2005 / 2
Introduction
Christophe Boureux, Janet Martin Soskice and Luiz Carlos Susin
Hunger provokes the first and most basic movement of all animals and is, according to Emmanuel Levinas, the first impulse of the human being towards happiness — in the enjoyment of food. The hunger of an infant provides the outline of desire, and is desire in its most primordial and genuine form. The hunger of the infant also attests to the precarious dependence of every living being on an other who, in their turn, must search for and receive food. Thus hunger reveals to us our first relationship and becomes a metaphor for all the others, including the relationship of the human creature to the Creator and Giver of bread.
Bread, the biblical ‘food’, is at the same the most material, most bodily and most spiritual thing in Christian spirituality. The Eucharist, the mystery of faith, is bread. For this reason the sacrament is also a sign of our social nature, of the search for and the giving of bread — the mouth of the infant, the mother's breast — and sign of the most primordial forms of justice and of gift.
Too much hunger, too many mouths and not enough bread: this situation reveals the menacing nearness of death. The fact is that in our world many know the pains of a hunger that will not be satisfied. This opens the space for the Eucharist as a celebration of hunger, desire and the Bread given by God, but only if the Eucharist itself is involved in the struggle for justice. All this means that in our world, the same world as that of Jesus but one in which bread does not multiply but hunger in fact does, the Eucharist and justice are joined together.
Hunger is not only for bread. Augustine, speaking in his Confessions to God of an experience at Milan before his final conversion, says ‘I seemed to hear your voice from on high: “I am the food of the mature; grow then, and you will eat me. You will not change me into yourself like bodily food: you [8] will be changed into me.'" (Confessions, VII. 10.16). This is the Christian hope, but this hope for spiritual feeding and Love of God cannot, as Augustine repeatedly said, be separated from love of neighbour, and proper love of self. From the earliest Christian writings it has always been possible to focus to exclusively on spiritual hunger to the cost of the actual poor, or to do the reverse. The best of Christian reflection has held both together, and we have tried to do so here in a collection that touches on social and political action, biblical interpretation, historical theology, philosophy, spirituality and pastoral care. We hope the readers will be nourished by it.
Concilium
English 
