The Breaking of the Bread
[Come with the dawning of the day; And make Yourself known to us in the breaking of the bread.]
The penultimate prayer in the conclusion of the Church of England’s order for Compline anticipates the celebration of communion in the morning. The dawning of the day recalls the breaking of light on the morning when the women discovered the empty tomb, the resurrection day, and anticipates the dawning of the glorious day when the whole heavens and earth are made new. One of the first signs of this new creation is found in the resurrection narrative in Luke 24. Two disciples had a moment of encounter with the risen Christ:
When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” (Lk. 24.30-32)
The breaking of the bread is the pivotal moment in the story of the road to Emmaus. It is a distinctive action at the Last Supper, the feeding of the five thousand, and presumably many more ordinary meals. The unfolding of the Scriptures makes sense only in context of this gesture. The breaking of bread reconnects the disciples to their emotional intelligence; they articulate that their hearts had burned within them. Luke wrote that their ‘eyes were opened’; Jesus was made known to them. Earth encountered heaven. This is the moment that the prayer of Compline recalls and desires for today, and it is enacted every time communion is celebrated.
So let us explore what it means for Christ to make himself known through the breaking of the bread. What does it tell us about how we know God? What does bread have to do with it?
Sensorial knowledge
Firstly, the breaking of the bread opened their eyes. There is a stream of theology concerning the concept of spiritual senses. In a nutshell, this addresses the analogy of our physical senses with our spiritual modes of cognition. ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good’, the psalmist invites. Poulain suggested in 1901 that ‘the words to see God, to hear and to touch Him are not mere metaphors. They express something more: some close analogy…'.[1] A recent volume, The Spiritual senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, edited by Sarah Coakley and Paul Gavrilyuk, charts different theologians over the ages who have played with this correspondence between our outer and inner senses.
Sometimes the doctrine is explicit, as in the case of Origen, Bonaventure, or Rahner. They both address the spiritual senses at cost of the physical, however. Sometimes the doctrine is implicit, a default to sensorial language in an effort to communicate the mystery of faith. We see this in Augustine’s account of his ecstatic encounter in Book X.27 of Confessions; far from being an immaterial Platonic ascent, he writes,
‘You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours…’.[italics mine]
God makes himself known in a physical way, and we cannot help but use physical language to describe our meeting with him.
Sensorial language signals a deeper epistemology of how we know God. I believe that the analogy of inner and outer senses is not just conceptual – we taste the kingdom like we taste bread – but actual: we taste the kingdom as we taste bread. The correspondence between physical and spiritual senses is a deep patterning of the world. When the Psalmist says ‘taste and see’, he might literally mean, taste and see.
As I write I have a baby monitor perched on the sofa next to me with a gorgeous baby wriggling about as he wakes up from a nap. He is at the happy stage of putting everything he can into his mouth. It is his primary organ for exploring the world. He tastes, and sees. I will soon begin trying different foods with him, and I can’t wait to see his reaction. It is all new. What a thrilling experience each meal will be! I believe that there is something in how babies grow and encounter the world that we are to learn about how we know God. It is through tasting and seeing, our physical senses, that we can know God’s reality and goodness. Perhaps this is part of how Christ made himself known in the breaking of the bread.
Kinesic knowledge
The breaking of bread is a gesture that cuts through cognitive processes and speaks to a deeper mode of knowing. In ‘The Style of Gestures’, Bolens studies how sensory and motor information ‘contributes to the "full" representation of the concept’ in literature.[2] This way of reading texts belongs to the late 20th century French school of kinesic intelligence, which grounds the meaning of words not just in objects or sensations but in actions. We know what something means through the way our bodies move and experience the world.
For example, I can say that right now my baby is lying on the rug and is grasping the jingly-jangly soft ball. The verb ‘grasp’ is both a physical action involving his hands (and on occasion, his feet), but is also a description of a cognitive process in which he ‘grasps’, or attains knowledge and understanding, that the nice soft ball makes a noise when it moves. Kinesic intelligence, as I understand it, enables the reader not only to visualize a baby taking hold of the jingly ball and also to imagine the baby learning what a ball feels like and how motion produces a sound. Our innate knowledge of how bodies move is an essential part of how we conceptualise our engagement with the world mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Motion words symbolise immaterial realities.
Bolens makes a case that ‘the eminently dynamic reality of the semantic use and retrieval of concepts grounds the very possibility of figurality’.[3] In essence, our ability to figure, or – in more theological language – to image and to imagine, is intrinsically linked to our bodily knowledge of movement. There is a reason why the expulsion from Eden is described as ‘The Fall’; the vertical plane communicates better the sense of shame and loss of status than the horizontal plane could. This logic depends upon our understanding of gravity, before any other symbolic language or theology of ascent. Descriptions of motion can describe spiritual reality.
