DIOCESE OF GALLUP

Food for the Journey

Most Rev. Donald E. Pelotte, SSS - Eucharistic Congress Keynote,

Diocese of El Paso, El Paso, Texas, March 5, 2005.

Dear People of the Diocese of El Paso,

     I am truly delighted to be with you this morning. In early August of this past year, I was on the phone with Bishop Ochoa. I was trying to organize a Jesus Caritas meeting for our small bishops’ support group of Region 13. During that brief telephone conversation, Bishop Armando asked me if I was willing to be one of the keynote speakers for this Eucharistic Congress. Needless to say, I was very touched by this invitation and as a Blessed Sacrament priest and religious I was thrilled to be asked to share my own reflections on this year’s theme: “Eucharist - Center of the Church’s Life.” The Eucharist has been and continues to be the very center of my life, and I might add, that of my twin brother, Father Dana, who is also a Blessed Sacrament priest and religious.

     It was in his April 2003 encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia (the Church in relation to the Eucharist) that our Holy Father John Paul II called for a special year dedicated to the Eucharist, beginning with the World Eucharistic Congress which took place from October 10 to 17, of this past year in Guadalajara, Mexico and ending this year with an ordinary assembly of the Synod of Bishops in Rome from October 22 to October 29.

     For me the two most powerful sections of that encyclical on the Eucharist appear in the very early paragraphs and in the very last number of the document. Allow me to quote these: “The Eucharist, as Christ’s saving presence in the community of the faithful and its spiritual food, is the most precious possession which the Church can have in her journey through history.” (EE9) “In the humble signs of bread and wine, changed into his body and blood, Christ walks beside us as our strength and our food for the journey, and he enables us to become for everyone, witnesses of hope.” (EE63) I want to make this the focus of my keynote this morning.

     Some years ago when I was studying at Fordham University in New York City and doing graduate-assistant teaching for a class of undergraduates on the theology of God, I asked each student to formulate what his or her own image of God might be, or how one might try to explain the presence of this mystery in his or her own life. The answers were, of course, very interesting, some very funny, some more serious, others even frightening. As is the case with any exercise of this kind, the person answering the question revealed much more about himself than about what he was trying to describe. One response in particular had a profound effect on my life of faith and I have always treasured it. The young college man answered the question in the form of a prayer and he wrote:

God,

I don’t know

if I know you or not.

They say you are

as close to me

as I am to myself.

But you might as well be

a stranger in the mist.

If wishes were real

you would be more real to me

than flesh and blood.

Could it be here

is where I lose the trail:

I look for you

the way I picture you,

rather than

the way you really are?

Do I look up when, perhaps,

you have no direction?

Should I even look

can the eye see the eye?

Am I looking for color in a song

or sound in a sunset;

or trying to cup-in-hand

sweetness and sorrow?

Am I searching for something

when perhaps that “something”

is the search?

Could it be

that while I walk in the flesh,

you will never be a destination

only a journey?

What if I found you?

That would be heaven:

But can heaven be on earth?

Can east be in the west?

When does the quest

cease to be the question

and become the answer?

Or, perhaps, that is it:

the question is the answer;

the search is the discovery.

In going, I am already there-

as “there” as any traveler

can expect to be.



     You must remember this young man was not a theologian, not even a seminarian. But, whether he realized it or not, he was in touch with a dimension of faith which is deeply rooted in our tradition. The theme of journey to describe one’s life of faith is not a new one. God entered the mainstream of human life through the experience of an immigrant people, a people who crossed seas and deserts to find the future; a people who remembered their past and celebrated it as a promise of things to come; a people who, through long centuries, learned to wait for God.

     When we view the Judeo/Christian experience from the panorama of world history, it appears strange indeed that God chose a band of wandering tribes to be his special people. How odd of God to choose a group of nomads who were considered outcasts by the surrounding nations and not politically strong enough to build an empire. The Hebrew people wandered along the edges of the wilderness and then settled at the crossroads of civilization. Because of their vulnerability, they were conquered by every mid-eastern civilization that rose to power.

