Ep 92 - You Are What You Eat

You are what you eat. On the Feast of Corpus Christi, I explore what this familiar saying means for our spiritual lives. While junk food affects our bodies, the content we consume, the thoughts we dwell on, and the habits we cultivate also shape our souls. 

Jesus presents himself as the Bread of Life, offering nourishment that goes far beyond physical hunger. In this episode, I reflect on the Eucharist, the power of God's Word, and why spiritual growth requires more than a once-a-week encounter with Christ.

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Welcome to episode 92 of Brother from Another Father. As we celebrate the feast of Corpus Christi, some of you may have come across the documentary called Super Size Me. In this documentary, a certain journalist, Morgan Spurlock, decides to investigate the effect of fast food on our diets. And so he engages in an experiment that for one whole month he will only eat from McDonald's. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner will just be McDonald's. And if they offer him the opportunity to supersize his meal, in other words, to double the size of his meal, instead of having one big Mac, he has two Big Macs and large fries, he will take that offer up. During this process, he was monitored by his doctors to check his health. When he started the experiment, he was in perfect health. By the end of the month, by the end of 30 days, his health was in an appalling state. He had gained 11 kgs, his cholesterol was off the charts, his liver was damaged, and there was other organ damage as well. In fact, during the experiment, some of his doctors were encouraging him to stop the experiment because his liver was suffering what they feared would be permanent damage. The point of the experiment and the point of the documentary is to show us that it is true that we become what we eat. We are what we eat. If we eat junk food, well then we become junk. Our bodies are relegated to a junk status. Now, it's clear how this works if we eat fast food every day, like from McDonald's or Hungry Lion or whatever. How though does it work when it comes to the feast that we celebrate today? How do we become what we eat if we're talking about the Eucharist, about Christ's body and blood? It should be clear to us that it does not operate on a similar level of the physical. We know that if we consume the host that we receive at Mass, that will not take away our hunger if we are hungry on a physical level. Christ's body and blood are meant to be spiritual food. And so they feed us on a spiritual level. And so what today's feast invites us to ask ourselves is what kind of food are we feeding our souls? What is the equivalent of a big Mac? What is the equivalent of fast food, junk food, in terms of the food that we feed our souls? Well, I don't think that's a difficult question to answer. If on a daily basis we are consuming conspiracy theories, if on a daily basis we are consuming stories on social media that make us angry, or that make us cynical, or that make us depressed, if we are consuming all the bad news, all the shocking news that social media serves up to us on a daily basis, that's the food that we're feeding our souls. And we will become what we eat. We will become angry, we will become depressed, we will become cynical. And so we need to pay attention to the type of food that we're feeding our souls. And it's not enough for us simply to say, Well, at least I am coming to Mass every Sunday, and I am feeding myself healthy food, good food. That would be the equivalent of this same journalist who did that experiment with eating McDonald's to say, Well, once a week I will eat a meal of only vegetables, no carbohydrates, and no sugar. I will eat a healthy meal. We all know that that simply won't work. If we are eating junk during the week, it won't simply do to have one healthy meal per week. We need to be eating healthy food, good food spiritually, every day. And it's clear from what Jesus says in the gospel today that Jesus wants to be our daily food, to nourish us on a daily basis. That is why Jesus compares himself to the bread that came down from heaven, the manna, that fed the Israelites on a daily basis. In the first reading, the reason that God fed the Israelites with manna is made explicit. We hear from Moses that it was to show the Israelites that it is not by bread alone that one lives, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. We live on God's word. That is what nourishes us. And at every Eucharistic celebration, at every Mass, we are fed from two tables. First of all, from the table of the Word that we have all heard today. The first reading, second reading, and the gospel. Christ's word nourishes us. And then in order to fulfill that nourishing presence of the word, we are then nourished from the table of the Eucharist with Christ's body and blood. Now it should be clear to us that not all of us in the midst of our busy lives will manage to come to Mass on a daily basis. But that doesn't mean that we should forgo the nourishment that comes from Christ's word. We can still have that nourishment on a daily basis and feed ourselves by reading the scriptures on a daily basis. This is what we are called to do. And it's interesting that the church's attitude towards daily mass has changed over the years. At the beginning of the church, the early Christian community, we know that they did not have daily mass, that they assembled once a week on the day after the Sabbath, the day of the resurrection, to gather together to break bread and to do this in memory of Jesus, as he had commanded them to do at the Last Supper. As we move into the Middle Ages, though, from about the fourth century onwards, it seems that the church developed an incredible reverence for the Eucharist, such that the Eucharist now became a reward for holiness, and increasingly lay people were discouraged from receiving the Eucharist frequently. By the time of the Council of Trent, the situation that happened in the 16th century, the situation had become so bad that certain lay people would only receive the Eucharist once every few years because they felt so unworthy of receiving so great and so precious a gift. And so the Council of Trent had to intervene and had to say, everyone, every lay Catholic must receive the Eucharist at least once a year. At least once a year, preferably at Easter. It took many more centuries for the encouragement for people to start attending daily Eucharist. And it was only in 1905 when Pope Pius X wrote an encyclical to the whole church to encourage lay people to receive the Eucharist regularly, at least once a week, if not daily, on a daily basis. Because our understanding of the Eucharist transformed from simply seeing the Eucharist as a reward for holiness, we now came to see the Eucharist, Christ's body and blood, as food for the journey. It is not a reward for holiness, it is a help for all of us in the midst of our sinful lives. Now, of course, there is a balance to be struck. We know that the church teaches us that we should not receive the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin. Now, this is left up to the conscience of each faithful member to examine your conscience and to see: am I so distant from God, am I so alienated from God that I cannot in good conscience come to the Eucharist, come to the table of the Lord without first putting my life in order. And that is where the sacrament of confession, the sacrament of reconciliation comes in. But I would say that those are very rare situations, that mostly in the midst of our attempt to serve God, yes, sometimes we will fall, but what the Eucharist will give us is the strength and grace that we need to do better, to draw closer to Christ and to serve him better, as we feed ourselves from both the tables of Christ's word and the table of the Eucharist. God bless and have a good Sunday.