Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even.

Berrigan frames compassion not as an abstract virtue but as a concrete encounter: looking into the eyes of someone who is hungry at the moment hunger is relieved. The “bread” functions both literally (food, survival) and sacramentally (shared human dignity, a Eucharistic echo consistent with Berrigan’s Jesuit vocation). The wish that you might have “baked…bought…or even kneaded” it stresses personal agency—relief of suffering is not merely to be witnessed but participated in. The closing cadence—“lose…suffer…die a little”—argues that such direct solidarity can reorder one’s values, making sacrifice intelligible and even necessary in the face of human need.