"Bread for the World"
Angela Orfield
Sunday, June 12th 2005

Sometimes I try to imagine what it might have been like to live the lives of various saints. Many of the saints were ordinary folks like you and me, and I’m sure some of them were pretty surprised when God showed up in their lives. Imagine being like St. Alphonsus, who retired from his position as a lawyer to become a priest after hearing a voice tell him, “Leave the world and give yourself to me,” or St. Francis, who renounced his inheritance and lived a life of poverty after receiving a sign from God. Then there was St. Paul who hated and persecuted Christians, but became one himself after hearing the voice of Christ. He was ultimately beheaded due to his faith.

All of the saints received different signs from God that moved them to action. I think that this is one of the ways God communicates with all of us. I am quite certain that God is giving me signs all of the time, yet I am often too blind to see them. I’m also hesitant to see them because I’m fearful that God might demand something great from me that I am unable to deliver. So sometimes I don’t look, I don’t listen, and, consequently, I don’t see.

Anthony DeMello, in his book Awareness, states:

The most difficult thing in the world is to listen, to see. We don’t want to look, because if we do, we may change. We don’t want to look. If you look, you lose control of the life that you are so precariously holding together. And so in order to wake up, the one thing you need most is not energy, or strength, or youthfulness, or even great intelligence. The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new. The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away.

These questions all fall under a broader question, the question of life purpose. This has been one of my favorite questions for the last 10 or so years.

I love to read and one of the books that books played a defining role in shaping my view of life purpose was Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. Siddhartha, the main character, is a Hindu boy who has the goal of attaining enlightenment and he is determined to invest his entire life in this effort. He tries everything –praying, meditating, fasting, studying, and traveling with different members of the priestly class. He is tireless in his efforts and toward the end of the book he finally achieves enlightenment. His enlightened perspective is revealed when a close friend asks him about what really matters in life. Here is what he says:

Love, seems paramount to me. Seeing through the world, explaining it, despising it may be crucial to great thinkers. But all I care about is to be able to love the world, not to despise it, not to hate it or myself, but to be able to view it and myself and all beings with love, admiration, and awe.

Just imagine having that realization as your permanent anchor as you walk through life. The anchor, being the thought, “It’s all about love.” So as you go through your daily routine, to the bank or post office, to the grocery store, to work, and then back to your family, you ask yourself, “How am I loving? Am I making a concerted effort to carry this intention into my thoughts, my actions, into the energy I give off when I am around others? How am I loving myself, my family, my neighbor, and my enemies?”

In the broadest sense, it is about expanding your capacity to love until you love everyone in the world as much as you love your family and friends, and then living your whole life as a reflection of that broad capacity to love.

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus is moved by the suffering of the crowds and asks the disciples to heal them of every disease and illness. What’s interesting is that the disciples didn’t first come to Jesus and ask how to help the suffering people. They had to be told to take action. Jesus, on the other hand, loved people so much that it was painful for him to see them suffer and natural for him to take immediate action. We can strive to be like Jesus in this way by learning how to cultivate the same quality of love in our hearts. If we do this, it won’t seem burdensome to take action, we will truly be moved and inspired to do so.

Now it may occur to you, as it did to me, to wonder how to develop the capacity to love more broadly and more deeply as Jesus did. Sometimes we want to be loving, but its just not happening. I have come up with a formula for trying to cultivate love in my own life and I would like to share it with you. Now, this formula may seem somewhat simplistic, but you need to know that I have spent so many years overcomplicating my life, that this actually represents progress for me. So here’s the formula: 1)Prayer, which I define as talking to God, 2) Meditation, which I define as listening to God, 3) Service, which includes acts of charity or social justice activities, and 4) Reflection, which for me, involves thinking about spiritual topics like nonviolence, compassion, forgiveness, and patience. And if you are ever at a loss about what to reflect on, there are two questions you can use as a spiritual compass to guide you through life, and these are 1) What does it mean to be Christlike, and 2) How am I doing ? So the formula, again, is prayer, meditation, service, and reflection.