     Faith sees farther than the history of empires. It is the vision and heritage of the Hebrews that we have inherited, not that of their conquerors. We admire the military genius of Alexander. We may respect the culture of the Egyptians but we worship the God of Abraham, and David, the God of Moses and Jesus. We are descendants of Abraham. We belong to an Exodus people, to a Passover people, to a pilgrim people, as Vatican Council II so beautifully described us. We find life in the same journey of faith. God loves us because we are immigrants . It is the diary of the human condition. We are immigrants not only because our ancestors came from other lands, but because we are always on the way toward life. We are immigrants because we have no lasting home, and because our hearts keep on moving long after our feet stop walking.

     We are homesteaders because we take risks for life. We cross oceans and prairies to explore new territory. We look at the moon and at other planets and we want to go there. We set out to discover new land to clear and new earth to plow. Our continuity with the Hebrew people is the soul out of which a spirituality of journey can grow.

     Jesus himself spoke of his life as a journey. During his last conversation with his disciples, he tells them: “I came from the Father and have come into the world and now I leave the world to go to the Father.” (John 16:28) Jesus’ life is pictured as a journey through struggle and death to new life. Redemption is a Passover. Salvation is the new and final exodus. From the moment of the incarnation until his glorification at the right hand of the Father, there is one mystery which is unfolding in Jesus” life. It is the inward journey of trust in his Father, the transformation of his life through love.

     Thus, what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus? Christianity is more than a philosophy of life or a collection of doctrines. It is more than a moral code or a series of rites for worship. Christianity is first of all, a personal journey. It is a way of living. In fact, in the New Testament the members of the early Christian community were called “followers of the new way.”   Christianity is not as much concerned about explaining our Christian life as it is about being committed to living it fully and deeply. Christianity is a choice to follow Jesus in his life of service and of healing, his Passover journey of love.

     How is this related to what we are doing today at this Eucharistic Congress, during this time of pulling aside, of deeper reflection on our journeys through life? Is not the Eucharist our food for the journey? If we are on a journey, we must have provisions. The language of the liturgy leaves us no doubt what those provisions are. One of our very familiar Gregorian hymns of the past referred to Eucharist as “the food of travelers.” Another prayed: “Bring us by your own path to our journey’s end.” Finally one of the most popular hymns prayed: Ecce panis angelorum, factus cibus viatorum, “Behold the bread of angels sent to pilgrims!” The Eucharist is indeed our viaticum, our allowance of food at every stage in our journey. Day by day, and week by week, this is our appropriate nourishment. “Give us this day our daily bread,” we pray. It is the Eucharist that brings us to our journey’s end, the day’s food for the day’s march, the manna we need.

     This is indeed the message of Jesus that we discover in St. Luke where we find the two disciples of Jesus journeying toward Emmaus. The insistence is not so much on Emmaus, or the journey towards it, or even on the two disciples, (one is left un-named). The insistence is rather on the Christian Community then as well as now represented in them on a journey in faith, and struggling with the absence of the historical Jesus, the disciples trying to understand how he is now present to them, to us, in a new way as the Risen Lord. And the answer: they recognized him in the breaking of the bread. And breaking not in a static, passive sense, but in an active, very dynamic way. The breaking involves a sharing of the word, of the word of God, of our own words of life, the insights into the word that we all have. The breaking of bread involves not only the breaking and sharing of the material bread become the body of the Lord, but the breaking and sharing of the Body of Christ that we are, each of us, and the giving of ourselves. The Eucharist is not only an event at which Jesus alone participates and nourishes us but one in which we all participate and nourish one another’s hungers. In referring to this passage from St. Luke in his encyclical the Holy Father clearly affirms that “Whenever the Church celebrates the Eucharist, the faithful can in some way relive the experience of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus.” (Luke 24:31;EE6) In choosing the Emmaus story as the framework for his declaration of the year of the Eucharist, the Holy Father is telling us that this is what happens to all of us if we truly understand what the Eucharist is. Eucharist is action. Eucharist is something that happens. Eucharist is the action of God’s people listening to his word, feeling our hearts begin to burn within us at the greatness of God and then recognizing him in the breaking of bread.

