As a person of faith, what does wisdom mean to you? Wisdom has a built a house and is having a banquet spread with her teaching. Will you attend, “not as foolish persons but as wise”? What will you find on the table?

IN BIBLICAL TIMES, before the advent of fast food and lone dining, people ate around a common table. With whom you ate was just as important as what you ate. Dietary restrictions defined membership in the Hebrew camp; no pork or shellfish, thanks. Nor did you sit down to dinner with just anybody. You ate with family. You ate with people who embraced your laws and customs.

Wisdom or foolishness? Those are two of the choices scripture offers this week. How to live wisely and well is a timeless question for Christians. Fortunately the words of Jesus and the gospel stories that depict him in action are timeless guides, as relevant today as when they first happened. Jesus lived and taught values that we can use to govern our own choices today.

In scripture this week we continue to deepen our awareness of the mystery of Christ’s presence. To open ourselves further to Christ, we turn to God’s grace and mercy.

"The bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” Jesus spoke of the need to eat his flesh and drink his blood to have eternal life in terms of the past, present, and future. In the past the Israelites ate manna in the desert but “still died.” In the present, he said, there was the need to “eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood” in order to “have life within you.” Those who do that now will be raised “on the last day” and “will live forever.”

Some might know that “eating the body of Christ” at the Lord’s Supper is best understood as a symbol of the Lord’s love and presence among us. But that’s not enough. The genteel young Southern fiction writer Flannery O’Connor must have shocked her companions when in conversation about the Eucharist, she once objected, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” In one of her letters, she wrote that the Eucharist “is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. —Annie Dillard