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Our Daily Bread

Our Daily Bread

Last updated on: February 25, 2017 at 9:52 pm by Chase Padusniak

Our Daily Bread 2017-02-25T21:52:18-04:00 Chase Padusniak

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Still Life with Bread Knife (1915) by Diego Rivera. Source: Flickr, Attribution Required.

Not the Eucharist.

I recall being in third grade, given an assignment to visualize the “Our Father;” particularly, we were told to write individual lines from the prayer on construction paper, weaved ‘round with depictions of their content. “Our Father, who art in heaven” might have yielded a smiling, bearded man looking down from on high, a sun inhabiting the corner of the paper, probably smiling too.

I liked that assignment because it made a familiar prayer weird. Not coming from a religious household, but exposed to religion at school, I had learned to rattle off the prayers that began and ended every day: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Saint Michael, Archangel, defend us in battle, in earth as it is in heaven…”

These were, to my 9-year-old brain, dead words, up there with the Pledge of Allegiance. We preferred “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” You could stomp along to that.

This temptation is lifelong. Prayers of repetition hold so much power, but equally as much temptation—temptation to deaden the words, to summon them up and spew them out, to give the sayings of Jesus Christ all the power of vocabulary words for a 5th-grade spelling test.

Perhaps with the “Our Father” it is strongest. It’s a Scriptural prayer, shared across traditions, liturgical communities, and languages. It’s one of the few outward signs that unite Catholics and Protestants, Orthodox and non-denoms. More repetition, more pregnant with power, more likely to be desiccated.

In one sense, this is how “Our daily bread” becomes stale. But the words themselves also suggest a lesson here. As with anything Scriptural (really anything textual), words suggest huge numbers of associations. “Our daily bread” could easily be sustenance, health, daily contentment, even the Eucharist.

For me, recently, they’ve come to signify something simpler, yet something weirder, something that has infused some energy into my regrettably-bad prayer life: simplicity.

As has been noted over the millennia, bread and wine are basic food items; thus the Eucharist takes these forms in part because Jesus Christ is to nourish us at all times, even in the normalcy of daily life. Hence the Latin: “Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie.” “Quotidianum” gives us the fancy academic “quotidian” meaning “daily,” but more importantly “mundane” or “usual.”

We think of these words in relation to God’s sanctification of us through His feeding us with His body. Fair enough. But what if the words suggest that that sanctification is itself simplicity, innocence, even naïveté. Two passages come to mind:

People were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them, and when the disciples saw this, they rebuked them. Jesus, however, called the children to himself and said, “Let the children come to me and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Amen, I say to you, whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it. (Luke 18:15-17)

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat [or drink], or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they? Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life-span? Why are you anxious about clothes? Learn from the way the wild flowers grow. They do not work or spin. But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was clothed like one of them. If God so clothes the grass of the field, which grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith? So do not worry and say, “What are we to eat?” or “What are we to drink?” or “What are we to wear?” All these things the pagans seek. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom [of God] and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides. Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Sufficient for a day is its own evil. (Matthew 6:25-34)

The former appears right between the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (or Tax Collector) and Jesus’ encounter with the rich official, who asks what he must do to get into heaven (give away his possessions and follow Christ). The latter comes at the end of a chapter filled with teachings on almsgiving, fasting, and prayer, not to mention the relaying of the “Our Father” itself.

Our daily bread suggests not just what God grants us in material goods, but the way we are to relate to the world, that we might treat all people honestly, with simplicity and good cheer. To eat one’s daily bread is to depend on God and therefore to move in Him, to trust in Him, not to worry and fret, to impose one’s own shallow will on the world, but to accept that all will be as it will in the Lord, that, as Julian of Norwich wrote “all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” “Our daily bread” is a relationship to God and our fellow man.

How impossible! And yet how necessary. How easy it is to speak and not listen, to complain, rather than look within. I stand guilty of this day in and day out, of reciting my prayers (when I remember to or feel moved to!) without passion or concentration, with only the heart of a nine-year-old student. I receive one sort of daily bread, and yet spurn its content in daily life. What arrogance!

And yet, the Lord has granted me some small illumination in the light of my sins, His doing and not mine, an inkling that the “Our Father” might be made weird again. After all, “weird” comes to us from the Old English “wyrd,” meaning “fate” or “destiny.” God is weird; God makes the quotidian weird again.

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