     The Eucharist seen in this sense as Christ giving himself in and through our self-giving can indeed be “food for the journey.” For we are not on this journey alone. We are fellow travelers who need to be nourished on the way. The nourishment will come through the communication of life, of his life. Communicating whatever insight one has found is in fact the best method of searching for the way. As one communicates the limited insight one has through personal and communal Eucharistic adoration and prayer, in support groups, through faith sharing and through small group scripture based reflections one receives further insight. It is like driving on a highway at night: the headlights illuminate only a portion of the road ahead and one guides the course of the automobile by the limited vision which this gives. But the road goes on, further and further portions appear and one is confident that one will eventually reach a destination which cannot as yet be seen. What one is doing, in effect, is discovering the way as one travels it. This may not be too much to suppose however Jesus may have described the way. But what Jesus did was this very thing: share his insight with others as he journeyed to the Father. Indeed this is the way: to share one’s insight with others as one journeys in faith is the essence of building community.

     Is this not the point of St. Luke is making after describing how the Emmaus disciples had come to recognize the Lord. They journeyed back to Jerusalem to share their experience with the rest of the community. “They got up at one and went back to Jerusalem, where they found the eleven disciples gathered together with the others and saying: The Lord has risen indeed! He has appeared to Simon.” The two then explained to them what had happened on the road, and how they had recognized the Lord when he broke bread.

     This journey in faith is a ceaseless one for each of us as individuals and as a community. It is this shared commitment to continue the journey which formed and kept together the Hebrew people. Nourished by Jesus, our Eucharist, it will be your commitment to journey together to the Father and this will continue to build up and strengthen you as the Catholic community of the Diocese of El Paso. In fact, it is not insignificant that your very name, the Diocese of El Paso, describes your very mission as a people. The earthly goal of the journey toward God is not to find him in some binding beatific experience, but to struggle ceaselessly to continue the journey.

     This morning my prayer and blessing for you is this: May the God who goes with you on your journey be the light that illuminates your way. And may God nourish and strengthen you in body, soul and spirit so that you might one day live with the Risen Lord.

     “When does the quest cease to be the question and become the answer? Or, perhaps that is it, the question is the answer, the search is the discovery; in going I am already there as ‘there’ as any traveler can expect to be.”

