Aug. 2, 2009: 18th Sunday Ordinary (B)

This coming week, many of our children and grand children will be going back to school after a long summer break. I saw signs of this in our local mall. I sometimes walk around the mall with my pedometer as exercise, and the few days ago I was at the Mall of Louisiana walking. I saw a lot of back-to-school shopping. It was nice to see mother and daughter shopping together. I noticed that men are not great shoppers. I saw sitting on a bench a father and his son staring into the space waiting for over an hour for mom and sisters to finish shopping.

The beginning of school is quite more intense and serious in other countries. In countries like South Korea and Japan, kids don't enjoy such leisure time. Few years ago when I visited my relatives in South Korea, several of my cousins' kids who were in middle school and high school were no where to be seen. Their moms told me that they are at their after-school academies until 10 or 11PM. Some of you may heard of 'cram schools.' Most of the Korean parents, who can afford it, send their kids to these cram schools to raise the chances of their kids entering elite universities. We as Americans would probably say, "That's too intense for that age. Studying isn't everything in life!"

(Photo: South Korean 'cram school' after regular school)

What if someone told you that the income and the lifestyle you'll enjoy when you are 60 years old are largely determined by which college you entered at 18?

What if someone told you that a college degree from an elite university is considered necessary for entering the middle class and there is very few alternative pathways of social advancement? When you have such outlook on life, you have a hyper-competitive Korean culture geared toward scoring high on high school GPA and college entrance exams. Parents may see their children only in the morning when they eat breakfast and late at night when they return from cram schools. Romance and extracurricular activities are discouraged for they are distractions from studying. Some Korean Catholic parents even tell their kids that it's okay to miss Sunday mass for the sake of more hours of study. Even family and God can be pushed aside until one gets into the right school.

What's your reaction after listening to the life of students in Korea? Mo

st of us would say, "We really have it good here." We saw how family and God can be pushed aside for the sake of survival. What about the opposite end of the spectrum, like in our case, where jobs and opportunities are relatively plentiful and leisure time is in abundance? In this country, do we also see the trend of family and God being pushed aside for the sake of enjoying my career, my choices and my leisure? Yes.

In both cases, we have to be mindful of what Jesus tells us today:

Do not work for food that perishes

but for the food that endures for eternal life,

which the Son of Man will give you.

What is Our Lord trying to get across? The Israelites in the desert reminisced about how good they had it when they were still slaves to the pharoah, and they grumbled by saying how they should go back to the old ways. Likewise, we can fall into grumbling about things that are still lacking in our relationships, things still we wish we had, how we really had it good in the past. But the Lord is saying to us, 'You guys really have it good, right now!' Our Responsorial Psalm points out why:

The Lord gave [us] bread from heaven

He commanded the skies above and opened the doors of heaven;

[We] ate the bread of angels, food he sent [us] in abundance.

This Bread from Heaven , the Eucharist, is something that we didn't have to go to 'cram school' or score high on entrance exam to earn it. Yet, Lord gives himself plentifully. He says, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.” Lord, are you saying to us, if we receive you in this Eucharist today, all of my hunger is satisfied and all of my thirst is quenched for the rest of the week? But how could that be if I still feel the same before receiving the Eucharist and after receiving the Eucharist? Besides, my situation hasn't changed; I still need to work to pay bills and I still need to study past 10PM to get my grades.

Here, St. Paul offers us an advice:

"[we] must no longer live as the Gentiles do,

in the futility of their minds;

that is not how [we] learned Christ,

you should put away the old self of your former way of life,

corrupted through deceitful desires,

and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self,"

What does being renewed in the spirit of our minds mean? St. Ignatius of Loyola explains to us how to orient our desires of our heart toward God in his First Principle and Foundation. It reads:

“We are created to praise, reverence and serve God Our Lord, and by so doing to save our soul. The other things on the face of the earth are created for us in order to help us praise and serve God." He adds, "we should not want health more than illness, wealth more than poverty, fame more than disgrace, a long life more than a short one, and similarly for all the rest, but we should desire and choose only what helps us more towards the end for which we are created.”

Can we be still be satisfied if we did not make the cut on our exams? Can we still be fulfilled if we did not have enough money to buy things at the mall? Yes, if we realize that we already have received the one thing that satisfies all of our hunger and desires for which we were made for, by receiving the Eucharist.