Bread of Life

Extract

I imagine a priest-worker gathering his friends together in his shabby little room in the industrial slum: the day's work is over; he is going to say Mass, but first he will talk to them: what might he say; Perhaps something like this:

If you look out of the window there, you can see nothing but factory and tenement buildings; down there in the grey street there are children who have never heard the chuckle of a brook o r seen a meadow filled with buttercups or felt the clean wind peeping across the hills; all around us there are men and women who have grown up like that, and who have lost touch with reality because they are severed from their roots: almost, you could say, they have ceased to be part of the universe, and when a m a n ceases to be that he ceases to be a human being in any full Sense. Modern man has used his intellect, his reason, to great effect within certain narrow limits; but he has lost the instinctive life the intuitive life: he has no symbols.