{"id":5623,"date":"2026-07-28T11:32:30","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T11:32:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailypurgatory.com\/purgatory\/?p=5623"},"modified":"2026-07-28T11:32:30","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T11:32:30","slug":"the-daily-bread","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailypurgatory.com\/purgatory\/2026\/07\/28\/the-daily-bread\/","title":{"rendered":"The Daily Bread"},"content":{"rendered":"

After the circulation of the Divine and Creation<\/a>, and the right ordering of receiving and engaging<\/a>, Dante moves on to the idea of alignment of the Will, in gratitude.<\/p>\n

Come del suo voler li angeli tuoi <\/em>
\nfan sacrificio a te, cantando osanna, <\/em>
\ncos\u00ec facciano li uomini de\u2019 suoi.<\/em><\/p>\n

Meaning roughly: “Like how the Angels are sacrificing their Wills to You, whilst singing Hosannah, so do the humans with their own Wills.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Simply pointing to how reconnecting to the bigger picture and aligning one’s cosmology with these bigger and deeper Truths, is in a way to “sacrifice” the Will to choose any cosmology one would like, but at the same time: once understood there is no greater joy or gift than to find one’s place in the bigger and fuller living Reality, in gratitude and in richness.<\/p>\n

Choosing the richest, eternally beautiful and generative abundant relationship to reality is indeed to forego the “choice” of other outlooks – but what better sacrifice can one possibly make. Even more: the sacrifice is the choice of something much bigger and better, once fully apprehended and experienced.<\/p>\n

Then, comes a more practical aspect from Dante:<\/p>\n

D\u00e0 oggi a noi la cotidiana manna,\u00a0<\/em>
\nsanza la qual per questo aspro diserto\u00a0<\/em>
\na retro va chi pi\u00f9 di gir s\u2019affanna.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Meaning: “Give us today the daily manna, without which in this dry desert, those who struggle more to turn themselves will go backwards again.”<\/em><\/p>\n

So there is a double effect in this tercet: both the confession that this is a difficult or strenuous change to undertake within oneself, and also that one needs support and nutrition every day on this journey. It is not sufficient to merely “understand”, and having a Gabriel moment internally, one has to keep working for a long time, and one also needs the spiritual nutrition, “bread”, manna – from the Heavens.<\/p>\n

In a way, this could also come in the form of Dante’s Divine Comedy in periods. Reading a couple of tercets every morning and contemplate, dwell, enrich oneself in the meaning and wisdom and experience, is in itself a form of spiritual daily practice. Which also changes you, and will gradually open Scripture as well, which in some sense is harder to apprehend for a closed or blocked secular mind. Dante’s Comedy reaches people in this condition too, through beauty, poetry, as literature, more secular philosophy at times, and rationality itself as guide for 2\/3rds of the whole Journey. This is in some ways a key pedagogical aspect of the work – start with the rational to reach out to the disconnected secular minds, and gradually build out a bigger cosmology of both the spiritual and rational, and also see how rationality itself leads to this balance and combination over time.<\/p>\n

So a simple advice and companionship from Dante here; once the spiritual path is found and started, remember the little daily inputs and devoted time\/experience in the spiritual. It will grow slowly. And using the Comedy itself is excellent nutrition and even channeled manna from the Heavens in many places.<\/p>\n

Which is in large part why, the poem still reads like and performs miracles right here in the real (and bigger) world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After the circulation of the Divine and Creation, and the right ordering of receiving and engaging, Dante moves on to the idea of alignment of the Will, in gratitude. Come del suo voler li angeli tuoi fan sacrificio a te, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-purgatory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailypurgatory.com\/purgatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailypurgatory.com\/purgatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailypurgatory.com\/purgatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailypurgatory.com\/purgatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailypurgatory.com\/purgatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5623"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/dailypurgatory.com\/purgatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5649,"href":"https:\/\/dailypurgatory.com\/purgatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5623\/revisions\/5649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailypurgatory.com\/purgatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailypurgatory.com\/purgatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailypurgatory.com\/purgatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}