SEDL: Bread of Kindness

SEDL Prayer Points
The article below was taken from Cebu Daily News. Please read through it, I hope that you would profit from the points raised by the author. God bless.

Bread of Kindness
by Simeon Dumdum, Jr.

“Let all guests who arrive be received as Christ,” St. Benedict counsels in his Holy Rule, adding that this particularly applies to “those of the household of the faith and to way-farers.”

The saint might have considered Luke’s Gospel account about the two disciples who met a wayfarer on their way to Emmaus, whom they took pity on, seeing that darkness was fast falling and he seemed still to have far to go, and invited to spend the night with them. But when they sat down to eat, they realized that the stranger – after he took, blessed and broke the bread and gave it to them – turned out to be no other than Christ.

St. Benedict directs that, in greeting the guest, the Abbot and his monks first pray with him and then give him the kiss of peace, and at mealtime the Abbot pour water on the guest’s hands, and after that, with the rest of the brothers, wash his feet. “Let the greatest care be taken,” the Rule continues, “especially in the reception of the poor and travelers, because Christ is received more specially in them.”

The world, it goes without saying, has changed since the time of St. Benedict. And I doubt that the Benedictine monasteries of today still observe the ablution, and the rest of the welcome ritual – greeting Christ in the guest by bowing the head to or prostrating oneself on the ground before him. And yet I am sure that the spirit of the Rule has remained the same – receiving every person as one would receive Christ.

This I find difficult. For instance, from time to time, two or three people – relatives – who otherwise are capable of, but for some reason are averse to, working, seek me out to ask for money. I hide whenever I sense that they are coming, and when occasionally they catch me by surprise, I look for an excuse to leave, or else just send them away, quoting 2 Thessalonians 3:10 – “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.”

I find being kind to strangers easier than being kind to these relatives. The beggars that in wait on the sidewalk and at the church entrance seem to me to fit Matthew’s portrait of the least of Christ’s brethren, the service or neglect of whom we will be judged by when the Son of Man comes in his glory. But not the kin who lacks industry and purpose, whose destiny it is to strain the means and patience of relations.

But then I realize that, if I find it easier to discern the face of Christ in unfamiliar than in familiar people, perhaps I must really be unfamiliar with the face of Christ.

And, possibly, if I do not find the face of Christ in the people around me, I have not dealt with them in an atmosphere of kindness, in which alone we can truly be acquainted with each other, in which, despite the accident or our unequal living conditions, we can be on familiar terms. Then perhaps we will realize that we belong to same family after all – the Family of God, who shares in our sufferings, from which He lifts us up, and makes us partake of His glory. Perhaps we have not sat down to the equivalent of a meal, which the two disciples shared with Christ, whom they recognized only after Christ got the bread, blessed and broke and gave it to them.

Kindness opens our eyes to the presence of the Risen Christ in each of us. Kindness is the bread that we take and bless and break and give to each other. And once we sense his presence, Christ does not so much disappear as take on the features of the one before us, and the one before the one before us.


The photo was taken three hours after leaving the port of Cebu. It was sunset, and four hours short from the first point of destination -- Surigao.