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	Food for the Journey Most Rev. Donald E. Pelotte, SSS - Eucharistic Congress Keynote, Diocese of El Paso, El Paso, Texas, March 5, 2005. Dear People of the Diocese of El Paso, I am truly delighted to be with you this morning. In early August of this past year, I was on the phone with Bishop Ochoa. I was trying to organize a Jesus Caritas meeting for our small bishops’ support group of Region 13. During that brief telephone conversation, Bishop Armando asked me if I was willing to be one of the keynote speakers for this Eucharistic Congress. Needless to say, I was very touched by this invitation and as a Blessed Sacrament priest and religious I was thrilled to be asked to share my own reflections on this year’s theme: “Eucharist - Center of the Church’s Life.” The Eucharist has been and continues to be the very center of my life, and I might add, that of my twin brother, Father Dana, who is also a Blessed Sacrament priest and religious. It was in his April 2003 encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia (the Church in relation to the Eucharist) that our Holy Father John Paul II called for a special year dedicated to the Eucharist, beginning with the World Eucharistic Congress which took place from October 10 to 17, of this past year in Guadalajara, Mexico and ending this year with an ordinary assembly of the Synod of Bishops in Rome from October 22 to October 29. For me the two most powerful sections of that encyclical on the Eucharist appear in the very early paragraphs and in the very last number of the document. Allow me to quote these: “The Eucharist, as Christ’s saving presence in the community of the faithful and its spiritual food, is the most precious possession which the Church can have in her journey through history.” (EE9) “In the humble signs of bread and wine, changed into his body and blood, Christ walks beside us as our strength and our food for the journey, and he enables us to become for everyone, witnesses of hope.” (EE63) I want to make this the focus of my keynote this morning. Some years ago when I was studying at Fordham University in New York City and doing graduate-assistant teaching for a class of undergraduates on the theology of God, I asked each student to formulate what his or her own image of God might be, or how one might try to explain the presence of this mystery in his or her own life. The answers were, of course, very interesting, some very funny, some more serious, others even frightening. As is the case with any exercise of this kind, the person answering the question revealed much more about himself than about what he was trying to describe. One response in particular had a profound effect on my life of faith and I have always treasured it. The young college man answered the question in the form of a prayer and he wrote: God, I don’t know if I know you or not. They say you are as close to me as I am to myself. But you might as well be a stranger in the mist. If wishes were real you would be more real to me than flesh and blood. Could it be here is where I lose the trail: I look for you the way I picture you, rather than the way you really are? Do I look up when, perhaps, you have no direction? Should I even look can the eye see the eye? Am I looking for color in a song or sound in a sunset; or trying to cup-in-hand sweetness and sorrow? Am I searching for something when perhaps that “something” is the search? Could it be that while I walk in the flesh, you will never be a destination only a journey? What if I found you? That would be heaven: But can heaven be on earth? Can east be in the west? When does the quest cease to be the question and become the answer? Or, perhaps, that is it: the question is the answer; the search is the discovery. In going, I am already there- as “there” as any traveler can expect to be. You must remember this young man was not a theologian, not even a seminarian. But, whether he realized it or not, he was in touch with a dimension of faith which is deeply rooted in our tradition. The theme of journey to describe one’s life of faith is not a new one. God entered the mainstream of human life through the experience of an immigrant people, a people who crossed seas and deserts to find the future; a people who remembered their past and celebrated it as a promise of things to come; a people who, through long centuries, learned to wait for God. When we view the Judeo/Christian experience from the panorama of world history, it appears strange indeed that God chose a band of wandering tribes to be his special people. How odd of God to choose a group of nomads who were considered outcasts by the surrounding nations and not politically strong enough to build an empire. The Hebrew people wandered along the edges of the wilderness and then settled at the crossroads of civilization. Because of their vulnerability, they were conquered by every mid-eastern civilization that rose to power. Faith sees farther than the history of empires. It is the vision and heritage of the Hebrews that we have inherited, not that of their conquerors. We admire the military genius of Alexander. We may respect the culture of the Egyptians but we worship the God of Abraham, and David, the God of Moses and Jesus. We are descendants of Abraham. We belong to an Exodus people, to a Passover people, to a pilgrim people, as Vatican Council II so beautifully described us. We find life in the same journey of faith. God loves us because we are immigrants . It is the diary of the human condition. We are immigrants not only because our ancestors came from other lands, but because we are always on the way toward life. We are immigrants because we have no lasting home, and because our hearts keep on moving long after our feet stop walking. We are homesteaders because we take risks for life. We cross oceans and prairies to explore new territory. We look at the moon and at other planets and we want to go there. We set out to discover new land to clear and new earth to plow. Our continuity with the Hebrew people is the soul out of which a spirituality of journey can grow. Jesus himself spoke of his life as a journey. During his last conversation with his disciples, he tells them: “I came from the Father and have come into the world and now I leave the world to go to the Father.” (John 16:28) Jesus’ life is pictured as a journey through struggle and death to new life. Redemption is a Passover. Salvation is the new and final exodus. From the moment of the incarnation until his glorification at the right hand of the Father, there is one mystery