December 10, 2013 – Catechism 2828 -2837

As in the other petitions (I am seeing a pattern here) this can be seen as a plea and command.  We ask God for nourishment, material and spiritual.  We cannot get by or live at all without the gifts God gives us.  This is true for everyone, whether you believe in God or not.  But it also means that we are to be nourishment for the world.  We are to take God out to the world and feed them.  The world needs our food now more than ever.  The world is starving for God.  It doesn’t know it or will even deny it and continues to try and nourish itself on everything it can find that isn’t God.  The world is in complete defiance that it needs God and is constantly attempting to find God’s replacement because the world knows it needs something.  I was trying to think of an analogy that might fit.  We all need food.  So to nourish ourselves, we do not need steak and fine wine with pure mountain fresh water and the freshest fruits, but that would be the most enjoyable way to live.  That would be living you life in complete surrender to God and relying on his nourishment.  But you can get by on stale bread and dirty water.  That might be where many are.  You might get by and survive for a time, but how healthy are you and how long before you are not surviving but perishing because of illness.  Then there are those that are investing in the diet of goats, eating newspaper, tin cans, scrap, tires, etc.  This is not nourishment but is the road to death.  Filling, yes, but not satisfying (hence the need for more and more, the need to jump from one fad to another) and most definitely not nourishing.  

“Pray as if everything depended on God and work as if everything depended on you.”  Attributed to St. Ignatius Loyola, cf. Joseph de Guibert, SJ, The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice, (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1964), 148, n. 55.

“The Father in heaven urges us, as children of heaven, to ask for the bread of heaven. [Christ] himself is the bread who, sown in the Virgin, raised up in the flesh, kneaded in the Passion, baked in the oven of the tomb, reserved in churches, brought to altars, furnishes the faithful each day with food from heaven.”  St. Peter Chrysologus, Sermo 67: PL 52, 392; cf. Jn 6:51.