For years I was Chaplain of Beechwood Primary School in Aberdeen. The school provided additional learning support for children and young people from 5-18 years. The full school Assembly was a brilliant celebration of life, sometimes noisy and excited, other times thoughtful and well engaged with what was going on.
Harvest was a mixture of the two. It takes 160 uninhibited young people to sing “He’s got the whole world in His hands” the way it should be sung, and with the actions performed with as much panache as any chorus in a West End musical. We always had bread on show. Sliced and whole, crusty and soft, plain and pan, wholemeal, fifty fifty and white, and one or two speciality breads.
We always said the Lord’s Prayer just before the end. We prayed for bread, that loaf at the centre, sandwiched between hallowing God’s name and deliverance from evil. We learned together that it is our daily bread not mine, that we live in a world where hunger is the daily reality, and daily bread a miracle.
A poem read by one of the children each year was one I discovered years ago.
Be gentle, when you touch bread,
Let it not be uncared for, unwanted.
So often bread is taken for granted.
There is so much beauty in bread,
Beauty of sun and soil,
Beauty of patient toil.
Winds and rain have caressed it,
Christ often blessed it;
Be gentle when you touch bread.
Yes indeed; Christ often blessed it. And on the night before he died he took bread, gave thanks and blessed it again, and gave it to his disciples. That loaf at the centre of the Lord’s Prayer, is also at the centre of our communion with Christ and with each other. Harvest Thanksgiving is one of those occasions when thankfulness is deliberate, planned, intentional, and focused on the deep and necessary things of life. And if, as those amazing young people at Beechwood believed, “He’s got the whole world in His hands”, then it is part of our love for God and our Christian obedience to take bread seriously.
That means amongst other things remembering the hungry, and putting some of what we have their way. There are few more important ways in which we pray the Lord’s Prayer and witness to our faith in God the Creator, than feeding the hungry, doing our best to pray for and provide daily bread. Our gratitude to God is measured by the extent of our generosity for God’s sake,
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