Last week I went away for a few days to the Clergy Study Days in Los Angeles giving ten sessions on Artificial Intelligence and the Pope’s new encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. There were more than fifty priests in one place, each of them serving a different community. And do you know where the real gift was? It was not in the talks. It was at the table. Each day we sat down and ate together, and over those shared meals I noticed something I did not expect. Fifty different parishes, fifty different men, and underneath it all, one shared burden. We are all over-busy. We are all running out of time. Every one of us is worn a little thin. It took sitting still at a table, slowing down long enough to eat together, for that truth to finally surface.
Here is what struck me on the way home. What I found at that table is the same thing I find in our own pews. We are equally distracted, all of us. I am not standing above you saying this. I just lived it in Los Angeles, as I was pulled in a hundred directions as anyone, and it took a shared meal for me to slow me down and realize it. That is what this Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ asks of us. It asks us to slow down, come to the table, and remember.
In our first reading, Moses stands with the people on the edge of the Promised Land and tells them to remember the long years in the desert, when God fed them with manna they had never seen. Moses names the real danger of a people who finally have plenty. The danger was never hunger. The danger was forgetting. We do not starve in the middle of our abundance, but we forget the One who feeds us.
That same forgetting is our temptation here at St. Simon’s in Silicon Valley. We are not a hungry people. We are a busy people, and many of us can barely find time to come to church at all. I am so glad you are here when you do come. In all our abundance, we are at risk of forgetting the God who longs to nourish us.
So how does God cure our forgetting? Not with an idea, and not with something we can optimize or fit into a spare ten minutes. He gives us something shockingly physical. He gives us a table and food to eat. In John’s Gospel, Jesus has just fed five thousand people with a few loaves and fish, one of the most powerful miracles in all of Scripture. Then he says something that scandalizes the crowd. He tells them the bread he gives is his own flesh, that whoever eats it will live forever. The word he uses is blunt. It means to chew, to truly eat. This is no metaphor. He means it. The bread of life is real, and he is really present in it.
Saint Paul also tells us what this eating does to us. Because the loaf is one, he writes to the Corinthians, we who are many become one body. When we come to this altar, we do not simply receive Jesus tucked into our private devotion. We are knit into one another. And as St. Augustine famously said, “We become what we receive. We become the Body of Christ.”
This is the heart of it. We come together, here, at the Eucharist, to be fed and to become the Body of Christ. And then we are sent. The Mass does not end so much as it commissions us. We carry Christ out the doors and into our homes, our workplaces, our neighborhoods, becoming his real presence to a world starving for it. The bread we chew at this table becomes the love we offer at every other table. To sit fully present with another person, attentive and unhurried, is itself a kind of communion. It is how the Body of Christ is built, one shared meal at a time.
Today, the eighth-grade class of our St. Simon Parish School graduates, and it breaks my heart that I cannot be with them in person. I will be speaking on a panel called Rome Meets Silicon Valley: Pope Leo and Artificial Intelligence, alongside Bishop Cantú, about Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on artificial intelligence and human dignity, Magnifica Humanitas. It is important work, and I have given much of myself to it. But I would so much rather be handing these young people their diplomas. Fr. Thanh will be there in my place, carrying my pride and my love to them.
I am so proud of this class. These are the children who began their school years in the hardest of seasons. In second and third grade, they lived through the isolation of Covid, separated from their friends and teachers, learning through screens, missing the ordinary joys of childhood. They could have been broken by it. Instead they persevered. They have grown into a remarkable class of young men and women, kind, resilient, and faithful. To our eighth graders: you have already learned the lesson Moses taught. Do not forget the God who has carried you. He fed you in your own wilderness, and he will feed you all the way home. Go out and become the Body of Christ for the world.
As I mentioned last week, Fr. Dat is preparing to begin his new assignment at Holy Family Parish in July. He will be with us until mid to late June. Fr. Dat has been a wonderful presence among us, and we are grateful for all he has given to this community. Please keep him in your prayers and please take a moment to sign his online farewell card here.
This Sunday, let the Lord feed you. Come to this table hungry and let yourself be changed. Then take what you have received and set the same kind of table at home. Be present to the people God has given you. Slow down long enough to remember. Chew on the bread of life, and chew on one another’s company too. That is how we are made one.
God Bless,
Fr. Brendan