Reflection
My wife and I celebrated our 5-year wedding anniversary this past November. We were one of those covid couples. I remember choosing plates and napkin colors when we realized that the wedding we were planning was not going to happen. We got married that year in her hometown of Franklin, Tennessee with her family spaced in the church well over 6-feet apart and my family watching it all over Zoom from California. After watching the whole event on their family computer, my nephew, with great earnestness, created a diorama of what he had seen, using random LEGOs. His mother captured a video, narrating each piece: "This one is Uncle Chris, this is Auntie Abby, here is the priest..." At the end of the explanation, he looked up and said something that still stirs my heart to this day: “It’s not much, but it is what I have to give."
This sense of having "not much to go around" resonates deeply with the disciples in our passage today. Five years later, with two small children, my wife working late nights, and my own meaningful work here at the university, I, too, am intimately familiar with the feeling of limited time, energy, attention, and resources. How often do I confuse my hyperfocus on these limitations for a genuine prayer? How often do I forget what God desires to do with the very crumbs I often discount of having any value or inherent meaning?
Yet, the Gospel today illuminates Jesus’s beautiful willingness to meet us right at our limits. It is not always a neat or comfortable place; it is often riddled with the uncertainty where our realism collides with doubt and cynicism. And yet, like the great, loving improviser God is, God takes what we can muster, blesses it, and reminds us, God can work with this, if we’re open.
May our loving God gently take what we have, our fragmented moments, our weary attention, our small acts of faith, and transform them through grace to nourish us and one another. It’s not much, but it's all we have to give.
Christian Santa Maria, MATM
Director of University Ministry