tragically, the church has too often turned prayer against hunger, imagining prayer as the antidote to hunger, as medicine to a bad condition. This is not so. Hunger needs prayer, but prayer needs hunger. Hunger sets the stage for prayer, and prayer sets the table for hunger. God works through prayer, but God works on the site of hunger. God glories in our hungers and speaks to us in the precisely ordained reality of it. Indeed nothing that God will now say to Peter makes sense unless we remember that the divine word came to a hungry creature. Prayer and hunger are the inner realities of a
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