climax at the Last 
Supper, the meal He passionately yearned to share with His 
own before His passion. It was not simply a case of divine 
foreknowledge; as wan, He sensed how changed their lives 

CARL J. PFEIFER, S.J. 
43 

I 



would be without Him—for some, unbearably lonely. Knowing 
their need as He did, He not only consoled them with words: 
"I will not leave you desolate" (Jn 14:18); He not only prom-
ised them a "Counselor" in His place, the Holy Spirit (Jn 
14:26). They would want Him. And so He would leave them, 
and He would stay with them. He would leave them, because 
His Father so willed it. He would take from them, from us, the 
palpable charm of His presence. No longer would we see His 
face, hear the music and the thunder of His voice, sense the 
fascination of His smile, be touched by His tears. And still He 
would stay: Till the end of time He would leave with us the 
reality of His presence, the same God-man Palestine saw with 
the eyes of the flesh. "This is my body. . . . This is my blood" 
(Mt 26:26, 28). And not only out there somewhere, on an 
altar, in a tabernacle. "Take, eat. . . . Drink of it, all of you" 
(Mt 26:26-27). He understood us so well; He understood that 
no gift but Himself would satisfy—His total self, body and 
blood, soul and divinity, given to our total selves, flesh and 
soul and spirit. He understood. 

II 
YES, indeed, Jesus understood; in fact, Jesus understands. 

The problem lies not with Jesus but with us. I am afraid 
that all too many of the human family can say of you and me 
what Jesus said in disappointment to Philip the night before 
He was crucified: "Have I been so long with you, and yet you 
do not know me?" (Jn 14:9). Oh, not my name or the color 
of my eyes; you do not know me. But how can we begin to 
translate into flesh-and-blood reality a whole world's hunger 
for understanding, for a special kind of relationship that links 
minds and motives, hearts and emotions? No single essay can 
fashion a solution; perhaps no solution is possible. I shall 
simply suggest some facets of understanding that may spark 
your own reflections. 

To begin with, I must relearn the value of each human per-
son. There is a serious problem here. Things happen on such a 
vast scale in our time that an individual is lost in the crowd. 
More than 22,000 people are killed in Guatemala's earth-
quakes; 56,500 U.S. troops die in Vietnam; 460 million men, 
women and children are hungry. There are no faces here, only 
ciphers. All the more reason why I must recapture the vision 
of a remarkable rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel. In an article 
44 



aptly titled "No Religion Is an Island," Heschel wrote: 

To meet a human being is a major challenge to mind 
and heart. I must recall what I normally forget. A 
person is not just a specimen of the species called 
homo sapiens. He is all of humanity in one, and 
whenever one man is hurt we are all injured. The 
human is a disclosure of the divine, and all men are 
one in God's care for man. Many things on earth are 
precious, some are holy, humanity is holy of holies. 
To meet a human being is an opportunity to sense 
the image of God, the presence of God. According to 
a rabbinical interpretation, the Lord said to Moses: 
"Wherever you see the trace of man there I stand 
before you . . . . " 3 

Is this my mindset: Wherever I touch a human person, I 
sense a divine presence? Can I even rise to the level of the 
Christless Roman, "Nothing that is human is a stranger to me"? 

A second facet: I must sense my solidarity with all that is 
human. It Will not be easy. Skim today's paper. What makes 
the headlines, the news? Not human solidarity but dividing 
lines: the Golan Heights and the barriers of Belfast, poverty 
levels and unemployment rates, color lines and party lines, all 
those marks that spell difference. And when we look at our-
selves, Henri Nouwen's perceptive insight should sting us: so 
much of our energy is invested in defending differences, "in 
maintaining definitions of ourselves made up of those aspects 
of life which allow us to keep distance from éach other. Most 
of our sense of self is based on our understanding of how and 
where we differ from each other. It seems as if we are our 
differences." We are smarter or richer, better tanned or better 
dressed, in a more important job or having more fun, than he 
or she or they. But if I want to understand, I must base my 
self-definition not on being different but on being the same: 
the common experience of being human. 

