Opening the Word: Our daily bread – Our Sunday Visitor

Lord, teach us to pray

This week the Gospel of Luke teaches us about prayer, echoing the Our Father as we learn it in Matthews Gospel. Here I offer a mediation on the third petition of Lukes prayer, Give us each day our daily bread, with help from the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The Catechism tells us that prayer is our relationship with God (No. 2558). Prayer is the recognition of Gods presence and our response, a living conversation that gives shape to our daily life. Thus, the Our Father is not meant simply for recitation, but for living. Our praying of the Our Father is not merely a matter of rote recitation, but to also bring it life to live it. How do we live the petition in which we seek our daily bread?

When meditating on this fourth petition of the Our Father, the Catechism begins with a broad understanding of our bread: The Father who gives us life cannot not but give us the nourishment life requires all appropriate goods and blessings, both material and spiritual (No. 2830). Here, our bread refers to all forms of sustenance necessary to a good and holy life a life lived in conversation with God.

But the Catechism then ends with a focused meditation on the Eucharistic Liturgy as our bread. In the Mass, we received Bread from the table of Gods word, both in Scripture and the Eucharist (cf. Dei Verbum, No. 21). Accordingly, the Catechism can tell us: This petition applies to another hunger from which [we] are perishing: Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, that is, by the Word he speaks and the Spirit he breathes forth. There is a famine on earth, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. For this reason the specifically Christian sense of this fourth petition concerns the Bread of Life: the Word of God accepted in faith, the Body of Christ received in the Eucharist (No. 2835).

Thus, and even more particularly, the Catechism tells us that our bread refers directly to the Bread of Life, the Body of Christ, the medicine of immortality, without which we have no life within us (No. 2837). Echoing St. Augustine, we hear the Church telling us: The Eucharist is our daily bread. The power belonging to this divine food makes it a bond of union. Its effect is then understood as unity, so that, gathered into his Body and made members of him, we may become what we receive (No. 2837).

Friends, notice two things: as our bread the Eucharist is a bond of union, and, as our bread the Eucharist helps us become what we receive. Wow! Does this not mean that if we are in union with the Father, with our Father this our meaning that we are his and he is ours (cf. No. 2829) that we can become what we receive? In other words, doesnt this mean that, when we become united to God in love through his sacrifice of love in the Eucharist, that we can become the bread of love for others?

And Christ himself gives us the example. The Catechism also describes the Our Father as the summary of the whole Gospel (No. 2761). Before becoming the bread of the written Word in Scripture, the Gospel was and is simply Christ himself, the revelation of Gods love lived out for us in a human life. Christ, thus, lived the Our Father, conversing with the Father and carrying his will of love out even unto death. Living the Our Father, Christ became our Eucharistic bread of love. Lets pray that we truly might become what we receive!

Catherine Cavadini, Ph.D., is the assistant chair of the Department of Theology and director of the M.A. in theology degree program at the University of Notre Dame.

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Opening the Word: Our daily bread - Our Sunday Visitor