Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 25 July 2015

Pictures of hungry starving people are always disturbing. Those of us who live in an affluent society cannot begin to comprehend what it must be like to have little hope of food or water. It is to their credit that so many people act according to conscience and with compassion to support charities and aid agencies that help alleviate situations of extreme deprivation. Some of us will help in an active way by becoming involved in these situations.

Whilst the UK isn't a country with water and food shortages or has terrible famines like other countries, there are amongst us people with little money who for a number of reasons are unable to feed properly. The problems of poverty and hunger are always with us.

In the summer I often walk through the main thoroughfares of Central Oxford about 6.45 am in the morning, on my way to start a Summer School. In the doorways and sheltered places of this wonderful city many homeless can be found sleeping. Some of them I recognise, and there are others who appear from time to time and then vanish.

They lie there silent, witnesses to inequality amongst us. I don't know all their stories, but most of them have been very hurt by society, by people, by life! People do help and there are groups that take a pro-active stance in caring, but the homeless still keep coming, still haunt the doors of busy stores, still sleep out in clement and inclement weather.

It is obvious that these are the visible and obvious hungry people that Jesus wants us to reach out to and feed. But there is another hidden hunger in our society, often unnoticed by those who actually are in need. It is a hunger for God, for God's word, for God's touch and presence in our lives. The crowds of today may not say they want to hear and meet Jesus because their attention is elsewhere on things, alas, that often prove illusory.

How do we reach out and feed them? We are like Philip, wondering how we can feed people with God's knowledge and love in a world of consumerism and the ego-centricity of a fabled 'celebrity' culture? And yet, Jesus is here with us, the miracle still happens, the food of love is given, for as the psalm says: 'The Lord is close to all who call him, who call on him from their hearts'.