This awareness of sameness, of solidarity, once struck 
Thomas Merton so forcefully that he has confessed: "This 
sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a re-
lief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And 
I suppose my happiness could have taken form in these words : 
'Thank God, thank God, that I am like other men, that I am 
only a man among others. . . It is a glorious déstination to 
be member of thé human race. . . ,"4 

45 



A third facet of understanding: I must learn to listen. Lis-
tening is an arduous art. You see, most conversations are not 
conversations at all. Either they are monologues: I wait pa-
tiently until you have finished—since civility demands it—and 
then I say exactly what I would have said if you had not 
spoken. Or they are debates: I do indeed listen, but only for 
that inept word or false phrase at which I proceed to intercept 
and destroy. No, to listen is to give yourself totally, for that 
moment or that day, to another, to put yourself into the other's 
mind, yes the other's heart. It means that you hear not naked 
words but a human person. 

I have experienced this in inter confessional dialogue. The 
reason why the Lutheran-Catholic conversations have made 
such remarkable progress is that we listen. For the first time 
in my life I have come to grips not with Lutheranism but with 
Lutherans; and it is a soul-shivering experience. Here are gen-
uine Christians—at least as knowledgeable as I am, wonder-
fully committed to Christ, touching in their care and concern 
for me—something I had never gotten out of a book on Lu-
theranism, would never have experienced had I not come face 
to face with live Lutherans, had I not been compelled to listen. 
Only by listening have I personally absorbed what came out of 
Vatican II as a theological truth: Non-Roman communities 
are communities of grace and salvation, where the Holy Spirit 
is amazingly active. 

The Holy Spirit. Precisely here is a profound reason for 
listening, for opening myself to another: Through that other, 
God may well be speaking to me, and in speaking to me help-
ing me to understand. 

A fourth facet: To understand others, I must understand 
their history. That is true of a nation, and it is true of a person. 
In a recent column on the uses and abuses of history, Meg 
Greenfield made a very astute observation: "I have heard every 
political and technical explanation there is for the failure of 
our 10-year-long adventure in Southeast Asia. But I think there 
is one that takes precedence over them all. Quite simply, we 
didn't know who the Vietnamese were."5 

To understand a people, to understand a person, it will help 
if I know where they come from and where they've been. Oh 
yes, it is quite possible to look into another's eyes and instantly 
understand; but it is also possible to look into another's eyes 
and misunderstand. We are all too prone to pigeonhole whole 

46 



peoples: "India is lazy and Italy is dirty, the Russians are bar-
barians and the Spaniards are fascists, the Germans are power-
hungry and the Scandinavians are sex-crazy, the Jews own 
most of our banks and the Arabs are a menace to the Middle 
East, the English are oppressors of the Irish and the Puerto 
Ricans are juvenile and senile delinquents." And we are so 
quick to turn away from persons we do not like. There are so 
many men and women and children who would be much more 
lovable if someone loved them; but we shall not love them if 
we do not try to understand them, if we do not try to discover 
where they come from and where they've been. 

A fifth and final facet: I must accept my own brokenness. 
Not in sheer resignation, because I can do naught else; rather 
as a positive asset, a help to understanding. I do not come to 
others fearless and tearless, unscarred and unshaken. Like 
Christ, I am a wounded healer. I too am vulnerable; I too must 
confront the brutal condition of my mortality; ultimately I too 
stand alone before an abyss; I too must murmur "I believe, 
Lord; help my unbelief!" In ministering to another, therefore, 
in trying to care, I am not simply removing a fear, alleviating 
an anxiety, cauterizing some human cancer. No, we are minis-
tering to each other, deepening our different pains to a level, a 
Calvary, where, in Nouwen's words, "they can be shared as 
different manifestations of our similar dread-full condition." 

To relearn the value of each human person, to sense our 
solidarity with all that is human, to learn to listen, to discover 
where others come from and where they've been, to accept 
our own brokenness—here, I suggest, is one road to under-
standing. And this, I submit, is what a broken world has a 
right to expect of those who feed on the broken Bread that is 
Christ. If we do not make an extraordinary effort to under-
stand, to bridge the gap that distances us from our brothers 
and sisters, I am afraid that one day Christ may say in sorrow 
to us: "Have I been so long with you, and yet you do not know 
me?" 

1 American Heritage Dictionary (1969) p. 428. 
2 Tr. J. A. Fitzmyer, Jerome Biblical Commentary 2:250. 
3 Union Seminary Quarterly Review 21 (1965-66) 121. 
4 Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday 

Image Books, 1956) p. 261. 
Ä "Lest We Forget," Newsweek, Feb. 2, 1976, p. 76. 

