Life and liturgy need to make an impact on each other. It’s a simple concept but all too often proves difficult in practice, at least from what I’ve observed and what people tell me — “There’s no connection between our lives and the Mass.” For me, the years in Bolivia and Peru, where I saw so much poverty and oppression, forced me to make the connection between the causes of human suffering and Jesus’ dying and rising. One story from those years may help us understand this relationship.
Some friends of mine in Lima once took an automobile trip through the Peruvian Andes. About midday on one leg of their journey, they stopped for lunch in a remote pueblo and went into a little restaurant. As they sat down to eat, an extremely poor Indian woman came in and asked them to let her have any scraps of food they might leave behind. My friends called the boy who was serving the table and told him to bring a plate of food for the woman and charge it to their bill. She gratefully took the food and went outside into the warming sunshine to sit and enjoy this unexpected windfall.
As my friends watched, another person in the same impoverished condition came along and sat down beside the first woman. They said that they fully expected her to tell the second woman to go inside and beg for her own meal. But she didn’t do that. Instead, she looked around the ground and found a piece of old cardboard lying there. She brushed the dust off it and pushed half of her meal onto the cardboard for the other woman to eat.
That story always makes me think about Eucharist and the many facets of this incredible gift. How can we not connect the bread of life, recognizing Jesus in the breaking of the bread, with all the efforts to feed the poor and all the efforts the poor make to feed themselves — like the two women in this story.
These connections strike me as the very center of Christian spirituality, and not to make them leaves Eucharistic celebrations in the dry limbo where too many of them end up. Making these connections helps us remember that spirituality has everything to do with active engagement in the here and now, in the real moment where each of us lives our life. I think this story also puts Jesus’ statement that we shall always have the poor with us in a different light. While doing our best to eliminate poverty, we know that, like those two Andean Indian women, the poor often are our teachers, helping us to deepen our life in God through engagement with God’s world.
Fr. Nangle ministers to the Hispanic community at Our Lady Queen of Peace, Arlington. His latest book is Engaged Spirituality: Faith Life in the Heart of the Empire (Orbis, 2008) from which this article is an excerpt.