We see this in the double aspect of Julian of Norwich’s parable of the Lord and his Servant. The Servant ‘suddenly springs forward…and at once he falls into a hollow…’.[4] In this servant she sees both Adam (all men) and the Second Person of the Trinity. The fall of man is mirrored in the fall of the servant. She explains: ‘the Godhead leapt from the Father into the Virgin’s womb, falling when he took on our nature’.[5] The two adams are one, creation and the incarnation are simultaneous. The fall of man can be seen as the leap of the Godhead. The dynamic kinetic meaning of the Fall gives creative potential for comprehending salvation.
The spiritual world is known through the physical. CS Lewis’ survey of the Middle Ages, The Discarded Image, captures how the medieval worldview had a more lateral concept of mimesis than our linear, modern logic. The mappae mundi, for example, depicted geography in the double aspect of salvation history. As seen in the Hereford altar piece, Eden sits atop the surface of the earth as man fell down, through successive world empires and ages as described in Daniel, and Jerusalem is at the very centre point of the world, in accordance with Ezekiel 5.5 (‘This is Jerusalem; I have set her in the center of the nations, with countries round about her’). These mappae mundi became imaginative pilgrimages, spiritual journeys through the multi-layered representations of the world. We patronise the geographical inaccuracy and yet don’t stop to consider that we moderns also represent reality in a peculiar way. Signalling a hill through squiggly lines called ‘contours’ is a little like the Egyptian method of representing people through their side profile. It is simply another system of representation. The historical perspective lends a humility to how we image reality.
The gesture of the breaking of the bread was a rich epistemological site of knowledge. There was something about that gesture that communicated who Jesus was. Of course, there is the familiarity of the gesture from the Last Supper only a few nights beforehand, and presumably much of Jesus’ living with his disciples. But there is also a deeper patterning of the breaking of bread. Jesus, the bread of life, was broken for us on the cross. This gesture, more than any theological treatise or explanation from Jesus, more even than his unfolding of the scriptures along the way to Emmaus, was what broke through the blindness and opened the eyes of the disciples to a new reality, a resurrection reality. It speaks to our kinetic intelligence. Jesus made himself known to us through the breaking of the bread.
Broken knowledge
Having established that we know and can perceive through our physical being – through sensorial and kinetic intelligence – we must now consider what it was about bread that reveals Jesus.
I am not going to give a foray into the scriptural references and symbolism of bread. It is rich and beautiful. Instead, I want to skip straight to more contemporary interest in bread as a means of knowing God. Sergei Bulgakov related agrarian economy to the divine economy in his Philosophy as Economy: the World as Household. Redemption is chartered onto the befriending of nature by mankind: in the fall ‘the human being is condemned to economic activity’.[6] The labour and toil of Genesis 3.19 becomes the work of the Spirit redeeming our bodies, a re-enactment of the fall and resurrection in the soil. The curse of bread eaten by the sweat of one’s brow (Gen. 3.19), which Bulgakov presents as ‘natural communion – partaking of the flesh of the world’, is reformulated as a blessing through the Eucharistic bread of Jesus’ own body.[7]
The toil of creating bread is a form of redemption. We have a sense of this in Solzhenitsyn’s One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, in which bread is truly tasted as the goodness of God. Agrarian theologians such as Norman Wirzba have written insightfully on the sacrament of the soil.[8] Working the ground is a means of joining with creator God. Bread as a material substance is a means of connecting to reality.
I have skipped through this section not simply because my husband is on a forty-minute walk with our baby son. Instead, as enthralled as I am in the joy of making bread and the holiness that comes from making something from scratch and tasting it – I don’t want to get caught up in that. The prayer of Compline is: ‘Make Yourself known to us in the breaking of the bread’. I do not want to write poetically of an agrarian idyll because this piece is not about creating bread. It is about the breaking of bread.
The breaking of the bread is the ontological fact of our failure to be whole. The round loaf breaks, separates in half. Or as any curate would know, it sort of falls to pieces inelegantly unless it is either pre-cut or a large wafer, and even then it shatters with unexpected fault lines and angles in ones hands. The bread through which we know Jesus is broken. Because as much as I rejoice in how my baby son is going to taste and see and move and experience the world, I know that he can only do this in part. As he raises a plastic cup to his mouth, tries to eat it, lowers it, fiddles with it through his fingers, looks at it, and puts it back in his mouth if it doesn’t fall with a clatter to the ground, he cannot fully consume the cup. As his mother I cannot provide him with a perfectly ‘eco’, bamboo cup that I know for sure will have the longevity for several children and then others too. I will not always give him lovingly hand-prepared organic food. One day he might grow up and want to drink Monster Energy drinks.
The thing to remember is that Jesus is known in the breaking of the bread. As I am confronted daily with my failure to be present, to taste and see truly, I come closer to the bread that was broken. I read Solzhenitsyn and I am briefly inflamed with gratitude for my daily bread, and the next morning I eat my toast whilst reading articles on my phone about how bad technology is for humanity. It is in my brokenness that I know Christ.
