If you are a Chinese, you would know how important it is to ‘come home for soup’. If you are a Catholic, you would know how important it is to ‘come to receive Holy Communion’.

A pre-blog caveat :  I have never, and will never use this blog for any political purpose.  The mention of the current situation in Hong Kong in this blog only serves to reference a remark made in an interview that I recently came across.  

It would have been about 15 weeks since the first riots or protests started in Hong Kong over the highly contentious extradition bill, but since then have been more fueled by other disgruntlements from the (mostly) younger generation of Hong Kong citizens.  The city has since been facing weekend after weekend of chaos, turmoil and mayhem, and there have been numerous stories shared both on the social media as well as mainstream news broadcasts lamenting that many families which were formerly very closely knit and united are now being split and factioned within.  In one poignant interview, a journalist asked a matriarch of a family how this spate of affairs has affected her own family. Choking with emotion and sadness, this Cantonese-speaking mother looked wistfully at the camera and made a statement that probably means very little to anyone who isn’t Chinese or more specifically, Cantonese Chinese.  She said “they (meaning the younger generation) don’t even come back home for soup now”.  I could fully appreciate her lament, not just because I am a Chinese Cantonese, but also because I am a Roman Catholic Priest.  Let me elucidate.

To the Chinese, and I am very sure this applies to just about any other ethnicity in the world, the family dinner table isn’t just a piece of furniture that sits in the middle of a space in the house or apartment called a ‘dining area’.  It represents many other things.  These include notions of family bonding, unity, respect, love, kindness, filial piety, tenderness and a sense of well-being.  To be able to sit together for a meal and to partake not just in the food on the table, but in the stories of each other’s lives gives a sense that one is valued and validated, and that each person has a place of importance in the family.  For that reason, being invited to a meal with one’s family is not something to be taken lightly, because one is for that moment, akin to being elevated to a status of family.  I recall watching 1960 black-and-white Cantonese melodramas on television where guests at such meals will be given the choicest cuts of the chicken which is usually reserved for the head of the family.  It was the playwright’s way of showing that the guest at such a meal is treated as a VIP.

But in the world of the traditional Cantonese family, the one dish which is always present at every meal is the ubiquitous soup.  (I am sure that other ethnicities would have their own particular dish or tradition which serves a similar purpose).  This soup isn’t just something which the cook (usually the mother of the household) haphazardly throws into a pot and brings to the boil with water.  It is always a well-planned item, where a portion of meat with bones is gently brought to a slow and gentle boil, together with carefully selected vegetables and herbs, some of which may have been procured from the chinese herbalists or apothecary.  These ingredients would raise the dish from being a mere soup to the level of a health tonic, with holistic benefits for the family.  In the days of old, this elixir would be cooked over a charcoal stove where glowing embers would be keeping the mixture at simmering point, contributing a distinctive smokey flavour to the soup when it is savoured by the entire family at dinner time.  Those partaking of this labour of love means that one has received and participated in the family’s bond and love. 

What the interviewee lamented resonated with me went beyond the fact that I am a person with Cantonese Chinese roots.  It gave me a new basis and vista from which to understand the deep sadness and heartache which many Catholic families suffer from when members of their family who are baptized no longer bring themselves to participate at Sunday Eucharist and hence do not receive Holy Communion anymore.  Often, these are children who are in their late teens or early twenties, and would possibly include those who have gone overseas to obtain their university degrees or working there, and who have, for various reasons, fallen out of love for God and the Church.  They have become numb to the richness of faith, the Mass and the Eucharist.  Like the protesting youth in Hong Kong, there also exist in our Churches many youth and young adults who also don’t come to home for soup too.  But in our case, the benefit of Holy Communion goes way beyond what a mere tonic gives to the body.  It truly feeds the soul.

Jesus must have taken great risks to cut to the chase at the Last Supper when he merely said to his disciples that they were to ‘do this in memory of me’, and to do it faithfully.  Notice that he didn’t give them a theological treatise of what it means to eat his body and drink his blood, and what kind of benefits the one who obeys this instruction is going to receive, or even how this is to be explained.  The disciples must have intuited that Passover night that this was a reasonable request, and that Jesus meant it very literally.  The Church through the ages, starting from the Apostolic Fathers broke it down to give this action a spiritual, theological and doctrinal essence, from which we now have such a rich pastoral understanding of what receiving Holy Communion and BEING Holy Communion means, as well as the central importance that the Real Presence of Jesus in Holy Communion is for every single Catholic.  

Its truth and its richness will always be there, whether we appreciate it or not.  What matters most is that Jesus asked that we do it.  Notice that he didn’t even say that we need to understand what it is that we are doing.  He trusted that the Church he founded would do that when the time came.  What he wanted most was faith.  Perhaps that explains why he asked pointedly at the end of his parables that when the Son of Man comes, would he find any faith?

Faithfulness sometimes makes it more important that we do something with great consistency and mindfulness, than if we understand why we do it.  Of course, knowing clearly why we do it elevates it to a much higher level – and this truth applies to many things we do in life – from drinking soup together as family to receiving Holy Communion at Mass.