47 





6 
JUST over a decade ago, the Dominican Fergus Kerr published a perceptive article in England under a frightening title: 
"Theology in a Godforsaken Epoch."1 Kerr's root affirmation 
was that today the experience of God, our encounter with God, 
the way God speaks to us, is radically different from yesterday. 
We live in a different epoch—^different because of profound 
changes in what is seen as meaningful, a fresh context that 
gives new meaning to words such as "real," "true," 'beautiful," 
"nature," "love," "God." In this new epoch, Kerr argued, God 
"seems to have withdrawn," does not,"make Himself accessible 
in many of the ways that have hitherto been viable. The way 
of life as a whole is not affording the experience of God it 
would seem to be the structure for." Our form of life is God-
forsaken in that God gives Himself now only in ways which 
either run counter to our traditions and customs or are unre-
lated to them. And so, "for believers at large . . . encounter 
with God seems to occur now primarily in experiencing His 
absence." In other words, "It is the fate of our epoch that the 
encounter we have with God . . . takes the form mostly of fail-
ing to find Him in the system of institutions and structures 
which constitutes our tradition."2 

You may disagree with Kerr, accuse him of unjustified gen-
eralizations; but he has provoked critical questions that de-
mand discussion. (1) In what sense can we speak of God's 
absence today? (2) Where do those who are hungry for God 
discover Him today? (3) What challenge does this pose to 
those Christians who romp continuously in God's presence? 

49 



I 
TH I R S T then, can we speak, without exaggeration, of God's 

absence? I think we can. You see, in this age of crises—war 
and peace, white and black, man and woman, rich and poor, 
Catholic and Protestant—there is a crisis more crucial than 
all the rest. The most critical issue of all is not bombs, not skin, 
not sex, not food, not even Church. It is the crisis of God. What 
can a human being believe? In the twentieth century, in the 
70s, is belief still possible? 

The problem is not artificial, not exaggerated. Take simply 
the United States. A whole generation has grown up since 
World War II, another generation is sprouting up now, yoisng 
men and women who do not look at the world the way I do, do 
not use words the way I do, do not quite think the way I do, do 
not sing my songs or dream my dreams. More to the point, 
their experience of God is different from mine. There are 
Christians among them, but so many Christians who do not 
discover God in the things they see and hear and touch, do not, 
with the poet Plunkett, "see [Christ's] blood upon the rose,/And 
in the stars the glory of His eyes," do not see that "His body 
gleams amid eternal snows,/His tears fall from the skies." 
There are scholars among them, men of learning, but so many 
for whom philosophical arguments to prove God's existence are 
stale, flat, and unprofitable, for whom order and design, 
beauty and intelligence and contingency point not to God but 
to man. 

There are theologians among them, but theologians who will 
have nothing to do with a God "out there," a God who cannot 
change, a God who does not weep when I bleed. There are 
poets and painters among them, artists of every description, 
but artists committed to Nothing; artists for whom man's dig-
nity and hope lie in his ability to confront, with courage and 
indeed with joy, a life and a reality that is senseless, useless, 
absurd—artists whose basic affirmation is Samuel Beckett's 
"Two times anything equals zero." 

There are men and women who fail to find God in the struc-
tures wherein we Christians have grown up, in our churches 
and our theologies, in our worship and our piety, who do not 
hear God's voice in our Bible, do not taste His flesh at our 
Supper. Increasingly, there are Catholics who are fashioning 
their own Christianity, because God does not speak to them in 
the institution of their elders, in pope or priest, in the word 

50 



written at Rome or the word preached from the pulpit. There 
are so many men and women who, if they encounter God at 
all, encounter Him in experiencing His absence, in an empti-
ness that says He is not there at all. 

Today's problem has been impressively posited by Karl 
Rahner: "Every age has its own task before God; the task of 
today's world is to believe. For today it is not this or that belief, 
this or that article of faith which is called into doubt, but faith 
itself, man's capacity to believe, man's ability to commit him-
self completely to a single, unambiguous, demanding convic-
tion. . . ."3 

There is, then, a sense in which God is absent from our 
world. Oh, I am not denying that God is everywhere; I am not 
questioning His real presence in the proclaimed word or the 
transformed Bread. I am not talking about God's objective 
reality; I am concerned about our experience of God. And I am 
saying that more and more Americans, more and more Chris-
tians, are not touching God, do not thrill to His touch in the 
structures and forms of life that, as I see it, were divinely de-
signed to touch God to man, man to God. In that sense, and to 
that extent, God is really absent from our world. 

II 
MY SECOND question: Where do those who are hungry for God discover Him today? If the "new man" does not find 
God where the "old man" found Him, where can he look, where 
does he find God? There is no easy answer, no single answer 
for all. I would stress four aspects of contemporary experience 
that have impressed me. 

