Fed

eucharist for all

I raised my sweater and put the baby to my breast, the still-thick rolls of my middle cushioning his tiny body as he slurped hungrily for his dinner. Around us, people milled about, flicking cigarettes into the grass to free their fingers for a plate and fork.

I’d given birth two weeks before entering the Catholic Worker movement. My body was broken and eaten at the same time I tore crusts off loaves made by homeless hands at the same time my forehead was marked with oil as a brand new Catholic. 

Eucharist for all.

We hadn’t come to help, my spouse and I. After two years as missionaries and three years as adoptive parents, we were more than aware of how utterly unhelpful we were. How unnecessary. 

But we hungered. 

We had looked up the address of the local Catholic Worker house not to save but to be saved.

We hungered for support and understanding; for friendships undeterred by the mess we were in or how broken we felt. We hungered to imagine a world where people could just eat together without anyone trying to rescue the other, without anyone more powerful or anyone more shamed. The evangelical worldview we’d once held had collapsed upon us and we were clawing our way out from the rubble. Hungry.

And so every few days I would come and sit on a hay bale between someone with an addiction and someone with a criminal record and we tore the crust off the loaf and passed it to each other while I breastfed my baby and learned what it was to let nothing be enough. Learned what it was to have nothing to give. Learned what it was to hunger.

In a place where we would all be fed.

This micro essay was first published in Geez magazine’s Summer 2021 issue.

The baby in those words - and in this picture - is 9 now.

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Keeping it short and sweet this week because we are knee-deep in summer shenanigans over here. I hope you, too, are slurping every last drop of these long warm days with the people (and animals)

you love. Gotta store up all those good vibes to pull out in January and February, amirite? (I only wish this were a thing one could do.)

Take care out there,

Shannon