Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Give us this day our daily Communion

"Give us this day our daily bread."
Give us grace for today; feed the famished affections.

At even ye shall eat flesh, and in the morning ye shall be filled with bread; and ye shall know that I am the LORD your God.

And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.

In this simplicity, and with such fidelity, we see Jesus ministering to the spiritual needs of all who placed themselves under his care, always leading them into the divine order, under the sway of his own perfect understanding.... To the students whom he had chosen, his immortal teaching was the bread of Life.

Give us this day our daily bread, our daily communion with God, our daily companioning with God.

But to accept this bread, this communion, this companioning, you have to come home to God, enter the house - the consciousness - of God. How? The Bible says "Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

So this is how you enter the house of God: through gratitude. And what is true gratitude if not the conscious acknowledgement of the true nature of God as omnipresent Good? How do you know that God is Good? Because God gives us the gift of grace - "he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." You don't earn God's love. God is just Good, universal Good, unconditional Good. You don't have to beg for the bread at His table. It is His 24/7 gift.

Recognizing this opens your thought to actually accepting His gift, to accepting what God really is, what His nature really is: all-harmonious, infinite good, divine Love. This is "Hallowed be Thy name" kind of thinking. This is adoring the Adorable One. And adoring is effortlessly lovingly hanging on every Word of God, is acknowledging Him, is entering into His courts with thanksgiving.

And what do you find there?

Your Father-Mother God's table set, your daily bread - specific to your daily needs - set for you. This is God's gift of "grace for today" feeding your famished affections - and calling on you to feed the famished affections of your neighbor. And maybe even the world.

You can always sit down with God. You don't have to earn it. You don't have to dress a certain way or say certain things or even believe certain things. And you certainly don't have to be "perfect". You just have to be willing.

Come to God as the disciples did to Jesus, after his resurrection, at their morning meal beside the Sea of Galilee.

There, they left their fishing nets, came ashore, broke bread and communed together with their risen Master. What an astonishing experience it was for them (see John's gospel and Science and Health). His ascending thought raised them out of grief and disbelief, forgave their fears and failures, awakened them to their true purpose, and so fed their real hunger - not just with bread and fish, but with the overflowing awakening here and now that God is Love.

This communion was also their companioning with Christ, with that True Bread which comes down from Heaven. So this too is how you commune with God: by leaving your nets - your tangled obligations, thinking you always have to fend for yourself, letting go of your burdensome duties, all those things that nag you and snag you and drag you into ways of the world. Christ calls you to leave all that. Christ calls you to sit in humble grateful adoration, letting divine Life and Love feed you, forgive you, lead you, deliver you.

In fact, Christ is calling you right now to give up your daily distractions for your daily Bread.

So sit still a moment. Open your thought up with gratitude. Let yourself enter that sacred space in your heart where God is. Let Him give you your daily bread, your daily grace, your daily communion, your daily companioning - your daily oneness with divine Love. Let "this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:"

As you do, you will wake up to see that divine Love is always with you. You have never been empty, never been famished, never been alone, never separated from God - but always only ever at one with Him, your perfect Mind, always welcomed and seated at His table, communing, companioning with "Our Father which art in heaven" - with our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious, forever.

So yes Father, give us this day our daily bread, our daily communion, our daily companioning with You. Give us that beautiful gift of Love's saving grace for today. Let it feed our famished affections, and help us share Your Love to feed the famished affections of those around us.

Obeying his precious precepts,--following his demonstration so far as we apprehend it,--we drink of his cup, partake of his bread, are baptized with his purity; and at last we shall rest, sit down with him, in a full understanding of the divine Principle which triumphs over death.

My Father giveth you the true bread from heaven.

Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift.

2 comments:

Aileen said...

Beautiful post, Mark. It reads like a prayer. "So this is how you enter the house of God: through gratitude." It's so true that gratitude opens the door. It is so contrary to the ego's thought, that it melts it away so that we can get a glimpse of God's grace.

Mark said...

I love this concept of gratitude. It is so approachable and simple. And grace - I love that it requires no merit, no "earning", no special effort other than perhaps an awakening, an acceptance. Both of these stir us deeply to awaken to our relationship to God, the Great I Am.