1) Some find God when they are brought face to face with 
their own insufficiency. I am distressingly aware, for example, 
that I am not what people have a right to expect of me—as a 
man, as a Jesuit, as a priest, as a theologian. This is especially 
apparent when I rely on the Burghardt charism, on my native 
charm and the naked power of my words. It is ¿n these mo-
ments of self-awareness that I feel an agonizing need for 
Another, to open myself to Him, to be filled with a little of His 
fullness. 

It is in these moments that I sense His presence—not a 
vision, believe me, but effects that can hardly have meaning 
unless He is there. It shows in insights that flood in on me, but 
only (to my embarrassment) after the chapel and bended knees 
have become a last resort. It shows in words of mine that in 

51 



themselves are incredibly insipid, yet somehow manage to 
transmute another's despair into hope, hate into love, dis-
couragement into courage. It shows in those rare moments 
when I rise from my sinfulness and my selfishness only be-
cause Someone else is quite obviously lifting me. It shows 
when, dissatisfied with myself, I find the power to go beyond 
myself; and I know that the power is not mine. 

2) Some find God in their social relations. I am thinking, 
for example, of the liturgy. Here, for many, God transpires' 
comes to light—not so much in His real presence on the altar 
as in His real presence on the face of a child after Communion, 
in the smile that two strangers exchange, in the love that 
thrills through a congregation that is spontaneously one. I am 
thinking of contact with charismatic figures: John Courtney 
Murray and John XXIII, Dr. Tom Dooley and Martin Luther 
King, Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day—men and women 
whose sheer presence is for ever so many a lift of the heart, a 
sign that God has not forsaken His children. 

I am thinking of Marriage Encounter, that wildfire move-
ment sparked by thousands of 'little churches," families aflame 
with love of God and His every image, husbands and wives 
whose whole existence opens on each other and on the other, 
children who encounter Christ in their parents and are capti-
vated by the encounter. 

I am thinking of the unexpected upsurge of charismatic 
movements within Catholicism since Vatican II, which have 
roused a fresh awareness of the Holy Spirit, the "unknown 
God," in the life of the Church, have given a profound impetus 
to prayer—prayer together, prayer out loud, spontaneous 
prayer. I am thinking that, for many a Catholic, the meeting-
place of God and man is not so much an altar rail as a stinking 
slum in Washington or a rat-plagued tenement in Harlem, a 
vineyard in Delano or a decaying schoolhouse in Appalachia. 
For in their quest of God these Christians have an enviable 
grasp on what George MacLeod meant when he said: 

I simply argue that the cross be raised again at the 
center of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of 
the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was 
not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but 
on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage 
heap; at a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had 
to write his title in Hebrew and in Latin and in 
Greek; at the kind of place where cynics talk smut 

52 



and thieves curse and soldiers gamble. Because that 
is where he died, and that is what he died about.4 

3) Many Americans—at least half a million, perhaps sev-
eral million—search for the divine in the great Eastern reli-
gions and their modern Western offspring. Whether it is the 
Hindu yearning for union with the Absolute through release 
from the physical world of appearances and various forms of 
yoga, or the many types of Buddhism that seek union with 
ultimate reality in which suffering is eliminated and compas-
sion and wisdom are attained, the search is disciplined, sacri-
ficial, enthusiastic. Is it a search for God? That is not always 
clear, if only because the concept of God is so difficult to pin-
point in East and West; but at least it is a heartening witness 
to the human spirit's ceaseless quest for an experience of the 
transcendent. 

4) Some, paradoxically, experience God by experiencing 
His absence. By "experience of absence" I do not mean a nega-
tive indifference, a lack of interest or concern; quite the op-
posite. The agony lies in this: The God who does not seem to 
be there is a God for whom I am agonizing. I want Him to be 
there, but I do not find Him where I expect Him to be: in the 
silence of my cell or where two or three are gathered together 
in the name of Christ, in the fragmented word or the broken 
Bread, in the human persons who should reflect the human 
Jesus or the heavens that should proclaim God's glory. It is a 
"dark night of the soul," which can force even from the lips of 
mystics the heart-rending cry, "My God, my God, why have 
you forsaken me?" It is an experience of absence that is 
awfully close to an experience of presence; God is dramatically 
near. 

