Breaking Bread

A friend recently lost her father, and my wife asked me what we could do for them.  She felt an urge to express our love for our friend and her family.  I didn't think deeply about it, nor did I arrive at an idea, until I had baked two large loaves of sourdough bread.  One was a round loaf baked in a cast iron saucepan: tall and superbly round, with a puffy top like a muffin.  We gave them this loaf, and it felt right to give it.  It seems like bread is good for healing.

This sentiment has cemented and deepened while I've thought about bread, this symbol of sustenance.  Bread is so primary in our human experience.  We measure economic prosperity by its price, and in economic crisis the availability and affordability of bread is as important as any other indicator.  In times of war or hardship, when there is no other food available, there is often at least bread.  Bread and water: this is for us elemental, essential; this phrase, 'bread and water,' sums up the very idea of survival, of sustenance.  Bread is distinctly symbolic and powerful archetypal, and as this symbol and archetype is has accompanied man throughout history.  Empires rise and fall on the availability of grain, one of bread's three essential ingredients.  The others: water and yeast.  Water is even more essential than bread.  We are ourselves 80% water, and the world is 3/4 covered in it.  When Jesus was pierced, the water flowed.  And he promised us living waters would flow in us.

As I've thought about bread, I've though specifically of Jesus breaking bread with his twelve disciples, saying This is my body which is broken for you.  He tells us to break the bread together and remember his body breaking, the sacrifice of his life for everyone.  His message is startlingly beautiful, confounding, and revolutionary, because it is the symbol of his revolutionary love, his earth-shattering act of sacrifice.

We can't of course ignore the wine in this image of the passover feast.  Jesus says it is his blood, shed for us.  And so I see in my mind a still-life image of the bread and wine.  The loaf is rustic, round, evidently toothsome and hearty - and distinctly leavened, even though at Passover it shouldn't be.  The wine is purple-black in a large stemware glass.  Since the wine is his blood, it is everything.  It's the blood of Jesus that cleanses, that somehow washes us white as snow.  It's the blood that makes us new.  And yet there is still the body, the reservoir of that life-giving blood, the body that was broken.  The bread.  It's the bread that I keep coming back to.

Jesus says, When you pray, don't pray like the religious folks who want to impress you with their pompous words, but pray like this: Our Father in Heaven, holy is your name.  Your Kingdom come, your will be done on Earth just like it is in Heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread.

Give us this day our daily bread.  I can hear this prayer in my head like a rushed murmur, spoken each time I've spoken it as an incantation, akin in rhythm in speed to the Pledge of Allegiance.  The words are skated over in my haste, and I don't know what they mean.  My rhythm is off, probably quite distinct from the rhythm of speech Jesus employed when he first recited that prayer.  So I wonder, what does this mean, Give us this day our daily bread?  Does it mean this day is our daily bread?  Or am I asking for bread for this day, asking for sustenance, both physical and spiritual?

I'm asking for all of it; I want it all, all of His sustenance, all of His grace and love, peace and joy, all of His Spirit, all of His abundance.  I want His bread, His daily bread.  I need it, as much as I need water and breath and as much as I need the blood of Jesus.  And His bread is healing, just as I suspected it might be.  Now that lofty loaf of bread sitting on my counter is something more than it was.