26: Our Daily Bread

I had already gotten used to saying prayers to the rhythm of my walking and breathing. Most of the time I was saying the Jesus Prayer:

"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."

You may think that a pilgrimage is a good time to say long prayers, and to bring before God all those things and people and issues that you keep thinking you should spend more time praying for. I did do some of that, but surprisingly little. For the most part I would just repeat the short prayers and make them my meditation.

I had also been working through the Lord's Prayer, in bite-sized pieces. Today I was saying, "Give us this day our daily bread." Over and over. I was breathing to the rhythm of my walking and walking to the rhythm of my praying.

"Give us this day our daily bread."
"Give us this day our daily bread."
[inhale, left - right - left - exhale, right - left - right]

I'm a novice at these methods of meditating, so I won't talk about it very much. I can tell my own story, but there are plenty of experts who can tell you much more.

[inhale] "Give us this day" [left foot - right - left]
[exhale] "our daily bread" [right foot - left - right]

It was daybreak of day 5, and I was already feeling the beginnings of what a pilgrimage can do for the soul -- something similar to opening windows and letting fresh air in, and also something similar to defragmenting a computer drive.

[inhale] "Give us this day" [left foot - right - left]
[exhale] "our daily bread" [right foot - left - right]

I had never suffered hunger. My grandparents on both sides had been refugees, and they knew hunger. My mother tells me that by the time she was born things were looking much better for the Mennonite settlers in western Paraguay, but that many of her parents' generation had already died of malnutrition-related causes by then.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

But to me personally the line about bread had never had that depth and urgency. I'd try to reflect on the millions of starving poor in the world, try to make myself feel more grateful and fortunate, but usually ended up feeling guilty instead.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

My father had known hunger, although he never told us so. What he did tell us was that when he was a child, living as a refugee with two brothers and a widowed mother in some post-WWII farming village in central Germany, they had once gotten a dead rabbit somehow. They had kept it in the space between the window panes until Christmas.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

It was a sort of refrigerator. And back then they would do anything for a bit of pocket money. They gathered wool off barbed-wire fences and brought it to the factory for a bit of spare change.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

Many parts of God's creation don't make much sense. Why are we so dependent on food? It's easy when you grow up like me, with never a hungry day in an entire lifetime. But such a large percentage of humans are not so fortunate. Meanwhile there are millions of people who throw away food regularly. I can never get used to that sight, and I can never help feeling offended by it. I think I once heard something like a sermon about how this part of the Lord's Prayer is meant to be a call to asceticism -- we ask for bread because that's all we need to live, and so the prayer should be accompanied by the throwing out of the non-essentials in our lives.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

When I worked with homeless people in Vancouver's red light district I wasn't even dealing with abject, Africa-style poverty, but I was still made aware of how limited these people were by their dependence on food. They had few options in life, because they had to be back in the soup kitchen by the next mealtime. They could not afford to miss the meals, because they were already on the brink of malnourishment and would be burning plenty of calories during their night on a park bench. They could not get very far in that time, because they had no money for transportation. Their job options were severely limited -- how impressive could their CV/resume be? Who would hire someone without a home address? Someone who shows up to the job interview wearing rags?

"Give us this day our daily bread."

These people were really dependent from day to day. There was nothing saved up for a rainy day somewhere, no possibility to have today's ration keep you going for a few extra days.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

There are some things that God does that I, frankly, have problems with. He creates us so fragile that we need to depend on Him every day. And it sounds so inspiring during our testimony times to talk about how God does provide for every day, but many who truly do depend on Him on a day to day basis still die of starvation. I guess God wants us to solve this problem ourselves, but He seems not to be above letting poor children in Africa suffer and die for their leaders' corruption and our Western World's incompetence at shipping our dinner leftovers across the ocean, so to speak, or coming up with a more viable solution.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

It also sounds inspiring to talk about how God is on the side of the poor and the oppressed, and how He will eventually vindicate them. But even this does not necessarily make sense of the situation.

"Give us this day our daily bread."

But my real issue in all this is not bread. This is all an extension of the general problem of suffering. I am not personally affected to any great degree -- except for a vague feeling that I should be doing more to be personally affected. But what I am personally affected by is another need we have that also has us in the vice grip of day-to-day dependence.