Ill 
rr*His leads to my third question: What challenge does all 

this pose to those for whom God is a living reality, those 
Christians who romp continuously in God's presence, whose 
hunger for God is not a starvation? In the first place, a warn-
ing: Don't sell short the search for God in social relations, in 
other persons. It can be very Christian, for it is grounded in 
two Christian affirmations. The first is the opening line of a 
Latin hymn we used to sing without realizing its implications: 
Ubi amor, ibi Deus est. A powerful line: "Where love is, there 
God is." And so I am justified in searching for God by looking 

53 



for love; and if I find hate, especially where love should live, 
I may be excused if I do not discover God. The second affirma-
tion is a sentence from Genesis: "God created man in His own 
image; in the image of God He created him; male and female 
He created them" (Gn 1:27). And so I am justified if I hope 
somewhere sometime to find the face of God on the face of 
man; and if I do not find Him, it may very well be because 
Christians do not reflect Him, mirror Him, as they should. 

This lays an awesome responsibility on committed Chris-
tians. We are supposed to be "the light of the world" and "the 
salt of the earth." Many indeed have been: Teresa of Avila 
and Teresa of Calcutta, Ignatius of Antioch and Ignatius Loy-
ola, Bonhoeffer and Merton and countless Christians whose 
names are now known to God alone. But this is not a task 
laid only on the heroic, on the exceptional believer; it chal-
lenges all who have been refashioned by grace into images of 
Christ, in whom Christ has been formed. Very concretely, the 
Son of God proclaimed a crucial touchstone whereby the world 
would recognize that God loves us and that Christ has come to 
us: the love of His disciples for one another. I dare not point 
an accusing finger at Northern Ireland or South Africa as 
long as my life and my love do not touch the God-hungry to 
Him for whom they hunger. 

Second, too many Christians look with scorn on America's 
search for a new star in the East. But are we not in part re-
sponsible for that extraordinary quest? In the words of the 
Carmelite William McNamara, "People in the West, particular-
ly the young, are being fed stones instead of bread in churches 
and schools. They know nothing of the deepest mystical tradi-
tion; yet, they want inner experience. They hear there's a 
mystic tradition in the East, and they go over."5 Yes, we have 
betrayed our ageless tradition: a tradition that goes back to 
Jesus, alone with His Father in the desert, on the mountain, in 
the garden; a tradition that goes back to the Fathers of the 
Church and the Fathers of the Desert, back to the medieval 
mystics, down to the contemporary Trappists whose relevance 
we questioned in the activist 60s—all those men and women 
whose life is contemplation, a long loving look at the real. 

Third, we who do find God in venerable institutions must 
be careful not to look down our tradition-honed noses at newer 
forms of religious experience. American Catholics have rarely 
worn God on their sleeves; we have consistently suspected the 

54 



emotional, the Holy Roller, dubbed such religion Protestant; 
and so we shy away from baptism in the Spirit, speaking in 
tongues, public witness, shouting in the streets our discovery 
of God in marriage encounter. But granted the need for dis-
cernment, the danger in identifying every psychological tremor 
with the wind of the Spirit, there is a comparable peril: We 
can strait-jacket the Spirit, confine Him to an antiseptic ex-
istence where He blows only as we will Him to. It might help 
the God-hungry if more of us could vent the agony and the 
ecstasy that God brings to those who are aware of Him alive 
in their hearts. 

Which leads to my fourth and final challenge. In this 
eucharistic year, vast millions of the God-hungry will not find 
the Lord in the Bread of Life. But we who do eat the flesh of 
Christ and drink His blood, will we be changed in consequence? 
So changed that our lives will cry out to the world with St. 
Paul, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" 
(Gal 2:20)? So changed that in the midst of death, racked 
on this world's cross, we can still chant the constant refrain 
of Eugene O'Neill's resurrected Lazarus: 

Laugh with me! 
Death is dead! 
Fear is no more! 
There is only life! 
There is only laughter! 

Only such Christians will attract those from whom God hides 
Himself; only such Christians can pose a problem for the 
Godless. 

1 New Blackfriars 46 (1965) 665-72. 
2 Ibid. pp. 670-71. 
3 "The Faith of the Priest Today," Woodstock fetters 93 (1964) 5. 
4 Quoted in Godfrey L. Diekmann, O.S.B., "The Reform of Catholic 

Liturgy: Are We Too Late?" Worship 41 (1967) 151. 
r> Time, April 9, 1973, p. 93. 

