Charlie Brown, all bundled up, is walking on an ice pond when he suddenly falls on the ice. Trying to get up, he says, “Good grief! I can’t get up! I’m trapped like a turtle! I can’t move, I’m doomed. ... I’ll have to lie here for the rest of my life!”

Lucy, speaking to Peppermint Patty, says, “And then she told me about this one party they had where they played ‘spin the bottle.’ Everyone sat in a circle with a milk-bottle in the middle.”

Standing over Charlie Brown she explains, “Then the person who was ‘it’, would spin the bottle like this.” She spins Charlie and while walking away, continues, “Then they’d all sit there and wait for the bottle to stop spinning to see who it would point to.”

Charlie says, “It sounds like a great game. I wonder who I’m pointing to?”

In recent years people have become acutely aware that we are what we eat and the result is not seemly. There is a plethora of medications, exercise devices, and biggest losers reality shows which promise great make-over results but deliver little, or so it seems.

Nonetheless, there is great interest in eating the right foods, healthy foods, correct labeling,  nutrition advice. Good eating habits, it is known, equal good health.

Not only eating the right food but eating the right amount of food has developed a dieting frenzy. With all the interest in how and what we eat, what about our spiritual nutrition?

In recent Scriptural passages over the last few Sundays we have been reminded that we need to be very careful about our spiritual development. The most nutritious of all foods is the food of the Lord’s supper.

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”

Jesus is asked, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” But Jesus does not tell them “how” he will give them his flesh to eat. Jesus tells them “what” eating his flesh will mean for them.

“Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.”

This is not just a promise, a hope hanging in the future. Jesus is saying that the person who eats the bread, his body, and drinks the wine, his blood, has union and life now.

St. Paul gives us an ongoing instruction of what it means to live and share God’s life now. “Watch carefully how you live.” Remember that Christ is with you, is in you, now.

A nurse went to visit a patient considered absolutely hopeless; too dangerous to go into his room. One day the nurse got the key and went to visit this incurable. She entered the room, walked over and asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

The patient looked at her intensely, and then slapped her face. Nurse backed off, hesitated for a moment, then said, “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

Some may consider themselves the most incurable of sinners but Jesus, the bread of life, is never insensitive to your needs and concerns. No matter how many times you slap him across the face, so to speak, his loving response will always be: “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

When you open yourself to the bread of life, you receive the strength you need to live a good Christian life.

When you open yourself to the bread of life, you are given the power to treat every person as precious.

Have you ever wondered who you are pointing to?