Bread of heaven

This meditation started with a little book I read years ago that focuses on bread as part of our spiritual lives. But as I wrote my sermon for last week I found myself pondering invisible need. And a conversation reminded me that our response to one another can often, without our intending it, be wounding. I read through this meditation one last time before posting it and realized it was achingly intimate. Though I had just stood in front of the congregation and told them intimacy with one another is where our calling lay I found, suddenly, the intimacy here amidst a discussion of spiritual hunger overwhelming. So I am posting it without editing, without removing the intimate messy words that make me shy. I realized that as honest as I have tried to make this place the words have been a protective film. This time they are stripped away. Perhaps it is remembered hunger, or the inclusion of my interaction with another. Perhaps it is the fact that I speak of communion, that rite I cannot seem to live without. Whatever the reason, I offer the messy intimacy of my life.

Bread, there is perhaps no more staple food in our diet, or more symbolic. Bread triggers, in some instinctual part of our brain, thoughts of safety and home. Want to sell a house? Have bread baking in the oven when the buyers come to look. Want to welcome new neighbors? Bring a loaf of bread to their door. We eat it, almost without thinking, as part of all three daily meals. It is the foundation around which our kitchens revolve. From toast with our coffee, to stuffing for our fanciest meals. And if you are Christian bread is, quite often, small, flat, and tasteless; and the body of Christ.

Just as it falls, almost unnoticed at the center of our physical lives so too do tiny bits of bread fall at the center of our spiritual lives. Such tiny things, seemingly utterly insignificant. And yet without them one can starve. I have felt the spiritual hunger, I have seen it in the faces of others. It is real, and sharp, and as painful as a stomach knotted and empty.

Yet for a friend bread has ceased to be home and comfort. It has become an enemy, bringer of pain and torment. Even the host, once food for the soul has become enemy to her body. Hunger, the world shifts as those around are fed and nurtured from a thing one must fear. As the act that unites us divides, almost invisibly. The alternative is dark, textured and soft, and fragile as gossamer. Fragile as the normalcy of our lives. Fragile as the wholeness of our souls.

How easily do the words, the actions of others deprive us of spiritual meat and drink. How readily do we wound one another; and how easily can we heal one another. Harm and help, we hold one in each hand. We hand them out with the same ease. The help may become hurt, or the hurt help if we do not watch and listen to the other. If we focus only on ourselves and our own needs. After weeks of forced fast I set safe bread gently in her hands murmuring holy words. "The body of Christ, the bread of heaven." But how invisible was the abstention, how transparent the change. Who noticed? Anyone? What do I not see, what need passes before my eyes like a ghost. How often do I miss the subtle cry of a wounded soul.

Bread has, since the time of Abraham been hospitality and welcome. Abraham fed it to God himself in the form of a dusty stranger. The Hebrews ate heavenly bread in the wilderness. Christ shared bread with hungry crowds on wild plains, and with close friends in small dark rooms. We are part of those great stories, when we offer bread and life to one another. Around the altar, around our dinner tables.

We must feed one another, love one another. We must be the bread of life for one another's souls. But to do that, we must be aware of one another. We must truly see. We feed the hungry with physical bread, we take great warm loaves of bread from our ovens and set it before our families, our friends, and strangers in need. But bread feeds only our bodies. And we are not only bodies. We need spiritual bread, rich and nutty. We must be fed or we grow weak and trembling, our souls sink into darkness.

When our bodies starve they make their pain and need clear in sunken cheeks and dull hungry eyes. Spiritual hunger is harder to see, and the bread that will feed it less easy to grasp. We must be wide awake, our eyes open, our ears listening for the cries of a hungry soul. And we must choose carefully between what will wound and what will feed. What will poison and what will nourish. A word, a gesture can lift up our starving neighbors or drive them deeper into the dust, clogging their throats with arid sand.

When our neighbor has grown soul-starved we must bring spiritual bread to her. We must feed his soul as we would feed his body. We must remind her of the taste of God. And in the doing our own hunger will be assuaged, our own emptiness will be filled, our spirit fed with the Bread of Life.