I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."
This is the one I generally omit using the Anglican prayer beads. So I've done less refletion on it in this context. It is in the collection because of the bread reference and the fact that a lot of early commentators on the Lord's prayer among the church fathers, tendend to link the petition with the Eucharist and this passage makes some sense of that link.
In using this passage as part of praying 'give us today our daily bread', I tend to focus on the idea that Christ is the true and living bread and that he gives his life for the Life of the world (the capital letter should be noted). So the prayer for daily bread is transformed by this passage into requesting eternal life and the food that lasts, sustaining eternal life within and around us. Christ is our Life, and day by day we ask for a renewal of Life within us. Actually this might be done by asking for the Holy Spirit, whose job it is, among other things, to form Christ within us and convey to us the benefits that Christ has won for us. So, praying for this daily bread involves asking for our spiritual needs to be met, particularly that we will have the grace and strength of the Spirit and keep our spiritual fervour.
I take the opposite of spiritual fervour to be something like a loss of spiritual appetite. However, I don't necessarily think that spiritual fervour has to show up as buoyant, upbeat and loud. Sometimes our emotional resources don't run to that but our emotional resources are not necessarily a guide to our spiritual health; the spiritually healthy may be a quiet and undemonstrative person by nature and their style of spiritual fervour should not be looked down on; their depth of commitment and quiet perseverance even in hard circumstances is testimony to the work of the Spirit within them.
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Crosswalk.com - John 6:51:On Del.icio.us: Prayer_beads, paternoster, Praying_the_Pattern, reflection, rosary
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