Is this image – a loaf of bread – a religious image? Is it a sacred image?

For most, including most Christians, this is just ‘the ordinary’ – a round loaf of bread on a plate.

It seems just too ordinary, too everyday to be a religious, much less a ‘sacred’ image.

Furthermore…

Many Christians would object if this image were placed alongside a crucifix or an image of Mary, or even a picture of some puffy Baroque angels.

Their objection: some sense that a plain loaf insulted these well-known ‘holy’ images.

Sacred / profane

Those reactions are interesting:

• it is just everyday, and
• it somehow demeans a holy image if placed beside it.

Indeed, they may be a key to the basic theological assumptions of those holding them.

Those reactions are based on viewing the ‘sacred’ in opposition to the ‘profane.’

In this scheme, the universe is broken into two and everything fits into a binary of ‘holy’ / ‘ordinary’; sacred or profane; this world or another world; and the splitting up goes on and on.

In this split-up world it is very ‘spiritual’ to think nice thoughts about the creation – but to worry about climate change or alleviating poverty is a case of religion ‘meddling’ in politics.

Beyond the divide

But do we not have to speak of the ‘sacred / profane’ divide – after all, many good clerics have used it for centuries!

The curious thing about it is that it ignores the very basis of our belief about the creation – all, everything, the whole shebang is a gift of God. This is the fundamental belief that creation wholly depends on God.

Even more curiously, God has entered into the creation in the Christ. In the Christ, the whole of the creation is transformed and brought within the realm of the holy.

There is no temple in the new Jerusalem – the age of the Christ – ‘because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple’ (Rev 21:22).

The loaf, our identity

The loaf is our Christian sign that we have gathered in the Lord Jesus and ‘through him, with him, and in him’ have offered our prayer of thanks to the Father.

The loaf shared is our participation in one another and the Christ through the Spirit.

Holiness does not belong in some other world where we can avoid dealing with injustice or greed or poverty and where we might have the faint whiff of incense, glittering vestments and musty images.

Holiness lies in discovering God in the everyday.

Faith is sharing a loaf with the poor and with one another.

So is that a religious image?

Because there is one loaf, we who are many are one body, for we all share the one loaf (1 Cor 10:17).

• Thomas O’Loughlin is a presbyter of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton and professor emeritus of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK).