Eat. Pray. Love.

How many of you are familiar with the book and the movie that came out last year, Eat. Pray. Love. It’s the story of a middle aged woman who is desperately searching for meaning in her life. She divorces her husband and goes on a year-long odyssey around the world trying to find what is missing. As I was watching it I kept thinking about this story of the woman at the well. The two women seem to be the same. Both have a hard time with relationships with men. Both are thirsting for meaning in their lives and try to quench that thirst with physical, material things like sex and food and intellectual pursuits. Both turn to worship, but don’t quite get it right. Their understanding of what it means to worship God, their images of God himself, are incomplete. And both end up turning to love to find their final fulfillment. The woman at the well finds her reality and meaning in the Savior of the World while the woman in the movie still doesn’t quite get what she’s looking for. She is still thirsty at the end.

I think many of us are like the woman in the movie. Everyone thirsts for something, and we try to find what we need first by indulging in the pleasures of the flesh. Then, when we find that to be empty we turn to spirituality, either in the form of the Christianity of our youth or in some other exotic path focused on the self. Finally, we turn to love. But if that love is not love himself – Jesus Christ – we still thirst.

It’s really just all about Jesus. We must encounter Jesus. Every time the woman at the well tried to change the subject, Jesus kept coming back with “It’s all about me”. We Catholics don’t confess that we’ve accepted Jesus as our own personal savior, like the Evangelicals do. But isn’t that what it’s all about? We focus so much on the externals of the Church that we tend to lose sight of who that Church is following. It’s sort of like reading a biography of a famous person and coming away with knowledge of that person’s life, but having no relationship with that person. We are just observers, not participants. We can read the bible through and through, come to Mass every day, and fulfill all our obligations as Catholics, but if those actions don’t cause us to personally encounter Christ, we will find our faith to be empty.

I often say that Christianity is the only major religion that does not follow a philosophy; we follow a person. Christianity is not just a set of tenets or precepts to follow. It is not just a set of guidelines on how to live a good life. It is a relationship with God that must be deeply personal. All those other things follow naturally if we first have that relationship; if not they are simply reduced to intellectual exercises. Like the woman at the well, we must encounter Christ and then change our lives.

The major difference between the woman at the well and the woman in the movie is that the woman at the well’s encounter with love radically changes her life. She reforms her life and is saved. The woman in the movie never really changes. Her pain just goes beneath the surface as she covers it with a physical love that cannot really satisfy her. She has searched everywhere for fulfillment except for where she needed to. She is focused on externals, not on relationship. She never encounters Christ, and so her search continues.

All this is well and good, but how and where do we encounter Christ and how do we have a relationship with him? It’s simple for us Catholics. Eat. Pray. Love.

First we must eat. The woman in the movie goes to Italy for a few months and basically eats her way through the country. There’s something about a meal that we are naturally drawn to. Meals do more than simply quell our hunger. We use meals to get closer to other people. We use meals to deepen our relationships. Many of our significant life events take place around meals. And so it is with our lives as Catholics. We must partake of the Eucharistic banquet if we are ever to really encounter Christ. We must have supper with Jesus. In the Mass we can truly find him because he is truly here. We can be intimate with him here, because how much more intimate can you be with him than to consume his body and blood? Where else could you learn more about Jesus than through your conversation with him in the sacrifice of the Mass? Where else could your spiritual hunger be filled than by doing what you were created to do? Remember he said, “Unless you eat my body and drink my blood you will have no life within you.” We need to be intimate with the Bread of Life.

Second, we must pray. We must take the time to nurture our relationship with Jesus. I quiet prayer. In common worship. We must communicate with our lover Jesus just as we communicate with one another. And prayer is not just saying a bunch of words in a certain order at a certain time. Prayer is first and foremost knowing who you are communicating with, and then listening as much or more than talking. You do not have to search for God in exotic places. He is right here. He is waiting to communicate with you if you just get out of the way. And we must try many different forms of prayer because God cannot be experienced in any one way, but in many.

Finally, we must love. If we truly encounter Jesus than we can’t help but love. The movement towards love is a natural progression, because we were created to love and to be loved. We must accept the love of Christ even though we know we can never earn it. And we must love in return without reservation. Interestingly, it was at that very same well that Jakob met his future wife Rebecca. He didn’t know that he would encounter love there, and the woman didn’t think she would encounter love when she went to draw water that day either. Love arrives when we least expect it. But the love of Jesus is the only thing that will satisfy our deepest, innermost need.

If we are willing to take the plunge.