c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The story of the miracle of the loaves and fishes was read recently in all Catholic and many other Christian churches. Earnest preachers emphasize the transformation of five loaves and a few fish into rations enough for 5,000, with plenty of leftovers.

But there is another story line here that explains why we sometimes experience this long-ago miracle in our own lives.

The reading is familiar because, in different settings, we have all had the same experience. In the Gospel story the problem is not that the crowd lacks food but that it is short on spiritual insight. The point of the story is less about nutrition and more about compassion.

St. Matthew’s Gospel makes Jesus’ motivation clear. Looking at the hungry people who have followed him, Jesus says, “My heart is moved with pity for the crowd.”

We can also wonder about the reaction of the crowd. Did they acclaim Jesus as the prophet for whom they had been waiting because he multiplied food _ or because he enlarged their spiritual view of each other?

Did his compassion so move them that they experienced a change of heart (essential to any spiritual growth) so that they were satisfied by just a taste of the tiny portions available?

Or did something else happen? Perhaps some had kept food for themselves, unwilling to share it, until Jesus moved them to compassion and they shared their supplies with each other.

By his manner and his words, Jesus opened the eyes of the crowd before he filled their stomachs. What was the sudden spiritual insight that enabled these men and women to look at each other in a new way? Feeling the compassion of Jesus, they felt compassion for one another. They grasped that they all felt the same hunger, so they also felt the same sorrows.

We have all been in crowds whose members keep to themselves. Think of the last time you were at an airport. As travelers, we all carry the same brand of sorrow in our baggage. It never sets off the metal detectors or arouses the suspicion of security guards. You don’t have to declare it to the customs agent.

Nobody, we think, even suspects the troubles we’ve had. And we dread the possibility that if we lower our guard, fellow passengers will tell us THEIR troubles all the way to our destination. So we defend against that, as did the members of the crowd on that hillside, keen-eyed for their hidden food but blind to each other’s woes.

Jesus knows that just like everyone on that hillside or all of us in the airport security line, we carry exactly the same garden-variety sorrows: losses, misunderstandings, broken hearts, longing for love. We conceal that baggage as we submit ourselves for inspection at the airport, removing our shoes and jackets, allowing guards to paw through our bags. We never notice just how much we are alike.

Once on the plane, we regard each other as fellow detainees; we do not sense how much our battered hearts resemble each other.

The miracle of the loaves and fishes happens every time we see, better than the airport X-ray, the mixed inventory of grief and joy, discouragement and hope, that we are all carrying.

It repeats itself whenever we pause to see into the television images of people all over the world and realize that our common sorrow makes us close.

The real reason Jesus left the hillside was only in part to avoid the crowd making him a king. He taught them, as he does us, how to work this miracle of multiplying nourishment by recognizing and bearing each other’s sorrow _ and then leaves us on our own to repeat it every day.

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

KRE/RB END KENNEDY

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