A special gathering with family and friends often centres around food. Certainly any one of us could eat alone, using food as the fuel that will keep us going. But it is at a table filled with love and companionship as well as lovingly-prepared food that we are really fed down to our souls.

The kind of food Jesus is offering us is the "Bread of Life" and if we feed on this bread, we will live forever.

In today's gospel, we see the confusion of people who can only understand it their way. There are quarrels and people wonder, "How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?" But Jesus calmly repeats his message: "Unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood, you do not have life within you."

How is it that we can eat his flesh and drink his blood? We can do this because his gift to us is the sacrifice of his very body and blood for us. He died that we might live. He is broken and given to feed our hunger. When he gives himself to us, that gift is real indeed. Whoever "feeds on me will have life because of me."

In every day of our lives, we will be fed with a life we could not have imagined. Real presence. Real food and drink. Preparing us to really give our lives as food and drink for others.