which is unfolding in Jesus” life. It is the inward journey of trust in his Father, the transformation of his life through love. Thus, what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus? Christianity is more than a philosophy of life or a collection of doctrines. It is more than a moral code or a series of rites for worship. Christianity is first of all, a personal journey. It is a way of living. In fact, in the New Testament the members of the early Christian community were called “followers of the new way.” Christianity is not as much concerned about explaining our Christian life as it is about being committed to living it fully and deeply. Christianity is a choice to follow Jesus in his life of service and of healing, his Passover journey of love. How is this related to what we are doing today at this Eucharistic Congress, during this time of pulling aside, of deeper reflection on our journeys through life? Is not the Eucharist our food for the journey? If we are on a journey, we must have provisions. The language of the liturgy leaves us no doubt what those provisions are. One of our very familiar Gregorian hymns of the past referred to Eucharist as “the food of travelers.” Another prayed: “Bring us by your own path to our journey’s end.” Finally one of the most popular hymns prayed: Ecce panis angelorum, factus cibus viatorum, “Behold the bread of angels sent to pilgrims!” The Eucharist is indeed our viaticum, our allowance of food at every stage in our journey. Day by day, and week by week, this is our appropriate nourishment. “Give us this day our daily bread,” we pray. It is the Eucharist that brings us to our journey’s end, the day’s food for the day’s march, the manna we need. This is indeed the message of Jesus that we discover in St. Luke where we find the two disciples of Jesus journeying toward Emmaus. The insistence is not so much on Emmaus, or the journey towards it, or even on the two disciples, (one is left un-named). The insistence is rather on the Christian Community then as well as now represented in them on a journey in faith, and struggling with the absence of the historical Jesus, the disciples trying to understand how he is now present to them, to us, in a new way as the Risen Lord. And the answer: they recognized him in the breaking of the bread. And breaking not in a static, passive sense, but in an active, very dynamic way. The breaking involves a sharing of the word, of the word of God, of our own words of life, the insights into the word that we all have. The breaking of bread involves not only the breaking and sharing of the material bread become the body of the Lord, but the breaking and sharing of the Body of Christ that we are, each of us, and the giving of ourselves. The Eucharist is not only an event at which Jesus alone participates and nourishes us but one in which we all participate and nourish one another’s hungers. In referring to this passage from St. Luke in his encyclical the Holy Father clearly affirms that “Whenever the Church celebrates the Eucharist, the faithful can in some way relive the experience of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus.” (Luke 24:31;EE6) In choosing the Emmaus story as the framework for his declaration of the year of the Eucharist, the Holy Father is telling us that this is what happens to all of us if we truly understand what the Eucharist is. Eucharist is action. Eucharist is something that happens. Eucharist is the action of God’s people listening to his word, feeling our hearts begin to burn within us at the greatness of God and then recognizing him in the breaking of bread. The Eucharist seen in this sense as Christ giving himself in and through our self-giving can indeed be “food for the journey.” For we are not on this journey alone. We are fellow travelers who need to be nourished on the way. The nourishment will come through the communication of life, of his life. Communicating whatever insight one has found is in fact the best method of searching for the way. As one communicates the limited insight one has through personal and communal Eucharistic adoration and prayer, in support groups, through faith sharing and through small group scripture based reflections one receives further insight. It is like driving on a highway at night: the headlights illuminate only a portion of the road ahead and one guides the course of the automobile by the limited vision which this gives. But the road goes on, further and further portions appear and one is confident that one will eventually reach a destination which cannot as yet be seen. What one is doing, in effect, is discovering the way as one travels it. This may not be too much to suppose however Jesus may have described the way. But what Jesus did was this very thing: share his insight with others as he journeyed to the Father. Indeed this is the way: to share one’s insight with others as one journeys in faith is the essence of building community. Is this not the point of St. Luke is making after describing how the Emmaus disciples had come to recognize the Lord. They journeyed back to Jerusalem to share their experience with the rest of the community. “They got up at one and went back to Jerusalem, where they found the eleven disciples gathered together with the others and saying: The Lord has risen indeed! He has appeared to Simon.” The two then explained to them what had happened on the road, and how they had recognized the Lord when he broke bread. This journey in faith is a ceaseless one for each of us as individuals and as a community. It is this shared commitment to continue the journey which formed and kept together the Hebrew people. Nourished by Jesus, our Eucharist, it will be your commitment to journey together to the Father and this will continue to build up and strengthen you as the Catholic community of the Diocese of El Paso. In fact, it is not insignificant that your very name, the Diocese of El Paso, describes your very mission as a people. The earthly goal of the journey toward God is not to find him in some binding beatific experience, but to struggle ceaselessly to continue the journey. This morning my prayer and blessing for you is this: May the God who goes with you on your journey be the light that illuminates your way. And may God nourish and strengthen you in body, soul and spirit so that you might one day live with the Risen Lord. “When does the quest cease to be the question and become the answer? Or, perhaps that is it, the question is the answer, the search is the discovery; in going I am already there as ‘there’ as any traveler can expect to be.” Back