Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought it or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little even.
--Father Daniel
Berrigan
I’ve never really been hungry, not in the life-or-death,
desperate sense. My hard-working parents
always put my brothers and me first, always made sure that we had everything we
needed, and many of the things we just wanted, even if it meant great sacrifice
on their part.
As an adult, I have worked hard and reaped the benefits;
nevertheless, I know that even without hard work, I’d probably be doing better
than most thanks to my comfortable perch of privilege as a white man in the
most prosperous land on earth.
So when I consider Jesus’ instruction on prayer to include, “Give us each day our daily bread (Luke
11:3),” I’d be less than honest if I didn’t admit that I’ve pretty much taken
it for granted that the food would be coming, prayer or not.
When my double-door refrigerator is nearly empty and the
cupboard is growing bare, I get up on my two healthy legs, drive my clean and
well-appointed car to the nearby supermarket, fill my eco-friendly bags with an
array of needs and wants, slide my chip-enabled card in the reader, and make my
way home to wash my vegetables clean with water that pours effortlessly right
out of the tap.
The convenience of this oft-repeated experience has lulled
me into a comfortable and complacent resting place where it becomes easy to
think God has nothing at all to do with it.
So why insist that this be a daily prayer?
All that any of us has, in fact, rests uneasily in a fragile
web of good fortune, economics, politics, and power. A look back at the hours immediately after
Hurricane Katrina (or any number of natural disasters) plainly shows what a
difference a day makes, and that each of us living in comfort is but a few
choices or a set of unforeseen circumstances away from real hunger, from
desperate need.
Lifted up as prayer, “Give
us each day our daily bread” should be more than “magic words” routinely
spoken as a safeguard from poverty. If
we rest relatively assured that the bread (and most everything else) we need will
come our way, what do we do with this prayer?
We know, of course, that for the majority of the millions of
people living around the world, the tender mercies of food, clean water, shelter,
safety, and medical care cannot be taken for granted. And when they do come, they are not manna from heaven laid fresh daily upon
the land by a benevolent God (Exodus 16: 1-36).
Indeed, God’s tender mercies are conveyed through the acts
of charity, hospitality, and humanity of those who have “more than enough.”
As I’ve reflected on this one small phrase—“Give us each day our daily bread”—I’m drawn
to other words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew:
Then
the righteous will answer him, “Lord when did we see you hungry and feed you,
or thirsty and give you something to drink?
When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and
clothe you? When did we see you sick or
in prison and go visit you?”
The
King will reply, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least
of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25: 44-45)
As I write this, I think of the children of Aleppo, the
mothers of the Sudan, the fathers and sons striving close to home and around the world…nameless faces
all merging into a sad uniformity. We grow
weary of their stories, and their familiarity has bred contempt.
Yet when they pray, “Give
us each day our daily bread,” or whatever similar supplication may arise
from their traditions, the answer to their prayers is…us.
Now, Kathy and I write these blog entries each week entirely
as reflections of our own personal experience, our faith struggles, and far
more questions than answers. I feel
confident she would join me in expressing the hope that what we share is never
interpreted as “preachy” or “pious,” but rather our vulnerability and questions,
humbly exposed.
I quoted Father Daniel Berrigan to start. He was considered a rebel, a revolutionary, a
militant subversive by “the establishment” in the 1960s. In His time, so was Jesus. And he paid for it with his life, as we know.
Berrigan’s words about the recognition of needs unmet,
and our obligation to be the agents of answered prayers, seem to reflect the same
sentiment of Jesus regarding “the least of these,” do they not? And if Jesus’ words serve only to “comfort
the afflicted,” but never to “afflict the comfortable,” then how are we to be transformed? What would be the point of all this
Christianity, anyway?
These are the kinds of questions I struggle with as I think
of “living” the Gospel, and falling so woefully short.
Set your politics aside for a moment, whatever they may be,
and consider the experience Tim Kaine recently relayed from his time as a
missionary in Honduras. During the campaign
for the vice-presidency, he was profiled in a revealing feature article in a
national newspaper.
He spoke of his lifelong Catholic faith and how it was
deepened during those years in Central America.
His first-hand experiences with deep poverty led him to change his
mealtime prayer from the traditional Catholic grace, “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which we are about to receive
from Thy bounty, through Christ, our Lord,” to a new petition:
“Lord, give bread to those who are hungry, and a hunger for justice to
those who have bread.”
Amen, and amen!
--Scott
April 2, 2017