[Oe List ...] A Thanksgiving meditation

[Herman Greene]

In our church we have introduced Creation Season, a Season that begins with
the Feast Day of St. Francis in October and extends to Advent. I thought
some of you might enjoy this meditation I wrote on Thanksgiving.

GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD



This is the last Sunday of Creation Season for 2004. Our theme for Creation
Season this year has been food and faith. Let us reflect for a moment on
those words from the prayer that Jesus taught us, “Give us this day our
daily bread.”



“Give us this day our daily bread,” how simple and, yet, how profound. Jesus
also teaches us “25 . . . do not worry about your life, what you will eat or
what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life
more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the
air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly
Father feeds them. (Matthew 25-26).



God feeds us. Each day we awaken to the sun, which causes the plants to grow
through the miracle of photosynthesis, a gift of a billion years ago. The
soil rich with nutrients from millennia of preparation nourishes the crops.
Rain falls through no effort of our own to water the crops. A rich ecosystem
of earthworms that turn the soil, insects, and winds that pollinate the
crops, feeds us.



Our daily bread is such a gift. Lord, we thank you for the gift of our daily
bread.



It is this same bread, which reminds us of Jesus, the bread of life. This is
my body which is broken for you. Eat this in remembrance of me.” You have
taken the ordinary Lord and enriched it, enchanted it, filled it with
spirit. It is in the ordinariness of life where we find you. It is in this
material, embodied world where we find you incarnate. When we partake of
bread, we partake of the whole world with all the systems of life that
sustains us and all other creatures and all those who labor to bring us our
daily bread.



Jesus has made the meal a special time of fellowship. His last supper is
memorable, but there were all those times of table talk when he sat down
with publicans, sinners, and thieves, with children, with women, with his
close friends and disciples. As the Gospel parable reminds us Jesus has
invited us to a banquet, and as Psalm 23 says, “Thou preparest a table
before me.”



And as Peter Farb and George Armelagos have written: “In all societies, both
simple and complex, eating is the primary way of initiating and maintaining
human relationships.”



Lord, as we enter this season of Thanksgiving, we simply pray, “Give us this
day our daily bread.”