For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. If a son asks for bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If you then, being but men, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!
—Luke 11:10–13
Evelyn Waugh’s eldest son, Auberon, once told the following story about his father in his autobiography, Will This Do?: Just after the end of World War II, Evelyn’s wife managed to get her hand on three bananas despite fresh fruit being nigh unavailable.
Neither I, my sister Teresa, nor my sister Margaret had ever eaten a banana throughout the war … but we had heard all about them as the most delicious taste in the world.… The great day arrived when my mother came home with three bananas. All three were put on my father’s plate, and before the anguished eyes of his children, he poured on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and ate all three. A child’s sense of justice may be defective in many respects, and egocentric at the best of times, but it is no less intense for either. By any standards, he had done wrong. It would be absurd to say that I never forgave him, but he was permanently marked down in my estimation from that moment.
I think of this story often, which seems over-the-top even for Evelyn Waugh, and how unpleasant the dish must have seemed by at least the second bite: a sort of raw bananas Foster, the sugar grainy and undissolved, the cream slopping everywhere, the sheer size of the thing, the unrelenting monotony of a mouthful of wet banana. The story has everything: joyless dessert-eating, public enforcement of family discipline, excess without taste, banana peels, the showiness of hoarding pleasure. Sad English childhoods always sound like caricatures of themselves, yet they’re somehow all true. It doesn’t matter if the inheritance is tasteless and unappetizing; a child knows his rights and objects to watching a tasteless banana that is rightfully his go to his father all the same. “If a brother or a sister is naked and without food and one of you says to them, Depart in peace, be warmed and filled, but do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit them? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:15–17). A child might not know what a banana tastes like, and a child might suffer for the longing of it just the same.
COMMUNION: Take bread, and bless it, and break it, and give it to the disciples.
ANTI-COMMUNION: Take bananas, and peel them, and stack them, and hoard them.
COMMUNION: Say, Take, eat, this is my body.
ANTI-COMMUNION: Find the most unprocurable cream. Find the most heavily rationed sugar. Commit the act of pouring in a stinting age.
COMMUNION: Take a cup, and give thanks, and give it to the disciples.
ANTI-COMMUNION: Take a bite. Swallow a wince at the flavor of soft and spreading banana undercut by milkfat and the sharp grains of sugar. Maintain eye contact with your children as you do.
COMMUNION: Say, Drink, you, all of it, for this is my blood shed for the remission of your sins.
ANTI-COMMUNION: Point out the obvious about the banana. Point out what the banana does and does not represent.
COMMUNION: Say to them also, I will not drink from now on of the fruit of this vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.
ANTI-COMMUNION: Remember that you are eating three bananas swimming in cream on a plate. The odds that some of the cream has run out onto the table and even onto your lap are high, possibly inevitable. Continue the heavy work of chewing and swallowing. This is a meal that can only ever happen once, but reenacted a thousand times in memory.
There are meals that require repetition and there are meals that cannot bear it. And of course you have to know that you are hungry before you can ask your father for bread. But it’s not enough to know that you are hungry; you also have to know that others have hungered before you and found the common solution named bread, and that bread is plentiful and readily available for you, that bread is digestible and wholesome and a ready answer to hunger; you have to know what hunger is, and what bread is and the difference between a loaf of bread and a rock that is shaped like a loaf of bread, though they may look and feel the same in the hand.
You must be able to imagine your own father hungering. Let us further imagine that your father has only ever hungered and thirsted after righteousness, see Matthew 5:6, and has no concept of bread hunger, in which case you have to learn the language of bread and explain it to him, and hope he will be able to compare it to his own hungers. You must trust that your father can tell the difference between a loaf of bread and a stone. You must trust that your father will not say, Depart in peace, be well and filled, but does not give you the things that are needed for the body. There are many conditions to be met before anyone might ask and hope to receive.
Now at the start of his ministry Christ was led into the wilderness by the Spirit where he met the devil, and in those days he ate nothing. For forty days he was led by the Spirit and met the devil and ate nothing and went about in the wilderness, so afterward he was hungry. At this same time was his Father in heaven, where they neither hunger nor thirst, nor does the sun strike them nor any scorching heat. And the devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread,” by doing so inviting the son to play the father and to give himself his own inheritance; by doing so inviting him to name the terms of his own hunger; by doing so inviting him to take a selfish meal that did not concern itself with the hunger of others or the needment of their bodies. At which Christ referred to Deuteronomy: God humbled you and caused you to hunger, then fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live on bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord. To which the devil had no answer.
The order of operations, then, is this: In order to hunger, you must be beloved of God and in need of humility. If you hunger, it is for the purpose of being fed. What you eat is beyond your knowledge and your father’s knowledge. The purpose of food is to sustain and increase the love of God, whatever your earthly father eats or declines to eat in front of us. I first began to be a man when I asked myself why it was that I was not a man; I first knew I was hungry when I saw food set before me and asked whose it was.
Anyone who hopes for bananas in wartime runs the risk of learning the following: that there are no bananas to be had; that there were never any bananas to begin with; that all bananas had ever been was a collective fantasy brought on by the deprivations of war; that your mother will fail to find any bananas; that you will have to compete with your sisters for the bananas; that your father will exchange the banana for the experience of watching him eat the banana, with or without cream and sugar; that your father will model substitutionary atonement and bear himself your hunger in his body, Christus Victor, paternal satisfaction, and eat the bananas in front of you. For such reasons and more a child might not ask for bread at all but instead say, I’m not hungry, I ate before I got here.