He took bread, said the blessing,broke it, and gave it to them.With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him.When I studied sacramental theology at St. Bernard’s here in Rochester, my professor, Dr. DavidStosur, asked the class to read an article written by Enrique Dussel, an Argentine-Mexicantheologian, whose work centers on liberation, ethics, and global politics. The article is entitledThe Bread of the Eucharistic Celebration as a Sign of Justice in the Community and its mainthesis is this, “Bread is life to the destitute and it is murder to deprive them of it.” Dussel andStosur taught me that the words – I was hungry and you did not feed me – not only havesacramental meaning, but also economic meaning. To offer a sacrifice from the possessions ofthe poor is like killing a child before their mother’s eyes. Put another way, justice is the practicalcondition that makes possible the Eucharistic celebration, which saves.I will try to help you understand what all that means with a story. Some years ago, as I walkedinto a salon, I had not anticipated that the visit would take on so much significance and symbolicmeaning. It had been many months since my last visit, because my stylist had taken an extendedmaternity leave after giving birth to her second child. She had been gone for so long that togetherwe joshed about whether she’d actually given birth to an infant or a small adult. As she gentlyheld my head while stroking my hair and laying me back into the basin of running water, shecalmly said to me, “Elijah was killed. Well, actually he was murdered.” I jumped up from myreclined position, tightly wrapped my arms around her and for a long while stood with her “in theblood of Christ.”In that embrace, Monique and I came to a shared understanding about just what it is that murderand deprivation really mean. Settled back into the ritual of washing, Monique poured water overmy head, and as she worked the lather into a comforting rhythm, she told me about the death ofher love and helpmate, Elijah. She said the sight and sound of the blood rushing from his woundwas like milk being poured out by the gallon. “Now,” she told me, she understood in real termsthe magnitude of the moment that I had related to her during an earlier visit, the moment when Ifound myself staring down at a pool of blood, with mop in hand, in, of all places, the “living”room, where my Uncle DJ had been left for dead. He was awakened in the wee hours of themorning by an intruder, who broke into his home and fired a gun. And as I stood there staring atblood on the floor, it was revealed to me that it was not simply the intruder’s bullet but rather hisdeprivation-induced depravity that took my uncle’s life.And so, Monique too found herself facing deprivation, economic deprivation. Though she wasn’tmarried to Elijah, his death, in effect, had left her widowed. With newborn and one-year olddaughters to feed, she returned to work in the salon one month after the murder of her partner.
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She and her daughters became the face of the poor. And like many working poor, Moniquehoped, despite the structural injustices that enable the rich to appropriate to themselves the hardlabor of the poor, that she and her children would not be separated from the product of her labor,bread. It is life to the destitute. It is indeed murder to deprive them of it.Where there is no wonder at creation, known as human life, that is violently laid to waste, thereis no wonder at creation, known as nature, for it too is spent without thought and laid to waste.Murder, here in the City of Rochester and cities across the country, is the ugly manifestation ofenvironmental racism that those who shield themselves in a cocoon of privilege do not wish toacknowledge or confront. It is not a crisis separate from the environmental movement in whichpeople of faith, who purport to be genuinely concerned, can simply opt out of, excludethemselves from, or turn away.The injustice of environmental r
