Saint Clare of Assisi was a contemporary of St. Francis and foundress of the Poor Clare sisters of the Franciscan Order. She is remembered for her poverty of spirit, faith, and her intense devotion to Jesus in the Eucharist. There is a story of her life in which her convent was being assaulted by Saracen soldiers. In fear, Clare’s sisters came to her while she was sick in bed, and they expressed their terror. Clare rose from bed and went out to meet the soldiers with the Blessed Sacrament in a monstrance. When the soldiers saw the fearlessness of Clare and her complete trust in God’s presence there in the Eucharist, it is said that they turned away and left that region.
Today, Sunday, is St. Clare’s feast day.
Life can be hard. This is a truth that we all know, but I am certain that we all wish that it wasn’t. I am sure that St. Clare did not want her convent to be assaulted by soldiers looking to loot it; and I know that the little nun from Assisi did not have the physical strength to deal with such a problem that day.
I know this because often, I do not have the strength to face the challenges that the day and the world present. Sometimes, I just don’t have the energy for life in general. We’ve all been there, right? Surely, we can understand Elijah’s feelings. He has been opposed and threatened in his ministry, and now he is at the point of giving up on everything. Perhaps we have felt this way as we look around at the world – both on a grand scale and in our own little lives. There is so much division, despair, and depression; we might not see how any of this will get better.
Listen to what St. Paul says to this situation today: All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice. And be kind to one another, compassionate,forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ. So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us. Our world has plenty of “bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling,” doesn’t it? In response to this, we can either join all that negativity, or we can “be imitators of God…and live in love as Christ loved us.”
How has Christ loved us? He gives us His flesh and blood; He gives us the Eucharist as His true presence in the world – the only thing that can give us true life. Jesus is the Bread of Life, and this Bread gives life to the world. We who have faith in Him must turn to this Bread in these moments when life seems hard. We cannot substitute some mere human effort to overcome the difficulties that face us. However, we might be tempted to entrust ourselves to more “temporal bread,” like the manna in the desert, rather than that Bread that lasts to eternal life.
We can do this when we seek worldly pleasures or distractions that take our minds off the real struggles that we are facing. Maybe it’s impulse shopping or browsing the internet or mindlessly scrolling through Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. Maybe it is in alcohol or drugs. Maybe it is in pointing out the flaws in others to distract from our own weaknesses. Whatever it might be, we soon learn that even after consuming this “bread” we are left empty and longing for more. Even the Israelites who ate the manna in the desert still died.
They died because life is hard, and death is the inevitable part of life. However, we know that death is not the end. We know that God has something wonderful in store for all of us. This is God’s love for us – a love that prompted Him to send His only Son into the world, so that all who believe in Him may have eternal life. Jesus is “the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. … whoever eats this bread will live forever.” This is what the Eucharist is – the expression of God’s great love for us; it is the reminder that Christ loved us and handed himself over for us; it is the source of strength when all other sources of strength seem to have fled.
This is what the angel gave to a despairing Elijah in the desert; it is what brought St. Clare from her sickbed and confronted those who would assault her convent; it is what Jesus gives to those who believe in Him. This Bread is the power of God that allows us to participate in His very life. We will find that nowhere else – not in a bottle or a pill, not on a website or a clever post, not in our own intelligence. Only Jesus gives us Himself as food for the journey. Only He can make this hard life possible and free us from our own weakness.
We encounter this same Jesus in our Eucharist here. In this place, Jesus looks at us, living our hard lives, and He offers Himself totally for us. With that heavenly nourishment, we are able to face whatever may come because God loves us and feeds us.
He knows that life is hard. Pack a lunch.
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