Kelsi Vanada

Dear friends,

In today’s Gospel passage (John 4:31-38), the disciples are trying to attend to Jesus’s human needs.

They urge him to eat something, but he says, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” The disciples wonder whether someone else has brought him something to eat, but Jesus explains that obeying God is food for him: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.”

In our Wednesday Mosaic discussion at the end of February about Lenten fasts, a fellow parishioner shared that when she fasted for the first time, she took literally a friend’s advice to feed on God’s word, and would pull out her Bible whenever her stomach grumbled.

Father Matthew shared that he fasts before celebrating the Eucharist on Sundays because he wants his first food of the day to be the divine meal we share.

I’m a poet, and I would say that poetry feeds me.

I think of the poet Brenda Hillman, who once said that she “gulps” as much poetry as she can each day, because she needs it. Or there’s the famous William Carlos Williams line: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / Yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”

Sometimes poetry feels like a divine language, as Deacon Susan shared in a recent sermon—and “feeding” on it can help me encounter the Divine.

Taking part in the liturgy of Sunday mass with all of you feeds me, too. Lent is a good time to consider what feeds each of us, and whether we are getting enough spiritual sustenance.

In Christ,

—Kelsi