Bread of life, bread of death

Frank Regan reflects on how to live simply through the breaking and sharing of bread in a broken world

Here in Newton Abbot every Tuesday there is a farmers’ market. Local producers bring their products to sell to the public.

One of the most frequented stalls is called Bread of Devon. There you can choose among several varieties of bread freshly baked from not far away.

Bread is the stuff of life they tell us. We put it on our table everyday. Without it life would seem odd, somehow off-centre, something missing.

Bread is part of our everyday lives, of the very fibre of our existence. It is an essential part of the simple life without which we could not simply live.

Transcending reality

Beneath its material reality, bread also has a symbolic reality. It has a transcendent dimension which extends to every human being.

Bread is life, work, struggle, creation, culture, celebration, community etc. Its symbolic extent and embrace are universal. Bread equals humanity and humanity’s experience of life, memory, the present and hope.

Bread is satisfaction, fullness, contentment. Bread shared is invitation to unity, solidarity, fellowship and conviviality. Wine shared is celebration, community and hilarity.

Nicolas Berdyaev wrote: “Bread for me is a material problem. Bread for the other is for me a spiritual problem.” In our Christian tradition bread is sacramental and symbolic of our sharing in the life of God and of our common humanity. No bread is just the opposite.

As we enter upon the Lenten season we are aware that our world is embarking upon a new stage of its history. At the core of our awareness is the way we live.

We know now that our lifestyle is endangering the planet and its life systems. We are in a zero-sum world economy: the more we consume the less others have and the more endangered is our planet.

Common humanity

Lent can no longer be only a time of fast and abstinence in penance for our sins or to avoid the pain of Purgatory. Now it is a season of preparation for an extended Lent, a time to reflect seriously on making fasting and abstinence a way of life, not just a pious practice.

Lent does not have to do so much with the state of our souls, rather with the state of our common humanity destined by God for transformation and transfiguration.

Today we live at a crossroads congested with issues which demand engagement on the part of committed Christians and other seekers.

The most pressing are the future use of nuclear weapons, environmental destruction and the growing numbers of poor afflicted with hunger and diseases related to hunger.

Which direction will we take? We live in an age of globalisation with its market-driven economics, a system that embodies a culture which is materialist and consumerist.

We may not agree with the system but we do embody its culture.

Gospel challenge

Over the years we have heard the cry of the poor and have recognised there the voice of God’s Spirit guiding us in the way of Peace, Holiness and Justice.

We have marched and campaigned, we have signed petitions, we have prayed, we have hoped against hope.

More recently we have heard voices raised criticising our western consumerist lifestyle. More and more of us are looking seriously at the way we live and our patterns of consumption.

We recognise the challenge of revising radically the way we live and the need for sweeping structural change. To live simply is a plea which comes from those who want to simply live.

To live simply is a Gospel challenge to follow Christ who had nowhere to lay his head, who walked alongside the poor and insignificant, who shared his bread and broke his body so we could have life in abundance.

To challenge ourselves and our culture of consumerism, we need to create a new culture, a new way of doing things – a Culture and Spirituality of Jubilee.

Such a way of feeling, doing, praying and celebrating requires resistance and interior struggle. It requires a more critical attitude toward the current economic model and the politics which propels and undergirds it.

Jubilee denounces the zero-sum relationship whereby the rich (you and I) get richer at the cost of the poor getting poorer.

It announces the end of an age characterised by self-centredness and structural sin and the beginning of an age which will see the quiet convocation of a People of God called to be faithful, called to the Cross as instrument of liberation, transformation and transfiguration, called to Resurrection hope for a society founded on values like justice and solidarity, called to share bread and wine as a sign that what is shared at table (fullness, conviviality, inclusiveness, wholeness) will someday be shared in by all of humanity.

We need a Church of flesh and blood, not of bricks and mortar, an historical movement of persons learning to be artisans of a new humanity, immersed in the sin and destruction around us, living simply in the breaking and sharing of bread in a broken world, feeling the pangs of childbirth as a new humanity struggles to be born and celebrating the Christ of the new Creation who came to make all things new.

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