55 



BREAD FOR THE LIFE 
OF THE WORLD 
Hunger for Jesus 



§_ 
TN THE six essays that have gone before, I sketched six 

hungers of the human family: hunger for food and for 
freedom, hunger for peace and for truth, hunger for under-
standing and for God. Each of these is a real hunger in its 
own right, and each demands to be satisfied on its own terms. 
And still it is true that, in the Christian vision, such satiety is 
not sufficient, should not be satisfying. The world's hungers 
ought to climax in still another hunger, hunger for a bread 
that is incomparably rich, bread that gives a unique life, bread 
that while it fills makes you ache for more, a bread that is a 
person. I mean, of course, the Bread of Life, our Lord and 
Saviour Jesus Christ. 

But if this Bread of Life is to be anything more than pious 
pap, you must ponder three problems: (1) What kind of life 
are we talking about? (2) In what sense is Jesus the bread 
of this life? (3) What significance has all this for the hungers 
of the human family? 

I 
TTURST then, what kind of life are we talking about? It is not 
•T sheer human existence, the joy there is in simply being 
alive. I am not downgrading this. After all, the Old Testament 
itself insists that life is a gift—a gift in which there breaks 
forth the mystery, the liberality, of a God who glories in the 
fact that He is a living God. The life of a man or woman is 
precious: It is the crowning point of God's creative activity in 
Genesis, and a long life is an Old Testament ideal. Fragile as 
life is—a wisp of smoke (Wis 2 :2) , a passing shadow (Ps 
144:4)—the life of a human person is still sacred: It is 
specially infused by a gracious God, who is so jealous of His 

57 



gift that He can say sternly to Noah and his sons: ". . . of every 
man's brother I will require the life of man. Whoever sheds 
the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God 
made man in His own image" (Gn 9:5-6). 

But sacred as it is, this sheerly human existence is not the 
life we are discussing. Life in our context is the life the Son 
of God took flesh to bring, the life Jesus gives in abundance 
(Jn 10:10), the life He calls "eternal life" (Jn 17:2), the life 
that is Jesus (Jn 14:6). That is why St. Paul can trumpet that 
thrilling sentence, "For me, life is Christ" (Phil 1:21). It is 
man's sharing in God's own nature, in God's own life. It means 
that we can, as Jesus put it, "know the only true God and 
Jesus Christ" whom He has sent (Jn 17:3), can love God and 
His Christ, love every human person with a love born of God. 

Eternal life, therefore, does not begin with death. It has its 
roots in the past, in the new life that sprang from Christ's 
death. It looks to the future: ceaseless life with Him who is 
Life. And still it is a here-and-now reality; eternal life has its 
beginning now. "If anyone loves me," Jesus proclaimed, "my 
Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our 
dwelling place with him" (Jn 14:23). Eternal life is a specially 
intimate presence, an indwelling of Trinity, where God-within-
me is the source of my activity, transforms my thinking, trans-
fuses my freedom—in a genuine sense, is my life. It is the 
mystery of grace—not some thing, but persons fused in love. 
In this profound sense, our living God is a "God of the living" 
(Mk 12:27). 

II 
SUCH, in brief, is the kind of life we are talking about. But in what sense is Jesus the bread of this life? Here the sixth 
chapter of John's Gospel is incomparably rich—I mean Jesus' 
discourse on the Bread of Life. The background, the context, 
is hunger. More than 5,000 have been fed on five barley loaves 
and a couple of dried fish. Many of these follow Jesus to the 
north shore of the Lake of Galilee. And Jesus chides them: 
"You are not looking for me because you have seen signs, but 
because you have eaten your fill of the loaves. You should not 
be working for perishable food, but for food that lasts for 
eternal life, food which the Son of Man will give you. . . . I 
myself am the Bread of Life. No one who comes to me shall 
ever be hungry . . . " (Jn 6:26-27, 35). 

58 



Two themes color this discourse; scholars call them the 
sapiential and the sacramental. Very simply, this means that 
Jesus presents Himself as Bread of Life under two forms, 
distinct but related: He feeds us with His word and He feeds 
us with His flesh. The "bread from heaven" which "gives life 
to the world" (Jn 6:33) is God's revelation and Christ's flesh. 
Each calls for comment. 

