By Ed Loring, Director, Open Door Community

(This is the second in a six-part series)

Many people in this state hunger for justice and thus they share bread. Many in this state thirst for righteousness and thus they serve soup. Many in this state know that God is found in bread and soup and thus they struggle against The Bomb and the violence which underwrites it. They know that bombs and bread, violence and soup cannot be mixed. To know the God who gives himself in bread and soup is to know the Prince of Peace who is Jesus Christ, God’s Shalom.

Because of the good works of Bill McNulty and other peaceful people from the Holy Family parish in Marietta, Brother Mark brings us 2,000 pieces of bread each week from the Monastery of the Holy Spirit. Each piece of bread is an instrument of God’s peace: in the streets, under bushes along vacant lots, in dark hallways of abandoned buildings – that is, wherever God’s poor and lonely children gather to rest their tired and wrecked bodies from the violence and war which is poverty.

A piece of bread is an instrument of the Peace of God, for as people eat together they recognize their mutual need and dependence upon the earth and one another. Breaking bread together foreshadows our most intimate sacrament and points us toward our eschatological vision which is the peaceable kingdom in the city of God.

At the Open Door Community we view our ministry of sharing bread with the hungry and homeless as a peace-making ministry. Each time reconciliation occurs and the commands of Jesus are obeyed, the frontier of the Kingdom of God is widened and the space for The Bomb is confined. Each time a tattered friend is clothed and a death row prisoner visited, a bolt on the machinery of death is loosened. Each time an old bent woman straightens out on the floor of a church shelter, an iota of pain and violence is diminished from the face of the earth, and the argument for registration rings a bit more hollow.

But be not fooled. We are not. We plant mustard seeds while powers and principalities build bombs. We live out our portion of God’s Shalom while others prepare weapons which can destroy the earth. All of us must pick up a piece of bread and move toward those who are strangers and even enemies. With the peace of God in our hearts we must love the world for Christ’s sake, even the world of the Russians, and Chinese, and Eastern Europeans. For peace is God’s will for us. Bread brings life and justice. Bombs bring division and death. “Take and eat for this is my body …” A piece of bread brings the Peace of God.