Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread
As a religious kid growing up in a Baptist household during the late fifties and into the sixties, I was familiar with a little publication called Our Daily Bread. It was a calendar-style booklet, a “daily devotional,” that had one Bible reading passage for each day and a reflection and prayer related to the Scripture lesson. As I recall, we got a new one every month by mail and they were also readily available at our church.
It (along with others, like The Upper Room and The Secret Place, which we also had in our house) is now accessible online, as well, and is still a source of inspiration for a great many people. A friend of mine told me not long ago that there are two emails — Notes From the GratiDude and Our Daily Bread — he never deletes until he has read them. The news puffed me up a little bit, of course, considering that beloved devotional has been around since 1938.
Not for the first time, it occurred to me that the biweekly posts I send out are quite similar in form, if not content, to these one page meditations. While the GratiDude posts are longer (six hundred words instead of about two hundred), it’s as if some internal gravity pulls me toward the devotional format. I never intended that, but the comparison is unavoidable after five hundred of these. The needle just seemed to settle in that direction. My soul was dyed at an early age.
I commonly offer some reflection about whatever is most on my mind in the moment and I often have a pithy and relevant quote by someone that I think will drive home the point, to stick the landing, as it were. They are self-contained, stand alone, three-minute reads and not specifically Christian, though I have referred to Biblical themes from time to time.
When I started, the only subject was gratitude and I examined it from every angle I could. I very often worked hard, often a little too hard, to point out some lesson I thought readers needed to get. Just as to a hammer every problem is a nail, to me a gratitude practice was the solution for everything (I’m not sure, even now, that it isn’t, by the way).
A couple of years ago, another friend challenged me to write a few pieces without using the word gratitude at all, so readers could draw their own conclusions. It was a challenge I took on, even while knowing it was still the lens through which I was working on viewing my life. He assumed that would be obvious, without my directly saying so.
But, whatever the guiding principle actually is, there’s a “so what?” still to be answered. So what if my blog posts are similar in form to devotionals like Our Daily Bread? Answering that question has been the challenge of every single G-Dude post. I see something that interests me and then “so what?”
My writerly conceit must surely be that I am now doing this on your behalf, too. I am illustrating one way, perhaps, of meditating on the every day, dirt simple glories of this blue planet, in an ecumenical manner, down to deep roots.
I make an offering twice per week: “Here’s how I do it, what about you?”
The only difference between you and me is that I have a strange and unexplainable compulsion to write stuff down and arrange words in some best grammatical way.
Joseph Campbell once said that his way of meditating was underlining sentences.
What is yours?