First, the Bread of Life is God's revealing word. As so often 
in John, chapter 6 has an Old Testament background that helps 
the hearers of Jesus to understand. Their tradition prepared 
them to see in food or bread symbols of divine word and 
wisdom. In their hunger and in their search for Jesus, they 
might recall the words of the Lord God in Amos: "Behold, 
the days are coming when I shall send a famine on the land— 
not a famine of bread or a thirst for water, but [a famine] of 
hearing the word of the Lord. . . . They shall run back and 
forth seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it" 
(8:11-12). Particularly pertinent are all those Old Testament 
descriptions of the messianic banquet with Yahweh or with 
His Messiah, a banquet which in John is at hand for those 
servants of Yahweh who believe in Him whom Yahweh has 
sent. Listening to Jesus, an Israelite might well be reminded 
of the Lord's promise in Isaiah | "As rain and snow come down 
from heaven . . . making the earth bring forth and sprout, 
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my 
word be that goes forth from my mouth" (55:10-11). 

The point is, Jesus announces Himself as God's revelation. 
Not only does He speak God's word; He is God's Word in flesh. 
Not only does He reveal God's secret life, unveil God's plan for 
sinful man; what He says finds its fullness in who He is: He 
is the word He speaks. And the response such revelation 
requires of us is belief: To eat this bread is to accept Jesus' 
word and the Word that is Jesus. It is of this bread that Jesus 
said to the Jews: "Indeed, this is the will of my Father, that 
everyone who looks upon the Son and believes in Him should 
have eternal life. . . . Let me firmly assure you, the believer 
possesses eternal life. I am the Bread of Life. Your ancestors 
ate manna in the desert, but they died. This is the bread that 
comes down from heaven, that a man may eat it and never 
die" (Jn 6:40, 47-50). To say a total yes to Jesus, to all He 
says and all He is, this is to eat the bread of wisdom, the 
bread that is the revelatory word; this is what it takes to live 

59 



in Jesus now, to live with Jesus beyond the grave. 
Second, the Bread of Life is Jesus' eucharistic flesh. As the 

sixth chapter of John's Gospel progresses, no longer are we 
told that eternal life comes from believing in Jesus; now it 
stems from feeding on His flesh and drinking His blood. Here 
the language of Jesus is uncommonly clear, terribly uncom-
promising in its promise of life and its threat of death: 

The bread that I shall give is my own flesh for the 
life of the world. . . . Let me firmly assure you, if you 
do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His 
blood, you have no life in you. He who feeds on my 
flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. And I 
shall raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is 
real food, and my blood real drink. The man who 
feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood remains in 
me and I in him. Just as the Father who has life 
sent me and I have life because of the Father, so the 
man who feeds on me will have life because of me. 
This is the bread that came down from heaven. 
Unlike those ancestors who ate and yet died, the 
man who feeds on this bread will live forever (Jn 6: 
51-58). 

NC NEWS 

60 



There you have the mystery-laden promise that would find 
its first fulfillment at the Last Supper, where Jesus prefaced 
the supreme expression of His love, His death for our life, 
with two sentences that link us with Him in life and love 
forever. He took bread, blessed it, broke it, gave it to His 
disciples: "Take, eat; this is my body, which is given for you." 
He took wine, gave thanks, gave it to them: "Drink of it, all 
of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured 
out for many for the forgiveness of sins" (Mt 26:26-28; 
Lk 22:19). 

Much theological ink has been spilled over the promise and 
its fulfillment; but few reactions over the centuries can rival 
in poetic power, can match for faith and love, the response 
of St. Thomas Aquinas, as we have it recaptured in the 
stunning version of Gerard Manley Hopkins: 

Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore 
Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more: 
See, Lord, at thy service low lies here a heart 
Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art. 

Ill 
MY THIRD question: What significance has all this for the hungers of the human family, for our day-to-day living? 
In my chapter on hunger for truth, I dealt to some extent with 
the issue of faith. God's self-disclosure calls for a twin re-
sponse: a total yes to the word that Jesus speaks and a per-
sonal self-giving to the Word that Jesus is. Let me focus now 
on the Bread of Life that is His flesh. Here several issues are 
crucial. 

First, for the hungers of the Christian family the Eucharist 
is not a luxury, some sort of dessert, icing on top of our Chris-
tian cake. It is bread: The flesh of Jesus is our staple food. 
Not because I say so, but because Jesus proclaimed it: "If you 
do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man . . . you have no life 
in you" (Jn 6:53). I am not interested in arguing whether 
you can reach God without receiving Holy Communion. Moses 
did; and I am sure six million victims of the Holocaust did; 
and I would not be surprised if heaven has mansions for non-
communicating Christians. The heart of the matter is not 
what is possible because our God is a merciful God who does 
not want the death of the sinner but that he should live, a God 
who saves in ever so many and strange ways. The point is, 

61 



here is a food which, in its potential for giving life, is un-
paralleled. 

