Ecstasy

Homily for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Deacon Douglas McManaman

What stands out to me in this gospel is that Jesus is moved to compassion for the crowd that followed him. The Greek word used here suggests that it was a compassion felt from the very core of his intestines. You could say he was physically moved at the sight of the people looking for him.

The very word “conversion” implies a moving in a new direction, that is, away from oneself and towards the mystery of God. Everyone in this world is seeking. Everyone. But not everyone’s seeking has the same trajectory. There are two directions: the first involves a seeking to directly satisfy an emptiness within me, the self, which is the direction that is characteristic of hunger and thirst. When we hunger for food or what have you, we seek to satisfy the self; when thirsty, we seek to satisfy the self. Even the more lofty pleasures, such as the enjoyment of beautiful art, or the enjoyment of tropical weather, beautiful sights from travel to exotic places, all these things are good, they are the object of this kind of desire, and they satisfy to a certain degree. But the satisfaction just does not last. The reason it does not last is because it is a seeking to directly satisfy a kind of hunger within. The direction this desire takes is toward the self. 

But there is a seeking that has a somewhat different trajectory. It is a seeking whose direction is away from the self towards another. It involves a loss of self, a forgetting of self. It is very hard to convince people that this kind of seeking alone brings enduring satisfaction, but this is the meaning of ecstasy, which describes a joy that is out of this world. Ecstatic. It comes from the Greek word ekstasis, which means a displacement outside the self, a standing outside of oneself. The self is left behind, as it were. The result is an “other worldly” joy that comes upon a person without our knowing where it came from. It’s a joy we have no control over, that is, we have no dominion over it. There’s a sense in which it is larger than we are, it embraces us from all sides, like the womb that embraces the child within it. 

This is what Christ meant when he said anyone who saves his life will lose it, but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it. If our life is motivated primarily by desire of the first kind, in which we directly seek the satisfaction of the self on whatever level, we will lose it. We’ll never find rest. But Christ said: come to me all you who labor and are heavy burdened and I will give you rest. That begins with leaving ourselves behind and going in search of him, not for the sake of our own satisfaction, but because he is good, he is the divine mystery. He is the Incarnation of Goodness Itself. 

Those who came looking for Jesus did not make any provisions for themselves. They forgot about themselves. They went looking for Jesus in a deserted place, because that’s where he was, grieving the death of John the Baptist. It was evening and they had nothing to eat. The disciples were ready to send them off so that they could fend for themselves. But then Jesus tells his disciples not to make them fend for themselves, but “feed them yourselves”, he says. 

The disciples are all too aware of their limits. They don’t have enough to do what Jesus asked them to do. What they have is inadequate. So what does Jesus do? He tells them: give me the little you have and I’ll do the rest, and he feeds them. He takes care of those whose hearts are set on finding him; for they moved him to compassion. Their pain was his pain.

And that’s the lesson. There are people in this world who are seeking the Lord, and the Lord calls us to feed them, not ourselves, but them. However, in our minds we can’t. We don’t have what it takes. But our purpose is to feed one another. And that’s where we find Christ, the person we are looking for; we find him in those who are seeking, those who are hungry and destitute. They are all around us. A life of service alone brings ecstasy. Nothing else. We only find life, meaning, joy, etc., in a self-forgetting exit of self, and never in a seeking to directly satisfy the emptiness of the self–we’ll be seeking forever, without rest. 

But we will feel our inadequacy and inability to really do anything for anyone, because we’ll sense our own limitations, as the disciples did when Jesus told them to feed the 5000 with nothing but 5 loaves and 2 fish. But this is where he comes in. Give it to me, he says to us. He’ll do it. Those 5 loaves and 2 fish symbolize us, our limited ability, limited resources. In a spirit of faith and trust, we just give it to him and he’ll do the rest. He’ll work through us in such a way that others will think we did so much for them, but in our minds we will have done nothing at all.

So we are all called to be miracle workers. And we will be miracle workers, but we won’t know it. That’s the beauty of it. We won’t know it. Only in the end will it be revealed to us just how much we did for others, or more accurately, how much the Lord did for the world through our limited efforts.