Baking Bread and Liturgy

Fortunately, I can work from home during this pandemic. Unfortunately, the pandemic also makes a lot of reading feel impossible, because nothing feels relevant. This last month, the world changed, and books haven’t realized it yet. So today, I used the freedom that I have to bake bread. I started baking a little over a year ago, in an attempt to not be the worst cook in my family, but over that year I really started to love baking, especially bread. When I was growing up, whenever my mom made bread was a special time. The smell would tantalize us for hours. We’d eat it hot out of the oven, even though all the recipes say to let it cool for hours and hours. Honestly, who has that much self control? 

Actually being the one baking the bread is a totally different experience. Bread brings you into its own time. Where most of my life is rushing and meeting deadlines, bread likes to take it slow. A lot of making bread is just waiting for the yeast. Waiting in anticipation of the next step in the process. And even though the process of making bread is ancient and largely unchanged for centuries, each time and each loaf feels unique. The environment is always going to be slightly different, so you may need more or less moisture than you did the last time. Kneading for different lengths of time will change the texture and how the dough rises. Even if you’ve done it a hundred times, you never know what’s going to happen next.

And I love that, because it’s what liturgical worship, the following of the daily and weekly services in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, feels like to me. Before I went to a church with this style of worship, I assumed that it would be stale. That doing the same thing every week was just rote repetition and no one really was serious about their faith.  But instead it’s like bread. Each time is different, because the circumstances are always different. The liturgy also forces us to slow down, and set aside time. Like I talked about with Lent, the liturgy replaces the normal time and schedule of my life with its own.

And with both bread and liturgy, it’s a partnership, and a really lopsided partnership at that. With bread, you partner with yeast. Yeast breaks down the carbohydrates in the flour and sugar, and in that process it releases gas. Gluten, a protein that you developed by kneading the bread, allows the dough to stretch, capturing the exhalation of the yeast and causing the bread to rise. If you don’t have yeast, you can’t have bread. I was worried today when I uncovered the dough after it had been proving (or fermenting as my cookbook likes to say) that it wouldn’t have risen at all. If the yeast was dead, or the water wasn’t warm enough, it wouldn’t really matter what I did. I’d just have a useless ball of dough and less time in the day. The same way, in the liturgy, we need the Spirit of God, or nothing rises. We could build up the glutinous structure of liturgy and cathedrals, but we need His breath in us, stretching us and filling us. The Liturgy partners with God, and without the power that raised Christ from the dead, all of our work falls flat. But the power of God working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. 

So happy Lent. We are living in the midst of a global pandemic. We have anxiety that people we love, or even those we don’t know, may die. But we still have to live our lives today. We might as well enjoy them. And as soon as the sun goes down, I’m going to enjoy my probably still hot marbled rye.