Abbey-Roads2

“He gave them all they craved.”- Ps. 78

The first reading at Mass today expresses something of what I was attempting to say in yesterday’s post, The long and lonely road: A story about nothing.  I’ll paraphrase the text from Deuteronomy 8, as if it was addressed to me alone, and perhaps you will understand some of what I was attempting to say in my post “about nothing“. 

Remember how for forty years now the Lord your God has directed all your wandering in the desert, especially since your conversion.  He did this to test you by affliction and to find out whether or not it was your intention to keep his commandments.  He let all of these things happen to you; he let you be afflicted with hunger - and then he fed you with manna - the Body and Blood of Christ, a food unrecognized by your fathers, in order to show you that not by bread alone does one live, but by the Word that comes forth from the mouth of the Lord.  It is not by novelties and delicacies confected by men that one lives, but by the Living Bread come down from heaven.

Do not forget the Lord your God, who brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery to debauchery and sinful pleasure.  Do not forget him who guided you through the vast and terrible desert of dissent and compromise, with its seraph serpents seeking to deceive you with false doctrine, and the scorpions of lust and self-indulgence, and its parched and waterless ground where other’s have died because their faith has no roots, or their dwellings have been built on sand.  Do not forget the Lord, who himself instructed you and showed you the way you must go.  He who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock of Peter- the clear teaching of the Magisterium, and who fed you in the desert with the manna of the most precious Body and Blood of the Lord, a food unknown to your fathers.- Adapted from Deuteronomy 8: 2-3, 14b-16a   

“He pierced the rock to give them water;

it gushed forth in the desert like a river.”- Ps. 105