"One Does Not Live By Bread Alone,....

The Appetite

​A LENTEN PILGRIMAGE - Day 3 :   Rev. Fr. K M George

In the early 1980s I was invited to be a resource person at a youth camp in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The participants were Orthodox Christian young people of the Indian Diaspora from Malaysia and Singapore. In the week-long camp they served very good food. However after two days some boys complained about food and there was some discussion among the campers. The next morning as we entered the meeting hall we found a sentence written on the black board: "When you are really hungry any food is good food". Later we found out that it was written by one of the participants, a girl in her early teens.

The difficulty with food is that even if you are fed the best food in the world continuously for several days, you are likely to develop satiety and begin to complain. The taste of food is a very relative one. In states of deprivation or satiety, the taste buds respond differently to food.

For many Christians food is a major issue during the Lenten period. Why should one abstain from this and that? How do we survive without essential nourishment from meat, fish and eggs? Will the brain of school-going children be weakened? Will they develop some deficiency diseases?

Food was a major issue for Jesus too. He abstained from all food and drink for forty days, a remarkable feat for a human being. But when He successfully finished the arduous journey, Jesus began to be subtly assailed by the Tempter. He knew He was hungry, and everything there in the desert appeared to be potential food. He only needed to say a word and all the infinite number of stones would become delicious food. Jesus was hungry enough, but He refrained from performing that feat. He relativized the vital value of food in reference to the life-giving Word of God.

"One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God."

(Matthew 4:3-4)

Material food alone does not sustain us in our quest to become true human beings. Human economics and welfare schemes, however, make us believe the contrary.

Lent is a period not simply for our personal spiritual improvement, but also for the Church to review and re-order the very socio-economic and cultural "form of this world" in which we are unknowingly trapped.

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world”

(Romans 12: 2)

We can break it by the power of God, and we should. "Another world is possible" as they say in the World Social Forum.