Tomorrow's Bread
/It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time:
repetitive, loveless, cheap sex;
a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage;
frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness;
trinket gods;
magic-show religion;
paranoid loneliness;
cutthroat competition;
all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants;
a brutal temper;
an impotence to love or be loved;
divided homes and divided lives;
small-minded and lopsided pursuits;
the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival;
uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions;
ugly parodies of community.
I could go on.
THOSE AREN’T MY WORDS. Are they my thoughts, sentiments, tendencies? Is it self-indicting to say, “Yes, maybe so.”
Do the words seem disturbingly descriptive of our divided world?
I’m sure of this: life is not either-or, black-or-white. Despite cultural pressure to reduce everything to absolutes we all know that’s ridiculous. Life happens in degrees, in shades, and at the risk of losing what small audience I might have: it’s relative too. It’s nuanced.
That doesn’t take away from the power of the picture, the validity of the argument, the truth of the message: as we move toward selfishness—trying to get our own way all the time—a kind of life develops that is fertile ground for all that crap the passage describes.
I’m not one for fatalistic, bleak, this-is-the-end worldviews. But, for some reason this lyric from the song “Lola” by The Kinks comes to mind (which I’m taking out of context to serve my own purposes [like we do sometimes]):
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, except for Lola
La-la-la-la Lola
I don’t claim to know why Lola’s world was more clear, more categorized. It seems his/her world was most mixed and muddled. It’s nuanced.
Let’s go back to the very first sentence of the passage and the phrase: “…life develops out of trying…”
The good thing about realizing that life is a process, that it develops, is that it is NOT a matter of throwing switches. Each of us can make choices, we get to become more selfless, moment by moment, step by step, shade by shade. And if we mess up, there is grace. We get to try again. We can count on having tomorrow’s bread. We have a blueprint and a model. There are footprints along a path we can follow. It a path that leads to self-giving, serving, and loving others as we ought to love ourselves.
Some will say I’m stretching the facts, twisting the “truth”, bending ethics and playing with fire. I’m aware of Carl Sagan’s epigram: “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”
We are all human after all, created by the Creator in that image. From first breath to last we live by degrees and shades, sometimes understanding, many times not.
To borrow more words, these are from Simon & Garfunkel:
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles
Such are promises
All lies and jest
Still, a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest
Guilty?
Those words? The ones from the passage I used to begin this essay? Those are from the Bible, from a letter of Paul the apostle, Galations 5:19-21 (The Message).
I’m aware that by sourcing The Message there will be those who dismiss it as invalid and maybe even heretical. I understand the love and allegiance of many old saints to the King James Version of scripture. I grew up hearing and reading from KJV. But, during my first coming-of-age, a version came along called The Living Bible. I became a fan. And when hardcore KJV folks dismissed it as a “paraphrase,” as if that were something the devil or the methodists might create, I dug in even more.
My teenage rebellion pretty much consisted of choosing The Living Bible over The King James, having long hair, playing drums in a rock and roll band, chewing gum in class, flashig a peace sign in the youth camp picture… I’ll wrap up this confessional with: and etc.
I’ll admit it now, that at times, I missed the feeling of the familiar words of the KJV when hearing passages like the 23rd Psalm. But this paraphrase called The Living Bible felt, well, alive somehow. In more recent years, The Message version has been the one I read most. I can picture Jesus and those with him talking in words that seem natural and genuine and unpretentious. I realize, it’s all nuanced.
I was reading an article this week and found this worth pondering:
“It is an open question how much Greek of any kind Jesus’s own circle understood or used. Nearly all of the words attributed to them are thus in a language they may never have voluntarily uttered, belonging to a cosmopolitan civilization they may well have despised.”
The author of the article, Casey Cep was quoting Sarah Ruden who has written a carefully translated take on the four Gospels simply titled “The Gospels: A New Translation.”
Cep observes, “Sacred literature is rightfully loved and cherished, but too often that love can creep toward idolatry, shaping the text into something fixed and static, when ideally it is shaping us every time we encounter it.”*
To this day, if asked to quote The Lord’s Prayer, I would do it in the King James Version, just as I learned it so many years ago. It is beautiful. But what if, just maybe, Jesus used a different word or phrase? What if, for example, he said:
Give us day by day tomorrow’s loaf of bread…
Can you feel how powerful that is?! I know it doesn’t seem that different from “Give us this day our daily bread…” But it is!
From her studies of Greek, Aramic and Hebrew and context, that is how Sarah Ruden believes Jesus might have said it. I hope she is right.
Consider it: while it is amazing to be able to ask for our daily bread, how life-changing is it to be able to ask for tomorrow’s loaf of bread today? Imagine being a hungry beggar or child, it’s night and time for bed and you go there with the knowledge that tomorrow’s loaf of bread will be on the table.
It’s nuanced. It’s a glimpse at the possibilities of how we might find fresh perspective and inspiration along the way as our lives develop. Open mind, open hearts, open eyes, open ears. Take a risk. Tomorrow’s bread will be on the table.
*Cep, Casey (April 28, 2021). What We Can and Can’t Learn from a New Translation of the Gospels: Sarah Ruden aims to return familiar texts to the fresh clay from which they were made. The New Yorker. www.newyorker.com