A Week Before Good Friday

 LEGACY

(Matthew 26:26-28)

When he was a child
his mother told him
of how she and Joseph
had been turned away
from their ancestral home --
the House of Bread --
on the night of his birth.
 

The story taught him
that rejection and hunger
gnawed with the same teeth.
 

Grown, he walked through
towns and countryside,
feeding hollow-eyed hundreds
who pursued him by day.
But a bottomless ocean
of hungry mouths  
flooded his dreams.

 
He learned that the memory
of yesterday's bread
could not relieve today's hunger
 
On the eve of his death,
He at last found a way
to keep rejection and hunger
at bay.  He held his life in his hands
and said to his friends,
"Take. Eat. This is my body,
broken for you."

And when they were filled commanded;
"Feed the hungry. do this.
Re-member me."

Sr. Irene Zimmerman; OSF