The Lord's Prayer...Week 5

"This, then, is how you should pray: 'Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.' " —Matthew 6:9–15 (NIV)

Give us this day our daily bread:

This is the 24-Hour Plan of life in the Lord's Prayer, and as such it is far from being the simple petition for the gift of food that it seems. This petition is worthy of our particular consideration, since it has special meanings for us in AA.

"Bread" in the Lord's Prayer means all the things that man needs to sustain life. The petition is concerned wholly with material things. Every material thing, whether it is food, clothing, shelter, a convenience of life or a means of pleasure, is solely the product of the labor of man applied to the gifts of nature. We get nothing without labor, but our labor would not be fruitful were it not for the gifts of nature, which are the fruits of the labor of God. It is a fundamental law that man must work if he is to live. It is a fundamental truth that life depends on God's bounty.

"Give us this day our daily bread" is first of all an acknowledgment that we are dependent upon God's bounty. But those who will take the trouble to read the Sermon on the Mount, in which the Lord's Prayer
appears, will discover ample evidence that the word "daily" in this petition is of greatest importance.

"Give us today bread for today," the petition means tomorrow's bread we will seek tomorrow. Thus, this is a renunciation, one that grows out of the last of the Ten Commandments (covetousness). It is linked
spiritually with the declaration that "Man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Granted that man must have bread, he must not make the pursuit of
material things the ruling passion of his life.

Now this is of particular interest to us. For most of us in AA became alcoholics largely because of our concern over material things. A few of our younger alcoholics are simply undisciplined children who have devoted themselves to the pursuit of pleasure and escape from the responsibilities of life. But most of our older alcoholics are men and women who have suffered frustration and disappointment, who have discovered that the aims they had in youth never are to be realized. We have had to cut our patterns to fit our opportunities, to walk when we had hoped to soar aloft. Moreover, the depression that preceded the present war made alcoholics of many men who ordinarily would have escaped.

Devotion to material things made tragedy out of disappointment.

No one would suggest that we turn away from the material entirely. We must care for our needs and our family's needs. And in our present economic order, a prudent man will save something if he can.

But if we are to have health, economic pursuits must not be our ruling passion. Ambition and pride and covetousness, the desire for wealth and the demand for power must be curbed, and with them, the
resentment and jealousy that come in the wake of frustration. We have to learn to be satisfied with what we can achieve, and in learning to be satisfied, it is well to renounce something of our aims. We may start by being practical. We may go on by finding interest in higher things. The man who has given up
greed is on the way to happiness.

[* Reprinted from a series of eight editorial articles written in 1944 and first published in the Cleveland Central Bulletin an Alcoholics Anonymous newsletter.]