“Fat, Drunk and Stupid is No Way to Go through Life, Son.”

(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: https://brothersinchristcmf.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Mass-Blog-for-the-20th-Sunday-of-Ordinary-Time-2024.mp3)

Wisdom and ignorance are incompatible delicacies. Ignorance is the delicious but poisonous fruit of ego—and is best savored by the egotist when its fertile seeds are transplanted for fruition inside someone else. Wisdom is a superego fruit whose essence can’t be planted. It is native to a higher realm and must be sought out among its rare sources and consumed whole. This superfood can counteract the effects of ignorance and other ego fruits that eventually turn poisonous within their hosts.

Ego fruits are more pharmaceutical than food, and they’re deadly in extreme doses. In fact, according to Rick Rigsby, ego is most dangerous when it “acts as an anesthesia that deadens the pain of our stupidity.” Rigsby, a motivational speaker, offered this observation in a commencement address to the most recent graduates of the University of California’s Maritime Academy.

He added this: “Make sure your servant’s towel is bigger than your ego.”

Service is another superego food, and a favorite of Christ’s, who made for us a delicacy of it in the sacrifice of his very body and blood. In Sunday’s gospel reading (Jn 6:51-58) he classifies his flesh and blood as true food and drink, so that whoever eats it “remains in me and I in him.”

“This is the bread that came down from heaven,” he tells us. “Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.”

But if the bread and wine Catholics consume at every liturgy were JUST bread and wine—or even JUST flesh and blood—it would equate to simple human ego. The Holy Spirit of Wisdom tells us that the sacrifice of Christ that we consume is Life itself—made divine in combination with God’s Way and Truth. We become one with these super foods by the will of God’s Superego.

But again, these foods can’t be force-fed, just as wisdom can’t. We must nurture the will to seek, take AND eat.

That’s where the service towel comes in, because God’s way, truth and life must be shared in service to one another. Service is a communal food, accentuated by the coming together of free wills in mutual understanding. It nourishes us while neutralizing the poison of humanity’s egotistical ignorance.

As Paul suggests in Sunday’s second reading (Eph 5:15-20), “do not continue in ignorance, but try to understand what is the will of the Lord. And do not get drunk on wine, in which lies debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.”

Those works of art—along with the Wisdom that inspired them—can be found at your nearest House of God. Wisdom invites us, “Come, eat of my food, and drink of the wine I have mixed!” (Prv 9:1-6)

By partaking in these super foods with each other, we overpower the ego-driven and selfish ignorance that makes one’s soul fat, drunk, stupid—AND alone.

–Tom Andel