Fr. Raymond Dlugos, O.S.A., and Sodexo staff gave students some food for thought at this year’s Mass of the Holy Spirit.
The mass is held at the start of each school year to help spiritually guide students through their future studies.
Fr. Ray chose John 6:1-14 for his scripture reading – the story where Jesus fed 5,000 of his followers only using five loaves and two fish. This miracle, Fr. Ray explained during his homily, helped turn the crowd of people into a community.
“In a community,” he continued, “no matter how little each person has to offer, they offer whatever it is, and there’s always an abundance…Continue to work towards turning a crowd into a community.”
Although the Merrimack community is similar in size to Jesus’ followers that day, Fr. Ray said he believed we are hungrier.
“It leads me to ask the question that Jesus asked his disciples – ‘How are we going to feed this crowd?’,” he asked. “Well, someone is here to answer.”
With that, Fr. Ray invited Sheila Hurley, the director of catering at Sodexo, to come forward to discuss how she and her staff feed hundreds of students, faculty and staff daily.
“We have an amazing dining team consisting of over 150 employees,” she said. “The dining team is here to make sure students have the best experience here on campus.”
According to Hurley, staff at Sparky’s served 683,600 portions of rice, 830,880 portions of chicken. Over at Sub Connection, staff made 13,623 baja chicken sandwiches and 28,665 sub rolls, and at Natural’s, staff made 18,192 smoothies.
“What percentage (of those smoothies) were consumed by Fr. Dan (Madden)?,” joked Fr. Ray.