The recently resigned director of the National Food Strategy, Henry Dimbleby, has published a book on the systemic failure of the food system. Having spent decades focussing efforts on bending the individual will power towards healthy eating, he instead believes the government should wield economic and political power to improve the food system in the UK. When he outlines the problem, he clarifies that he is not saying that ‘we are powerless in the jaws of the machine. On the contrary: to a large extent we are the machine. Our appetites and behaviours are crucial to how the food system arranges itself’.[9] Luther, or Augustine, would probably agree. We live in a broken system driven by appetites that result in bread that looks like bread but tastes like cardboard, and not the nourishing goodness designed by God. The fault is neither with the individual nor the supermarket nor even the government, though all are complicit, but the ‘machine’ itself: the way of the flesh, the world and the devil.
Sin means that bread doesn’t taste like bread, and even if it did, we couldn’t taste it. As Julian of Norwich said, ‘by Adam’s fall our perceptions are so shattered in various ways, by sins and by different sufferings, that we are so darkened and blinded that we can hardly find any comfort’.[10] The apple of the tree of knowledge would not have tasted as God intended when it was taken in disobedience and fear and the pursuit of power. When we recognize the unnatural state of our food systems, the disembodied experience of eating, we realise our need for daily bread that truly nourishes the body.
This is where the Emmaus Road story is so interesting. Sarah Coakley proposes that the Lukan account of the empty tomb offers evidence of the transformation of epistemic sensibilities of those being progressively reborn in the likeness of the Son.[11] We see this also in the way that the breaking of the bread opened up the eyes of the disciples; their dawning recognition is a process of transformation. Balthasar, following Bonaventure’s stages of mysticism, wrote that ‘Our senses, together with images and thoughts, must die with Christ and descend to the underworld in order then to rise unto the Father in an unspeakable manner that is both sensory and suprasensory’.[12] The eyes of their hearts are enlightened. The breaking of the bread baptises the senses; it is the dawning of a new day. The bread had to be broken in order for us to taste it and see God.
It is in the broken bread, the broken connections between physical and spiritual realm that we come to know Christ, and the broken body that Christ is made known. As the church, his body on earth, I wonder if it is in the failure to be unified, to image the wholeness of Christ and to be the Real Presence, that we find Christ. In the pain of our separation from one another and the ground on which we stand, Christ makes himself known because he has been there. G.K. Chesterton summed it up simply when he said that Christianity does not have a circle as its primary symbol, but a cross – it cuts through opposites and makes a way (cf. Orthodoxy, ch. 2). We long for the image of unity in the new heavens and earth when all stand around in a rainbow of colour and light and worship Christ – but for now the circle is broken and we need the cross.
We ask Christ to make himself known in the breaking of the bread. This must surely be our prayer in the crisis of how we manage the land and feed the world, when what we produce does not come full circle but remains. He meets us in our failure to have communion even in our households, much less with our neighbours or enemies. It is in our failure to sit at the table and eat that love bids us welcome.
So having pondered our epistemological faculties of knowing, our bodies, how we operate in the economy of the world and even as a body of believers, we come finally to conclude the day with the prayer of anticipation. This prayer is reflexive. We ask Christ to make himself known. He makes himself known even in the very awkwardness of not knowing whether to say this prayer in square brackets as we sit in a small side chapel and find consolation in these familiar words. In the fragmented time in which I have written these thoughts and the disconnection of ideas. Come with the dawning of the day, and make yourself known to us in the breaking of the Bread. Amen.
About the Author
Florence Judson is training for ordination in the Church of England at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. She is also studying on the Christian Theology MPhil course at the University of Cambridge, looking particularly at agrarian theology in relation to readings and interpretations of the Song of Songs.
Notes
[1] Poulain, A., ‘The Graces of Interior Prayer’, trans. Yorke Smith, L.L., (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1950) p. 90.
[2] Bolens, Guillemette, The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative, (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 2012), p. 16.
[3] Ibid..
[4] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 112.
[5] Ibid..
[6] Bulgakov, Sergei, The Unfading Light, (Moscow: Put’, 1917), trans. Evtuhov, Catherine, The Cross and the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy, 1890-1920, (Itaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1997) p. 261, cited in Rogers, After the Spirit, p. 41.
[7] Ibid., pp. 103-5.
[8] For example, Wirzba, Norman, Food and Faith: A theology of eating, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011).
[9] Dimbleby, Henry, Ravenous: How to get ourselves and our planet into shape, (London, Profile Books, 2023).
[10] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, ch. 52, p. 115.
[11] Coakley, Sarah, ‘Resurrection and the Spiritual Senses’, in Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), pp. 130-52.
[12] Balthasar, Hans Urs von, ‘The Spiritual Senses’, The Glory of the Lord: Seeing the Form, vol. 1, 3.d.5, trans. Merikakis, Erasmo L., ed. Fessio, Joseph, and Riches, John, (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), p. 245.