Tag Archives: daily bread

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: Who Made Manna?

Raphael’s “The Mass at Bolsena” (1512–1514)

I was recently in Orvieto, in whose Duomo is the corporal[1] upon which the miracle of Bolsena is said to have taken place. That miracle is the blood that dripped, it is said, from the host when a priest, who personally doubted the notion of transubstantiation, experienced a miraculous event when he broke the host. Orvieto thus became the seat of the festival of Corpus Christi, a feast day that it shares and always shall with the scenic lakeside town of Bolsena.

“I am Catholic and even I don’t believe that,” a friend of mine said over dinner. I thought little of his remark at the time, but a few days later I wondered why he does not believe it, for my personal reasons for not believing it have nothing to do with the fact that it is a purported miracle. My basis for unbelief in the event has to do with my Protestant understanding of Christian doctrine based on the final words of Christ on the cross, not because a miracle can’t or didn’t happen in Bolsena.

In fact, were I God, I could hardly imagine a more scenic place for a miracle than Bolsena. But that has nothing to do with the notion of a miracle. Rather, miracles, whether orally (or artistically) transmitted, like that of the host of Bolsena, or recorded in Holy Writ, like that of the miracle of manna come down from heaven to feed the hungry Israelites as they wandered in the wilderness, simply require a bit of faith, but with that bit of faith added, do tend to make sense in a world that is otherwise too often senseless without them.

Now one could say that I am probably overthinking this, and I probably am, especially inasmuch as one certainly could call, pace Raphael, the miracle of Bolsena merely a minor one. It is, after all, only a miracle that is said to verify a point of Catholic doctrine, not one that healed the sick or raised the dead. But however that may be, it got me to (over-)thinking, and I found myself pondering miracles in general. Thus I wondered whether, were there to be someone who did believe in a minor miracle of any kind, what might that same person do with the major miracles? I have in mind those such as the miracle of the manna recorded in the book of Exodus. That miracle itself prefigures, if not the miracle of Bolsena per se, at least the central feature of it, the Bread of Heaven, which all Christians, whether trans-, con-, or a- substantiators, agree is in some sense the body of Christ. (Those who believe in the real presence, in down and under the bread, I personally think, are closer to the truth; those who do not are not. But that is, to my mind, adiaphoristic in the greater scope of things and certainly will be resolved on the other side of the Jordan, where “real presence” will be played out at a new level).

And thus to return to the manna specifically. The symbolism of manna itself, bread from heaven, struck me, as I pondered it, working backward from Bolsena to the exilic wilderness of the Israelites. It seemed to me to be particularly central to Christian thought, for at the center of the Lord’s Prayer lies a petition specifically for a more mundane kind of manna: “Give us this day our daily bread.” That centrality, that powerful, real sustaining presence of God through bread and wine in our life, to give our bodies true blood and corporal form are not unrelated. The miracle can be fancy, like manna from heaven, or humble, like daily bread, but it is a miracle nonetheless, sustained evidence of a God who is capable of miraculous events, even as that of Bolsena, which I paradoxically don’t believe in, as I said at the outset. But the reason for my skepticism is not because the event itself is said to be miraculous but rather because of Christ’s final words, “It is finished.” And with that, I will parrot those words, for this blog is, likewise now finished, with a hope for you and me and a world that needs them but deserves them not, the continuance of miracles among us.

[1] About that they even made a movie, “The 33.”

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