GOD IN A CUPCAKE
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
April 17, 2021
In the
parish where I ministered before I came to Pax there was a catholic grade school
attached to the church, and that school was the source of a lot of happy
traditions for the community. One of these traditions was the observance of
children’s birthdays. It was the custom
on birthdays for the student to bring to school a whole tray of cupcakes to
share with all his/her classmates. Usually they had been homemade and everyone in the room got one, with a
candle on top. Nobody was left out, from the best friend down to that kid in
the corner that maybe wasn’t known or liked very well. A birthday is more than about the food...but
you do need the food it it’s going to be a real celebration.
Usually
those cupcakes were shared among the children at lunch time, and very often the
birthday girl/boy had thought to bring one for me too. But I was often not in my office over the
noon hour, so would return to my desk later on to find on it a cupcake with a note
from the “student of the day” inviting me to share in the food and
festivity. Sometime I didn’t even
recognize the child’s name and often times I wasn’t very hungry after lunch,
but hey it’s cupcakes, and you don’t say no to that, especially because it was
more than an invitation to eat something. It was an invitation to be drawn in
to the whole bigger meaning of gratitude for life and community.
It always
ended up that I was hungrier for all that than I’d thought I was. Those precious gifts – life and community – they
don’t mean very much if they are reduced to mere concepts or ideas or
disembodied spiritualized things. And
that’s always the danger of merely spinning theories about such realities
rather that living them out in very concrete ways each day. That’s a special risk for religions that are
so focused on a God who is imagined to be someplace far away or separated from
the real people and things that are right before us every day. That can be experienced in and through all of
our human senses and sometimes only in that way. Sometimes you actually have to eat the
cupcake in order to truly receive the gift and to engage the experience of what
it contains.
Today’s
resurrection gospel of St. Luke tells us about the Risen Lord who continues to
confront us through real human experiences even after Easter. That is to say, even NOW! It’s not that those
material encounters serve to emphasize what resurrection life is
like: They ARE that what resurrected
life is. That’s what it is. The
so-called “real” gospel of Easter is not to be found behind or around our
senses, but instead in and through them. You don’t believe in The God who loves you because you close your eyes
real tight and imagine it. You believe
in that because you’ve experienced it in your homes from your parents, your
grandparents, your friends, your classmates, the people who love you all the
time, every day.
The cupcake
on my desk after lunch doesn’t just signify Happy Birthday, it is Happy
Birthday. It invites me not merely to
think about something. It invites me to
partake of it. Those 1st followers of the Risen Lord were confronted by him though their very human
senses. They heard him greet them with
his words, “Peace be with you.” They saw
him with their own eyes – though they thought at first that he was a
ghost. They were invited to touch him
with their hands and to recognize his wounds of flesh and blood. (If you remember last week he invited Thomas
to actually probe the nail marks with his fingers.) And Jesus asked to be fed -- to taste
something, to eat something from their hospitality. This Risen Lord is not a spiritual
concept. He’s a transformed human being,
with an emphasis on both the words transformed and human.
A birthday
without a cupcake is sweet sentiment. But with the cupcake, its actually sweet.
This weekend
we welcome many of you, our children to the table of the Eucharist for the very
first time here at Pax Christi. And as
usual, your celebration is our opportunity for the rest of us adults to
remember again what we believe about this sacrament. We don’t assemble here merely to speculate
about how to be formed into a spirit filled Christian community, or to hold
discussions about resurrection life must be like. We come here to do these things in the most
visible, tangible ways possible. And unless/until we take and eat and touch and
hear and see who we truly are and what we are becoming, day by day, week by
week, and until we share all of that in our homes, and places of work and
cities, and yes, our school rooms, it all remains on the level of a nice idea –
satisfying concept without the cupcake. So
today as you receive the Lord for the first time, we will all watch you dig in
to the whole experience, with all its meaning and with all of its power to
transform us. And you young people, as
you do that it will be for the rest of us a reminder of what all of us are
called to be. One day long ago we were
all exactly where you are now. Thank you
for reminding us about that and calling us back. Calling us back to the Easter God who is
still with us in every bodily way possible.
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