Some time in what felt like the ninth or tenth week of the long, long March of 2020, I remember these pointed conversations about what a more intense lockdown might look like. Thousands of people had died in Canada, and countries were fighting to manage the movement of people, respirators, and medications. I had friends and family members working in hospitals, watching patient after patient die; all these people for whom they could do nothing. It was not the deadliest point in the pandemic by any measure, that would come as restrictions eased or were flouted.
We talked about what a serious cordonning off of people would actually look like. What it would be like if food were distributed by militaries rather than our briefly valued and always essential service workers. There were real shortages, and fears of worse ones, still. One of the few times I went out to shop at Country Grocer, I was reprimanded for trying to buy three of something. It didn’t matter what. We knew that things could easily become very, very stretched and strained.
I thought about our neighbours, almost certainly not as much and as generously as I should have. I fantasized about whether and how we could share resources with them if needed, and we did pass cartons of eggs off at a distance every so often. My fantasies, of course, also included the dread of those situations in which we might not be sharing quite so freely.
There is a drive for survival in the human person that carries with it an enormous cost to what we might otherwise think of as our humanity. We are very capable of being generous and caring with one another, and we are exactly as capable of being cheap, of taking what is not ours, and of destroying others so that we might live. The cost of survival is very high.
If you go and read chapter 28 of the Book of Deuteronomy, you will find awful and accurate depictions of what it is like when things go critically out of balance, when ordinary life collapses, and we, humans, all of us, fall into trying to survive through a time of trial, of siege, of famine. There is a true, deep beauty in the fact that we can adapt, that we are so terribly resilient, and that we can manage to survive through unspeakable things, but it really is unspeakable, too, and there are those who survive who wish that they did not, and sometimes to live at all is simply terror.
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Gandhi spoke on behalf of a starving people who were alienated from the very land they lived in, and memorably met with a group of English workers, and said this:
It is good enough to talk of God whilst we are sitting here after a nice breakfast and looking forward to a nicer luncheon, but how am I to talk of God to the millions who have to go without two meals a day? To them God can only appear as bread and butter. (Compiled in “All Men are Brothers” chapter 8: “Poverty in the midst of Plenty”.)
We pray about Gaza, we pray for the people of Gaza, and we watch Palestinian children be tortured to death through the use of starvation as a weapon of war. The Gospel this morning and the hope of our salvation rests on the confidence that even evil knows better than to starve their children, and that God is certainly better than that; but each child is entrusted to the whole of humanity as a sacred gift, and each life is the child of all, as well as the child of God. We must somehow be something worse than evil, for we have found it in us to let our children starve.
Meanwhile God is rotting in the form of bread and butter held up by blockades and borders, these imaginary lines of will, these delusional separations of human beings from nourishment. God is desperate to be feasted upon, the bread is ready to be eaten, and yet humanity somehow finds the resolve to hold back even the Holy, all the same; and we create death and suffering and destruction, and we will nourish tomorrow’s terrorists on the painful memories of what it is like to be starved for sport by the cruel games played by nation-states with impunity.
Survival has a cost. We pay a price for the things we inflict on one another. We are robbed of better futures through the lives we treat as disposable today, and all the God we leave to rot.
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Famine is one thing. Shortages and tough times happen, and at our best we are able to come together and find our way through them. When circumstances are hard, we are resourceful. Whole civilizations have emerged out of how groups of people have thought to plan for times when things inevitably become tough. Staple grains that can be stockpiled are the backbone of the agricultural society, providing for stability, however meagre it may be.
Gandhi was speaking on behalf of people whose hunger emerged through the destructive patterns not of weather but of colonialism, and its economic structures. Indian people were set up to be dependent upon the English, so that the English could depend upon India; food and liberation came from Indian people working to support one another, and stepping outside of the economic chains of the colonial state. That starvation emerged through patterns of economic exploitation and coercion, and that hunger fueled a revolution.
The hunger of Gaza is yet another degree more willful, being neither due to crop failure nor craven economic policy, but the deliberate disruption of food itself. Again, this is the image you would find in Deuteronomy 28: life under siege, where the powerful and dominating force takes from you everything but the need to survive. Backed into a corner, you become easier and easier to dehumanize, being seen to be so broken, so dysfunctional, so depraved. It is pain, inflicted wholesale, indiscriminately, and designed to demoralize: to break the very spirit of a whole people. That hunger fuels revenge. A person who has fed too long on pain will settle for more pain to sate their deepest longings, and to return cruelty for cruelty, again and again and again.
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The Jewish theologian Martin Buber recounts a Hasidic teaching (compiled in Ten Rungs) that everything that has been created has some good purpose, some way of pointing towards the good. Someone poses the question, then, of what the good purpose of atheism is, and the reply is something like this: atheism illuminates the very real ways in which we are called to be God’s presence in the world. If someone brings their pain to you, you should not tell them to go and take their pain to God, but act as if there were no God, and only you could help this fellow soul.
We are called to be bread that can actually feed the world. Where there is food enough to go around, it may not be about our ability to nourish the bodies of others, but perhaps the hearts, the minds, the poor, broken-down parts of we souls who are so afflicted by the wounds of survival. There are times, though, when we are called to find some way to turn our lives into real bread that can really nourish, because God is aching to break into the world and to be felt in the empty stomachs of children; God lurks in the borderlands just waiting for a moment to crash through.
We are called to be bread and butter, and therefore God, for all the hungers of the world, and not to wait for God to break in and arrest our willful choosing to allow things more evil than evil.
May you know that you have such glorious substance in you, that you can feed the world and save the starving. May you let yourself be broken open for the life of those who suffer. May you let your own suffering be shared, so that you do not feast too long upon loneliness and pain.
May God come to all who hunger.