My father Sam said, “We’ll get a picnic on the way.” I was around seven. My half-brother Joel about five years older.
Joel and I jammed our cane poles and our father’s rod and reel into our aging Dodge Rambler’s trunk and slid into our seats. Sam turned the key in the ignition and pointed the car toward Rocky Comfort Creek.
A few miles down the road, my dad pulled into a shabby country store with rusty signs for RC Cola and two ancient, weathered gas pumps out front. We all hopped out to buy our picnic: a pack of Saltine crackers and a tin of sardines in ketchup sauce.
We paid for our food and followed a two-lane county road through woods and fields until we came to a small bridge spanning the creek. Baiting our hooks with red wigglers we stood fishing for bream from a mud bank a few paces down from the roadside.
As the morning stretched toward noon, my father opened up the paper bag that passed as our picnic basket, rolled back the lid of the sardine can, and passed out the crackers. Each of us placed a couple of sardines between two crackers and munched as we fished.
Maybe this doesn’t sound like the Bread of Life to you. To tell the truth, it would taste like cat food on a cracker to me these days. And yet, as I look back, I’m beginning to believe that I was offered the Bread of Life that day.
In a few years our prospects improved. My mom bought my dad a tiny jon boat. We fished on the water for bass using open face reels and artificial lures. Our picnics featured country ham and biscuits.
Jesus never laid eyes on a biscuit. And no observant Jew’s menu would include country ham. But as the cicadas sang, the bullfrogs moaned, and the dragon flies hovered unsteadily above our fishing rods, ham and biscuits might just have been the Bread of Life. At least, that’s how it seems to me in retrospect.
Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.” (John 6:35) He had just miraculously fed a large crowd with just a few loaves and a couple of fish. People scrambled after him to make him king and, once he had refused that offer, to secure a magical lifetime supply of groceries. In other words, they had missed the point of the multiplication of the loaves.
By feeding the crowd, Jesus is showing us who God is. God is the source from which we draw our very existence. Julian of Norwich’s famous vision of the hazelnut may help us understand Jesus’s point a bit more clearly.
In that vision, Julian held a hazelnut in her palm. A voice told her that the hazelnut represented the entire creation. Everything that exists. She was struck by how small and fragile the thing was. She wondered how such a frail, vulnerable thing could continue to exist. Why had it not simply passed into nothing?
The voice said, “Because God loves it. And that’s how everything comes into being. God’s love makes it happen.”
The divine love is a power that we are invited to open ourselves to. To partake of. To be sustained by, to be nourished by, and to be transformed by.
In Jesus we see that the life-giving, life-transforming love of God resides in the depths of even the most mundane of our very earthly moments. God invites us to participate in the divine life found in crackers and biscuits, in sunsets and starry nights, in smiling dogs and laughing babies, in lonely widows and homeless veterans.
When we partake of that love, it gradually forms us into the image of Christ. The bread of life. Eternal life.
Along with Lutherans, Methodists, Roman Catholics, and others, Episcopalians place the Bread of Life at the center of our worship. In the Sacrament of the Eucharist (or Holy Communion or the Lord’s Supper), we participate in the divine life through the simple act of saying prayers and receiving a morsel of bread.
There are various ways to understand the Sacrament. I don’t mean to dismiss anyone else’s grasp of what amounts to a mystery. But here’s what I understand to be happening at our altars.
As I stretch out my hands to receive that bread, I glimpse things as they really are. If even for the briefest of moments. God’s sustaining, nurturing, transforming love is pouring itself out to me in even the most routine and mundane moments of my life. Urging me to open myself to it. And to let that love pass through me to the world.
The Bread of Life is not just a blessed communion wafer handed out in a church building. It is cornbread, Wonder Bread, and ham and biscuits at our dinner tables. It’s a morning walk in the woods. A nap with your dog. It’s your ordinary life. If you know how to look.
Life—life as it has always been meant to be—begins with love. The Sacrament helps us to see what is already being given to us.
“Love makes it happen” touched me deeply. Took me back to fishing with my dad and brothers in the 1950s and 60s. Also touched me spiritually about how God is in the ordinary and simple events in our lives. Thank you!
Ernie
Thanks for reading, Ernie! Catch one for me this weekend!
Reblogged this on Pastor Michael Moore's Blog and commented:
A wonderful reflection, Jake!
Your posts are always inspirational to me! Love your way with words! ❤️🙏✝️
Thanks, Connie! Have a great weekend
Dear Bishop Jake. Thanks for this reflection of Christ as the centre of God’s loving provision for us in the Eucharist. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve taken the liberty of re-blogging this lovely article on my own blog at ‘kiwianglo’.
Thanks for the reblog! I’m honored
Thank you for sharing your stories of time with your Dad and brother. This was a powerful reminder to see and cherish the divine in the small moments of our lives.
Mindfulness is a daily challenge for me. I’ve got a long way to go.
My husband loves to tell the story about how Chuck Wood, chaplain at LSU in the late 70’s, early 80’s, led a retreat Eucharist in canoes with a hot dog bun and beer. To him, this meant the Bread of Life can be found in the ordinary food of every day life.
That was one terrific chaplain!
Your reflection brought back memories of my parents – long dead – with whom I spent summers in our house in the Ocala National Forest (Florida). I fished for bream – trying to explain that fish to someone the other day – they had never heard of it – and my mother and I sat out on the dock – in the cool of the evening – and she would point out the different stars – their shapes and names. They were giving me the bread of life – I don’t think I would have made that exact connection until your reflection. For some of us, I think, the real roots of what our parents gave us don’t become clear until we are not with them anymore. The other ‘bread’ my mother gave me was the Episcopal Church. On a Sunday morning, in an un-airconditioned church, while the preacher went on, I would lean up against her – and knew what all was well.
Gigi Conner
What tender memories! And all manner of things will be well
What a beautiful post! Thank you so much for this great reminder and thank you for sharing it with us!
Thank you, Tammy! It’s good to hear from you!