7 November 2021
Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Many centuries before Christ, there was a period of drought in the holy land. The people were brought to the brink of starvation. Then the prophet Elijah appeared to a foreign woman, a widow in Zarephath, and told her that “the LORD, the God of Israel, says, ‘The jar of flour shall not go empty, nor the jug of oil run dry, until the day when the LORD sends rain upon the earth’”(1 Kings 17:14). The widow, in turn, put her trust in the Lord, despite the drought, and she used the little flour that she had to feed the starving prophet Elijah. She was then given a sign: a miraculous supply of food that lasted until the drought ended.
In our day, many of us are facing a modern version of drought: inflation, labor shortages, broken supply chains, and empty shelves. Our drought is caused by billions of individual human choices. The great mass of humanity is like a sea that ebbs and floods. Powerful ideological and psychological forces compel us like the wind, stirring up waves one moment and bestowing calm the next. For a few decades, we are stirred up to labor, cooperation and production. Then come decades of chaos, confusion and emptiness.
Neither you nor I can control the great mass of humanity any more than we can control the sea or the weather. If it is truly a drought that lies before us, we must do what the widow of Zarephath did: listen to the revealed word of God. Today we find God’s word revealed in the Bible and in Tradition. And like the widow of Zarephath, we must also eat from the miraculous supply of food given to us by God, which, today, is the Eucharist.