Experiment 2: Make a Loaf of Sourdough Bread.
In seconds, I can whisk a bagged loaf from the supermarket shelves and drop it into my cart. Most days, this is how I feed my family bread. Most days, I don’t have the luxury of dancing through the careful steps of mixing, kneading, waiting. But lately, I’ve been experimenting with the comparatively inefficient process of making my own sourdough bread–and finding gifts within.
To make sourdough bread (I have recently learned), you must begin with a starter. The recipe is simple: just mixing white flour and water into a kind of pudding. But for the flour and water to magically come alive, you must wait. Each day, I discarded some of what I had mixed the previous day and added more flour. Five pounds of flour and two weeks later, the mixture miraculously bubbled up to twice its size. Such bizarre, divinely-crafted chemistry is beyond my fathoming!
Now I feed my hungry “pet” a cup of flour each week. And if I’m feeling plucky, I’ll embark on the two-day journey of baking it into a loaf of sourdough bread. The recipe I use involves twelve steps, like the movements of a dance. Mixing, folding, shaping, covering. Woven into the steps are nine pauses for rest.
The dough is a living, breathing creature and, like all beings, needs rhythms of repose. These multiple obligatory pauses remind me how finite and vulnerable life is. Nothing, not even bread dough, can become what it is meant to be without rest.
Photo Credit: Shine_Photos on Unsplash
Lately, I’ve been learning how much I need rest. For weeks after a medical emergency– sudden panic, blood I couldn’t hold back–my body forced me to the couch. Or to the floor, while my son played with his green recycling truck. Healing has taken much longer than I expected.
But I’m learning how the re-creation of things takes time. Making bread takes time. The metamorphosis of a wormy caterpillar into a fairy butterfly takes time. The process of a human’s transfiguration into the image of Jesus takes beyond a lifetime. But when blood and bone, flour and water, get a chance to rest, God knits the tissues into life. He works miracles through human flesh and bubbling yeast.
I also love how bread-making grounds me in the concrete. When I work with dough, I engage with the physical reality that God called good. So much of my life is lived in disembodied settings. I collaborate with colleagues over Zoom, the scent of their hand lotion, the rhythm of their breath hidden behind a screen. I buy vitamins with a click, without holding the bottle’s weight in my hands or exchanging greetings with the cashier.
Photo Credit: Nadya Spetnitskaya on Unsplash
But when I hold bread dough in my palms, squish it between my fingers, smell it like a bouquet, I connect again to the world God spoke forth. I connect to the humans who, for thousands of years, have waded through the many steps to make yeasty bread. I connect to the innumerable processes–planting, tending, reaping, mixing, fermenting, baking, transporting–that have gone into the creation of what sustains my life.
And I remember the reality that all that sustains me and all that I have is the result of great sacrifice: sweaty necks closeted in kitchens, muddy hands tearing weeds in gardens, holy feet impaled with Roman nails.
Bread, this body given, is pure gift.
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Note: I am indebted to Norman Wirzba’s brilliant work Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating, which inspired many ideas in this post.
This blog is part of the “Experiments in Inefficiency” series, which explores what it means to resist unbiblical cultural and personal pressures to produce in favor of Jesus’ easy yoke.
