The Gospel According to the Son by Norman Mailer Page B

nor for what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor yet for your body, nor for what you shall put on. Is life not more than meat? And the body more than raiment? The fowls of the air do not sow, neither do they reap. Yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Consider the lilies of the field: They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of them. If God so clothed the grass of the field, shall He not clothe you? Therefore, take no thought to go about, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'Where shall we be clothed?' For your heavenly Father knows that you have need of all these things. Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you. Take, then, no thought for the morrow; tomorrow will take thought for itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."
    And I said to them: "Let us all pray together," and as I heard their voices repeating my words, I felt as mighty as Leviathan rising from the deep.
    Together we prayed:
    "Our Father, who art in heaven,
    Hallowed be Thy name.
    Thy Kingdom come,
    Thy will be done
    In earth as it is in heaven.
    Give us this day our daily bread,
    And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
    And lead us not into temptation
    But deliver us from evil.
    For Thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever.
    Amen."
    And I said "Amen" many times as we descended from the mountain. It was late in the day. My disciples said, "It would be wise to send them away now. They must go back into their villages and buy bread, for they have nothing to eat and here is a desert."
    But to send them away was not in my thoughts. These people had walked over sharp stones to join us and they had listened to me. And I could still feel the Lord's hand at my elbow. I said: "Give them to eat."
    My disciples said: "You are the one who must provide. Did you not say to us: 'Take no thought of: "What shall we eat?" or "What shall we drink?" ' "
    I had said it.
    "How many loaves have we?" I asked.
    They looked. There were five barley loaves and two dried fish. So I told the disciples to seat all our followers in companies upon the ground. And I took those five loaves and divided them exceedingly small, until there were a hundred pieces of bread from each loaf. Then the two fish gave up more than twice two hundred small morsels. And, with five hundred bits of bread and five hundred of fish, I passed these morsels to each of the followers, doing it myself for all five hundred. I would lay one flake of fish and one bit of bread upon each tongue. Yet when each person had tasted these fragments, so do I believe that each morsel became enlarged within his thoughts (even as once in Cana I had been enlarged by eating one grape), and so I knew that few among these hundreds would say that they had not been given sufficient fish and bread. And this was a triumph of the Spirit rather than an enlargement of matter. Which for the Lord is but a small deed, considering that He made the heavens and the earth out of nothing, and could certainly have changed our five loaves into five hundred.

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    Later, this story was much exaggerated by Mark and Matthew and Luke. No angel appeared in the sky, nor did the manna that God gave to Moses appear. But such was the power of the blessing of the Lord that my followers were satisfied. I felt as if I were a carpenter's apprentice again and had gathered with my fellows in a green field (rather than on the stones of a desert beach). We were eating with much joy. Indeed, it was a feast. Perhaps that is why Mark gave me not less than five thousand loaves and hundreds of fish and burdened my disciples with twelve baskets of food to bear home. Whereas we were five hundred, and brought nothing back but ourselves.
    Exaggeration is the language of the Devil, and no man is free of Satan, not even the Son of God (and certainly not Matthew, Mark, Luke, or