Do not worry for your life, about
what you are to eat, or for your body, about what you are to wear.
Is your life not more than food and your body
more than clothing?
Look to the birds of the sky,
who neither sow nor reap nor gather things in storehouses, and your heavenly
Father feeds them. Do you not matter
more than them?
Can any of you add an hour to
your life by worrying?
And why do you worry about
clothing?
Consider the flowers of the field, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin.
I say to you that not even Solomon in all his
splendor was dressed like one of them.
If God clothes the grass of
the field which is here one day and the next is cast into the oven, will he not
do even better for you, you people of little faith?
Do not worry, saying, “what
are we to eat?” or “what are we to drink?’ or “what are we to wear?”
For the Gentiles chase after
all these things, but your heavenly Father knows what you need from all these
things.
Seek first the kingdom of God
and His justice, and all these things will be added to you.
Do not worry about
tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.
Sufficient for one day is its own trouble.
“Give
us this day our daily bread.” That’s
what we pray; but often it’s not what we want.
More honest might be: “give us this day a month’s worth of bread, and while
you’re at it, an independently verified plan for where the next month’s is
coming from would be nice too.”
But
that’s generally not what we get given.
God gives us our daily bread. Our
eyes often don’t focus on that though, we don’t taste it fully because we get
distracted, our concentration is sucked up by the fantasy world we create in
our worrying minds which consists of our fears for the future.
Jesus
was not naïvely unaware of the struggle for daily existence for those living in
agrarian poverty. God is not ignorant today
of the plight of a day-laborer who doesn’t know if there’ll be work tomorrow;
God is not distant from the loss felt by the hospital patient who asks the
doctor what their life will be like in 6 months time and receives little more
than a shrugged shoulder in response. No,
God is so present that our response can’t be to stare down a future we create
in our minds; our response is to perceive more keenly the taste of the daily
bread God creates on earth.
“Seek
first the kingdom of God.” That’s not
something distant to wait for; it’s something glimpsable here and now that we
are to seek. That’s the daily bread we
receive in gratitude; the daily bread God uses us to give to another; the bread
that has sustained us to get to this point and has built the body whose future
we would worry about.
Many
of the prayer techniques we teach people in discernment and those new to
formation are ways of more deeply understanding the habitual ways in which you
encounter God’s grace right now; they’re not crystal balls for diagnosing where
God would have you be in ten years’ time.
We must let God develop in us what our Constitutions call the “competence
to see” before we can hope for the “courage to act.” We must seek first the kingdom of God which
is revealed in the everyday graces of our lives.
Towards
the end of his life, Basile Moreau looked back on the still young Congregation
of Holy Cross that he’d founded and noted that: “this is no human contribution,
but the work of Divine Providence… it began and developed in a manner so
mysterious, that I can claim for myself neither credit for its foundation nor
merit for its progress. Therein lies the
indubitable proof that God alone is the Founder of this Congregation.” This is the conviction, this trust in Divine
Providence, that was built up in Moreau as he came to understand better and
better how he had been graced in his life.
This is the conviction that brought him through terrible struggles in
the early life of the Congregation. This
is what kept him focused on seeking first the kingdom of God. This is what we pray for, what we ask Moreau
to pray for on behalf of his Holy Cross family.
This is part of the daily bread God does
give.
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