Praying for our daily bread is asking to be reacquainted with our vulnerability, to learn how to approach not only God but each other, with our hands open. So to pray this prayer with integrity, we need to be thinking about the various ways in which we defend ourselves against the need to open our hands. We cannot fully and freely pray for our daily bread when we are wedded inseparably to our own rightness or righteousness, any more than we can when we are wedded to our own security or prosperity. And perhaps this explains why the Lord’s Prayer at once goes on to pray for forgiveness – or rather for the gift of being forgiven as we have learned to forgive.
The person who asks forgiveness has renounced the privilege of being right or safe; she has acknowledged that she is hungry for healing, for the bread of acceptance and restoration to relationship. But equally the person who forgives has renounced the safety of being locked into the position of the offended victim; she has decided to take the risk of creating afresh a relationship known to be capable of involving hurt. Both the giver and the receiver of forgiveness have moved out of the safety zone; they have begun to ask how to receive their humanity as a gift.
Forgiveness is one of the most radical ways in which we are able to nourish one another’s humanity. When offence is given and hurt is done, the customary human response is withdrawal, the reinforcing of the walls of the private self, with all that this implies about asserting one’s own humanity as a possession rather than receiving it as gift. The unforgiven and the unforgiving cannot see the other as people who are part of God’s work of bestowing humanity on them. To forgive and to be forgiven is to allow yourself to be humanized by those whom you may least want to receive as signs of God’s gift; and this process is deeply connected with the prayer for daily bread.
-- Rowan Williams (1950- ). Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life, chapter 3.
