Daily Bread

Cathedral at Reims

...Give us this day our daily bread…

—The Lord’s Prayer

Prosphora, or bread, is generally made everywhere by beings who are aware of its sacred significance. Only your contemporary favorites prepare it without any consciousness of what they do, merely as a practice automatically transmitted to them by inheritance.

—Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, from Beelzebub in America

…I’m eating a piece of bread as I write this.

Take a piece of bread in your hand today and consider, with all of your parts, how absolutely precious it is.

Our daily bread means the sacred energy which God sends into us every moment of our lives through the inward flow of the divine presence; but it also means, literally, the actual bread, made from wheat, which we eat.

There’s a relationship—a correspondence— between the harmonic vibration of ordinary bread and the bread of Divine Love. This is the reason that bread forms part of the sacrament in Christianity. Ordinary bread is, as it were, a harmonic undertone of the divine; when we eat it we participate in a fractional portion of a much larger and more intimate cosmological phenomenon which involves the exchange of both finer and coarser substances which depend on one another.

When one holds a piece of bread, there is a moment where we’re invited to participate with real feeling— sacred feeling—in an appreciation of this extraordinary gift we’re given: a simple piece of bread.

If one participates sincerely and with all one’s parts at the beginning of the day in such a perception, along with its concurrent Being-gratitude, one has fulfilled a sacred responsibility towards God; 

and one gives thanks for all of our life and life itself, as represented by the bread.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.