Our Daily Bread

I was fifteen years old when I ate the best dessert I’ve ever had, and if I squint tightly enough I can still remember the taste. Its premise was, of course, chocolate – but this particular chocolaty specimen fell into a realm bordering on the celestial. The dessert was a cube – somewhere between the texture of mousse and cheesecake – of the richest, creamiest, most delicious dark chocolate imaginable, and every mouthful elevated you from the chair on which you sat to a kind of floating reverie where the only two things that mattered in the world were this dessert and the love you had for it. That day, at age fifteen, I fell in love with that dessert.

It was the same year my heart was stolen by another; the same year I fell madly, irrevocably, head-over-heels in love with Jesus Christ. And, not unlike the dessert, that love was bliss. I felt so fully alive; so certain of God’s love for me, of my own worth and dignity; so eager to explode into songs of praise. Every time I knelt down in front of the Blessed Sacrament or raised my voice in worship, I would cry tears of pure joy. I was tasting a goodness surpassing anything else I’d ever experienced, and it was pure relish.

Naively, part of me thought that it would be like that forever. I expected faith to be a mountaintop experience, constantly driven by overwhelming emotions of love, joy and gratitude towards God. I expected to always feel His presence there with me, to continually taste the sweetness of His company. I expected to keep eating dessert.

But it turns out that dessert isn’t actually what is best for you. Sure, in moderation, it’s great. Heck, it’s fantabulistic! And there are most certainly moments in our lives that dessert is both permissible and, I daresay, necessary. But it’s not what will sustain us.

When Jesus taught us to pray, He didn’t tell us to implore God, “give us this day our daily chocolate cheesecake.” No, we beg our Father in heaven for bread. Plain, simple bread. Nowhere near as delicious as decadent, indulgent desserts; but far more nourishing. 

In the three years since my “honeymoon period” with Jesus, I’ve certainly had my fair share of bread. There’s days in prayer where I will sit before Him and not feel a thing. I will pray the Stations of the Cross and not shed a tear. And some days – many days – I won’t even feel like praying, because it just doesn’t seem like He is there. 

But you know what? I’m infinitely more in love with the Lord than I have ever been before. Because although that plain, unsentimental Daily Bread hasn’t always tasted as sweet as the initial outpouring of His love, I know that it has nourished me.

You see, our God is far too generous a God to spoil us. He doesn’t want us to become spiritually fat and ungrateful. And while the sweetest aspects of faith – those blissful glimpses of heaven here on earth; those moments when you know and you feel God with you – are beautiful and good, the Lord knows they need to be experienced in moderation.

Our faith cannot stand on dessert alone. We cannot let our love for Christ depend on emotion-driven mountain-top experiences. It is not until we learn to go without these treats, and start hungering for the less delicious but more nourishing ordinary encounters with His Providence, that we will thrive and grow healthy in Jesus.

It isn’t always going to be chocolate cheesecake. It’s sometimes – most of the time – going to be the plain, boring bread of choosing to love God even when we don’t feel Him tangibly or emotionally. But once we are thriving on a balanced diet of mundane life in His service He will, at the right times, indulge us. He’ll give us those mouthwatering chocolate cheesecake moments where we are brought to tears of joy in an overflowing of His magnificent love. And they will taste all the sweeter for the fact that we’ve been living on bread.

You know, I think that’s what Christmas is for. It’s what Easter is for. We live through the steady plodding of Ordinary Time, the watchful hunger of Advent, the bitter but hopeful repentence of Lent – all so that we can, at long last, join Him in a grand feast, replete with delicious desserts.

He doesn’t have to give us a share in that glory. He doesn’t have to bring dessert into it at all. He knows that we would survive on Ordinary Time alone. But He desires our JOY! He wants to see our faces light up when we taste His decadence and are overwhelmed with love for Him.

And perhaps one day, when we’ve learned to truly embrace the bread that He gives us, that bread will begin to taste like dessert too.

AMDG