An Easter Coda: The bread of being

The search for a path through life

Photo: The old barn. Washington Valley Road, Morristown, NJ. Friends have gathered here, and will again.

We’re all well familiar with the phrase "give us this day our daily bread.”

The original word for “daily” used in this prayer is Greek, ἐπιούσιος (epiousios) and it is, as reported by scholars, an original Gospel word found nowhere else before it in the Greek corpus. So there have been discussions about exactly how to interpret this word since first the western world encountered it.

The word is derived from two roots: epi = “for” or “toward” and ouisa = being. So it could be loosely translated as "for the coming being", that is, what is about to happen. And that's a reasonable enough interpretation.

This meaning has a relationship to the practice regularly introduced to listeners and readers in The Morning Five. I’ll do what I can to explain that here, although words have their limits.

In order to become more open to the energy that creates not just our being, but all being, we need to come in to touch with it every day at the beginning of the day. This involves an engagement with the inner self, the root of awareness. And although one may be unaware that such a thing exists, it absolutely exists—as surely as we live and breathe.

This is an unusual place within consciousness, because it is the place where consciousness begins. And it is furthermore, the place where the root of the soul touches God.

The soul, as Meister Eckhardt oft reminds us, is female—and she touches God in only one place, which can be construed as everywhere, but is also nowhere, and involves a very precise awareness and intention and attention, rather than—speaking in general terms— a “yogic” (or other inner) understanding of location. For this place cannot be located in time or space: it’s not spinning around in our various chakras.

It exists only in eternity.

The soul is very much like the mycelia of fungus, in that it has an exquisite and perfectly attuned nature that explores everything that exists within the inner and outer worlds it touches using the finest of rootlets. These are metaphysical, tiny, inner tendrils of awareness that grow themselves inward, outward and all-aroundward through being and our various layers of essence and personality into the whole of the living world around us.