When you assimilate the food of the body, you change it 
into your own substance. That is not true of the eucharistic 
Christ. When He gives Himself to you as food, you are trans-
formed into Him. In the words that Augustine of Hippo heard 
from on high, "I am the food of grown men: grow and you 
shall eat me. And you shall not change me into yourself as 
bodily food, but into me you shall be changed." So much so 
that you can cry out with St. Paul, "It is no longer I who live, 
but Christ who lives in me" (Gal 2:20). In the felicitous 
phrase of Pius XII, "If you have received worthily, you are 
what you have received." In our ceaseless effort to build up 
Christ in us, the Eucharist is food incomparable; for the food 
is Christ, body and blood, soul and divinity. 

Second, within Christianity the Bread of Life is not primarily 
an individualistic thing, a solitary supper, my private party. 
Its function is to form a community. St. Paul phrased it 
beautifully: "Because the Bread is one, we, though many, are 
one body; for we all partake of the one Bread" (1 Cor 10:17). 
The Lord who locks Himself in the tabernacle of my body is 
none other than the Lord who nourishes my next-door neigh-
bor, the same Christ who feeds the Lebanese, the Japanese 
and the Thai, the African, the German and the Czech. Christ 
is not divided, Christ is not multiplied. There is one and the 
same body, one and the same Christ, for all. In His flesh we 
are one. 

A peril within Catholicism today is that the Eucharist which 
should make us one threatens to divide us. Catholic communi-
ties are unchristianly rent by warring loves: Shall we stand 
or kneel, pray in an ageless Latin or an ephemeral English, 
receive Life in our hands or on our tongues, wish peace with 
a touch or a word, blare forth Bach from an organ or strum 
a Christian love song? For all too many, these are not academic 
debates or Christian options; they are life-and-death struggles 
—so much so that some Catholics will not worship with other 
Catholics save on their own narrow terms, even suicidally 
refuse the bread that gives life. Is it for this that the Word-
made-flesh offered that flesh the night before He died: "This 
is my body, which is given for you"? 

Which leads to a third issue: the world outside our altars. 
The Eucharistic Congress is not an occasion for narcissism, a 

62 



chance to fall in love with our own reflection. An encouraging 
facet of this celebration is that it has expanded our horizons, 
has forced us to focus on the hungers of the human family. 
In that context—millions of men, women and children strug-
gling desperately to live human lives, struggling even to live— 
talk about the Bread of Life can sound awfully empty, sus-
piciously hollow. And it will be empty, will be hollow, unless 
we who feed on the eucharistic Christ are ourselves eucharists 
for the life of the world. 

This is not insubstantial poetry. The Eucharist is central to 
Christians for a. complex of reasons. It is a presence, a real 
if hidden presence, a presence without peer, a presence of 
Christ's whole person, a presence which leaps from love and 
leads to life, a presence which is a promise, a promise of good 
things which our eyes have not yet seen, our ears not yet 
heard, blessings it has not entered our minds to imagine. If 
I am to be a eucharist for the life of the world, my feeding 
on the flesh of Christ must take me from church to world. I 
must begin to be present to others, present where they are, 
present in ways that respond to their needs, to their hungers— 
for food or freedom, for peace or truth, for understanding or 
God. I must be really present—I, not merely my money or my 
mind—somewhat hidden at times but always totally com-
mitted, because as a Christian my life is love and only love 
can bring life, can light dulled eyes with hope, can promise 
somebody somewhere that tomorrow will be more human, 
will be worth living. 

In closing this series of reflections on the hungers of the 
human family, I suggest that we should, each of us, put to 
ourselves one urgent question: Where I walk and work, where 
I play and pray, in the little acre of God I till, is there anyone 
who is less hungry because I am there? 

63 







Walter J. Burghardt, S.J. 

Walter J. Burghardt, S.J., Professor of Patristic Theology at 
the Catholic University of America, was born in New York City 
in 1914. He earned M.A. and Ph.L. degrees at Woodstock Col-
lege, where he was ordained, and a S.T.D. degree from the 
Catholic University of America. 

Father Burghardt is editor of Theological Studies, a research 
associate at Woodstock Theological Center and a member of 
distinguished religious commissions, including the U.S. Dia-
logue Group, Lutheran-Roman Catholic Theological Conver-
sations; Faith and Order Commission, World Council of 
Churches; and the International Papal Theological Commis-
sion. 

The author of six books, Father Burghardt has lectured and 
published widely and holds six honorary degrees.