Back To Baking

~ As I’ve written before, I like to bake bread. Bread is a simple food and one of the oldest in recorded history, but it’s more than that. Bread can serve as a metaphor for us of how God and His grace are active in our lives.

One of the most significant parts of baking bread is how we work the dough both through kneading and folding it. At first when we begin, the dough is a bunch of disparate elements: a rough combination of flour, water, salt, and yeast.

But by vigorous kneading or more gentle folding these various elements are integrated. Gluten and structure are developed in the dough as the dough comes together into a cohesive whole. What was raw and unformed becomes something with greater structure, it’s more elastic and more capable of stretching or expanding. Such a dough is then able to rise and become a beautiful loaf of bread shared among friends and family.

In much the same way, we are called to let God work in our lives, kneading and folding into our hearts those ingredients that are necessary for us to become who and what we are meant to be.

Kneading or folding though requires patience and persistence.

Dough doesn’t just happen. It takes time and effort. The initial kneading often needs to be supplemented by folding the dough several times throughout the process. It’s not something done in a single moment or instance.

In the same way, the Christian life calls for perseverance in prayer and the steady practice of virtue, acts of charity and mercy, even when immediate results are not visible.

While immediate results are not always visible, the final results when we allow God to work in our lives are clear.

We become Eucharist, bread broken for others. We become those people who gather others around a shared table for fellowship, for faith, and for love.

Bread baking isn’t just about food but about formation. The act of kneading or folding dough occurs in our prayer, when we invite God to guide us through this process of becoming. It occurs when we allow God to convict us of some necessary change or course correction in our life. It occurs when we go out of our way to fold in and invite others into our lives, particularly the poor and those on the margins, or those we might wish to ignore. 

God is continually shaping us, kneading us, folding into our lives what we need to not only survive but to thrive. And God invites us into that process: that process of becoming bread broken for others. That process of becoming Eucharist. 

Throughout the year, we present an article in the bulletin each week on a variety of topics, written by a member of our Parish staff or ministries on a rotating basis.