Breaking bread 2

The story of Ghadir's little table


Four people died in Harbour View home in one week. Even for a retirement home that is more than usual. This week on Thursday I celebrated a memorial mass with all the oldies sitting around. We thanked the Giver of life for all the lives of these four people who are still part of his creation, his family, his loved ones.
We sat around a little table that reminded us of the time Jesus sat down for a meal, with his friends, with tax collectors, with sinners, at weddings, on the beach, at the Last Supper.

Imagine the occasion- a dining table is covered with beautiful, white linen cloth, with the best cutlery, glasses and crockery. A sumptuous meal is eagerly awaited. Suddenly a grim faced hostess walks into the room. "I ‘m sorry, there won’t be any dinner. You see, I forgot to buy the food."
It sounds like a ridiculous situation but it shows that even the best-dressed tables are meaningless without food to share.

In the gospel we witness the first sign of what Jesus would do in the institution of the Eucharist. He takes bread from the table, he breaks it and he shares it. In this way he shows his disciples that out of very little, great things can happen.
In the Eucharist we believe Jesus shares more than bread, he shares himself as food for life’s journey to the end. In doing so he satisfies a deep hunger—for justice, truth and peace .

Our lives become the time and place of sharing the table of our gifts and wholeness, sharing the sacrifice of our pains and brokenness. We share in the compassion of Jesus, and the generosity and goodness of his Father.
We realise that all is gift, the life we have, the gift we use, the ancestors we have, the families we celebrate, the elderly we thank and remember.
As always with every celebration we think of absent friends, of other people not as lucky as we are. Daily we are reminded of hungry, lonely, wounded powerless people. Jesus saw the great crowd and said to Philip, "Where can we buy bread for these people to eat."
There were many people at the lake, north of Israel, south of the Lebanon. Even Gaza, not far from Bethlehem, there was hunger and suffering.

From Bethlehem I received an email last week. It reads:

Dear Friend,

I don’t have many words to share with you, but I think it’s important to share the SILENCE—the silence of those who have no voice to cry out for help; the silence of those who are afraid to speak; the silence of those who have too much violence and suffering; the silence of those who are simply too tired to speak.
Our region is being shattered by the world’s most powerful weapon: FEAR.
Fear blinds and maims. It tortures and kills.
It is the source of lies and destruction. It builds walls and prisons. It traumatises children and sweeps adults into the pit of despair.

And here I sit, in the relative, eerie calm of Bethlehem, struggling to make sense of what is going on around us. The horrors of Gaza are gathering relentless momentum. The systematic destruction of Lebanon has just begun. The Wall around Bethlehem is almost complete.

And yet Ghadir, a young woman with severe physical and intellectual disabilities who lives in an institution in Bethany, still greets me with a belly laugh and sparkling eyes when I walk in the door. As she gracefully moves her hands up and down, I recognise her invitation to dance. And so we dance.

Ghadir knows what it feels to be a source of fear for people who look at her and see someone less than human. But she refuses to succumb to the paralysis of her heart. With the joy she wants to share and the thirst she has for friendship, she discovered the weapons that destroy fear. She simply realised that each moment is a gift, an invitation to sit at the table of friendship. Ghadir has created a little world of peace, a little world of healing. A little world where gratitude is possible.

Ghadir has invited me to her table and into the little world where hope becomes possible again. And because of Ghadir I am able to invite others into this world of hope.
My prayer is that each of us can ask for the grace to be an instrument of peace, of hope, and of healing in our little worlds, since it’s only in the "little worlds" that healing can begin for the big world.
Peace from Bethlehem,
Kathy, l’Arche community at Bethlehem, Holy Land

I pray that you can invite others to your little table of hope and healing, like Ghadir did to her friends and caregivers. In the breaking of bread we recognise Jesus.
The little table of Ghadir becomes for us a symbol, an icon of our sharing with people in need, be it elderly, disadvantaged, dying, young and old.
In the breaking of our lives we become life-giving.

Let us pray for peace and strive to be peace-makers, just where we are.

John