In the context of doing the last of theses 4 things, reflection, it occurred to me that I need to practice loving more broadly in the way that I serve others. I have been working in a soup kitchen on a regular basis and I was thinking to myself, “If I really love these people, then I should be doing more than just serving them meals. I should be taking steps to change the systems in our society that keep people in a position of being poor, so that these people don’t have to spend their lives coming to soup kitchens to get a meal.” So I decided to join Bread for the World, an organization dedicated to solving the problem of world hunger.

Before telling you more about Bread for the World, I would like to share some statistics on hunger with you.

• One in five people around the world survives on less than ONE dollar a day.
• One in seven people worldwide goes to bed hungry.
• 6 million children die each year from hunger-related causes

This is where Bread for the World comes in. Bread for the World is a citizens movement of 54,000 people of faith including 2500 churches. Its members help hungry people by calling, writing, and visiting members of Congress to promote legislation related to hunger. Bread for the World focuses on long-term solutions to address global hunger and poverty, emphasizing sustainable approaches to economic development, those that empower poor people. Bread for the World has a partner organization, Bread for the World Institute, that does research and education on policies related to hunger.

I would like to give you a few examples of what Bread for the World has accomplished thus far:

• In 2001, Congress increased the appropriations for poverty-focused development assistance by $593 million dollars.
• In 2003, Bread for the World helped to establish a new US assistance program aimed at reducing poverty in the world’s poorest nations. They also helped win the largest increase in poverty-focused assistance in nearly 20 years.
• In 2004, Bread for the World helped win more than 1 billion dollars increase in poverty-focused development assistance.

In an effort to address this issue, a group of senators presented a bill to Congress to pass the Hunger Free Communities Act. This bill has both Republican and Democratic sponsors and is currently under consideration in the US House and Senate. The Hunger Free Communities Act would require that Congress maintain nutritional programs by providing adequate funding and that they maintain food stamps and school meals. It also requires annual progress reports on two goals: cutting hunger in the US in half by 2010 and eliminating it by 2015. This Act will also supply grants to community-based organizations working to end hunger. Bread for the World has been trying to support this bill with a massive letter writing campaign to members of Congress. Already, 40,000 letters have been sent to members of Congress.

I’d like to try to increase that number today, and I am hoping you can help. After mass, there will be volunteers in the main entrance of the church and in the back hallway who are going to hand out materials to write letters to members of Congress regarding the passage of the Hunger Free Communities Act. I would like as many of you as possible to stay and join me in writing to at least one member of Congress. I would have had a pre-written a letter for you all to sign, but I was told that handwritten letters carry much more weight with members of Congress. Fortunately, Bread for the World has a simple letter-writing format to make the writing of these letters as easy and quick as possible. There are 3 steps outlined on the form. Number one asks that you state something specific about hunger and then gives you 4 choices to pick from. You can copy one onto the letter verbatim as your first sentence of the letter. The second step is to name the action. All you need to do is copy down the first sentence asking that whomever you are writing to cosponsor the Hunger Free Communities Act. The third step is to give a reason why this act should be supported, and you can pick one of 8 reasons listed to copy as the third sentence of your letter. That’s it. Just three sentences. Then you just sign the letter and write you address below your signature to show that you are a constituent. We ask that all completed letters be left at St. Joan of Arc, if possible, so that I can count them before they are mailed.

For those of you who are interested in learning more about Bread for the World, we have brochures near the letter-writing materials, or you can go online to www.bread.org for additional information or to sign up to receive action alerts about ongoing legislation related to hunger.

I’d like to end with an excerpt from an adapted version of one of St. Francis of Assisi’s writings:

Keep a clear eye toward life’s end. Do not forget your purpose and destiny as God’s creature. What you are in his sight is what you are and nothing more. …If you open yourself to God and His plan printed deeply in your heart, God will open Himself to you. Remember, that when you leave this earth, you can take with you nothing that you have received—fading symbols of honour, trappings of power—but only what you have given: a full heart enriched by honest service, love, sacrifice, and courage.