A fellow traveller, not a guide.

Why it is called this

Two friends walked out of Jerusalem on the worst afternoon of their lives. A Stranger fell in beside them and asked what had happened. He explained the Scriptures to them the whole way, and they knew Him only when He broke the bread. Then they got up that same hour and walked the seven miles back in the dark, to tell the others.

Bread for the Road is written from that stretch. The books and the letters are for people carrying wounds and questions that have not closed, by a man still walking it. What is offered here is bread for the next mile and the One who breaks it, and He is walking you into His own life rather than back to the one you had. He breaks that bread at a table, and there are others at it.

Who is writing

I am Gerard Antony. I have served in Catholic lay ministry for more than twenty years, first in youth ministry and then in Couples for Christ and Missionary Families of Christ, where my family and I were among the first households in Bangalore. Most of those years were spent walking with people rather than teaching them: in prayer ministry, in healing programmes, in marriage support, in the long conversations that happen after the meeting has ended and the chairs are being stacked.

I am not a priest, a therapist or a doctor. I am a layman who has been trusted with other people’s worst days for a long time, and who has had a few of his own. The books come out of both. By day I run a technology company, which is a different road and keeps this one honest.

The rules it is written under

Nothing here will diagnose you. Nothing here will tell you that prayer replaces a doctor, a counsellor or the police. Nothing here will hurry you toward forgiveness, disclosure or a decision you have not chosen. Your dignity and your freedom come first, before any teaching, and consent is the ground everything else stands on.

The stories are my own, or they are told with the permission of the people in them, or they are patterns with every identifying detail changed beyond recognition. I would rather lose a good story than borrow a wound that is not mine to tell.

And every chapter has to pass one test before it goes out. Take Christ out of it. If what is left still stands on its own as sensible advice, the Gospel was decoration, and it goes back for rewriting. He is not the ornament on these pages. He is the reason they hold together.

What is being written

Six books, in the open. Three of them form a series on wounds: one for the person who walks beside the wounded, one for the wounded person, one for married couples. Three stand alone: on discernment, on the mystery of suffering, and on the God who still acts. Each has a page that says honestly where it stands. The books are here, and the letters draw from all of them while they are being written.