COME, HAVE BREAKFAST

MEDITATIONS ON GOD AND THE EARTH

By Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ - Orbis Press, 2024  - a review by R. B. Williams, OP.

     I have been invited to provide a review of Elizabeth Johnson’s wonderful little book of meditations, COME HAVE BREAKFAST - MEDITATIONS ON GOD AND THE EARTH for a website dedicated to the ministry of preaching!  I do so with fear and trembling both because the author is a preeminent theologian, and the subject is immense!!  Why would such a book be useful to preachers?  The title should be familiar from the Gospel According to John, where Jesus appears after his resurrection to a tired bunch of disciples who are trying to pick up the pieces of their lives after his death and resurrection.  They try to go back to fishing and wind up with Jesus’ help with a big catch after which he says to them, “Come, have breakfast.” [John 21:12]   Johnson is upfront about her goal in writing:
 “In the story itself, the inviting words ‘Come, have breakfast’ is obviously an expression of Jesus’s care for the bodily well-being of the fishers.  Reading this gospel in our time of ecological crisis, the invitation opens onto a wider perspective.  ‘Come, have breakfast’ is a bugle call of divine hospitality toward all people and all living creatures, revealing a passionate divine desire that all should be fed…..The aim is to open up an angle of vision so that when anyone says the word ‘God,’ a picture of the changing Earth enfolded with divine affection reflexively comes into view, along with whatever else one is thinking, teaching, preaching, arguing, or praying about.  No God without Earth!  No Creator without creation! No Singer without her song.” (from the Introduction).  Well…in this work, we are handed a hymnbook of thought for preaching about God and creation.

     Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato si’, serves as a major inspiration for the meditations, but what one notices immediately is the abundance of scripture, especially from the psalms.  Psalm 104 gets some special attention, but nearly 30 of the psalms make an appearance.  Another nice surprise, at least to this Dominican, is the frequent reference to our brother Thomas Aquinas!  Each meditation is short and eloquent, making this book a great homiletic and spiritual resource.

     Johnson invites human readers to see themselves as “part of” creation and not “a-part from” creation (my words).  She tackles the traditional idea of the “hierarchy of being” and places the human person in the middle of and not on top of creation.  The interdependence of humanity with all of creation and through it with God shines forth.  

     For one whose ministry may be oral or written preaching, this book offers a tremendous resource for dealing with the daily concerns that we live within our relationship with nature.  Forest fires, earthquakes, winds, hurricanes, smog, water contamination, extreme temperatures - all of these point not to domination as a response but a recognition of our dependence in the face of nature’s power.  If we haven’t read Pope Francis’ two works, LAUDATO SI’ and LAUDATE DEUM, this book could inspire us to do so, but if not, Elizabeth Johnson gives us the opportunity to be inspired to preach about, and be ourselves far more aware of, God everywhere in creation.

—by R. B. Williams, OP

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