Food appropriate for us

Moses glorifies the everlasting Lord as He Who sets a table for His people in the wilderness. The bread of the wilderness was the manna. The word manna is actually a question: What is this? When we are sorely tried, this is our first question: What is this? Clearly, the secret that is hidden from us will become bread for us. Moreover, this bread will keep us alive in a biological sense as well. So our task is not to answer the question, or to insist upon an answer, but to accept the test. The one who accepts trials from God's hand, even if they do not seem to come from Him, that man will eat even the putrid insides of an animal with thanksgiving. God feeds us with food appropriate for us (Proverbs 30: 8), but he also decides what is appropriate for us. If it were not so, those who suffer dreadfully for Him would quickly collapse.

A very peculiar transubstantiation of the food can be observed in the ways of God. There is honey in the rock and there is oil in the flinty crag (Deuteronomy 32:13). God doesn't give honey from the hive or oil from the olive. One of God's lesser known names is the God of breasts. This suggests that we should give ourselves to Him like helpless children and even in the hardest situations, we will become beautiful, like the young Jews in captivity who refused to eat any Babylonian food.


[FV, 1995]