To feed your spirituality, go to the kitchen

Baking bread can be a profound spiritual lesson.

I have a new living organism - for lack of a better term - to feed in my house. It is my sourdough starter, a beige and pasty mix of wheat flour, water and yeast that lives in a glass jar on the back of the refrigerator. Once a week visit the kitchen counter, where it is supplied with water, flour and oxygen. Sometimes I divide it and use half of it for naturally leavened crackers or focaccia.

I regularly ask friends if they would like a little appetizer, because their maintenance is so expensive. Every week, you must discard at least half the portion to prevent your sourdough from growing exponentially so that you take control of each shelf of your refrigerator and the pieces of storage in the closet.

Some "bread heads" boast appetizers with lineages that date back to the "Old World", appetizers that have been fed for over 100 years. My starter was given to me by Peter Reinhart, author of the James Beard Award for The Bread Baker's Apprentice (Ten Speed ​​Press), after a lesson I took with him.

I prepare sourdough loaves every week following a combination of instructions from other bakers and my intuition. Each loaf is different, a product of ingredients, time, temperature and my own hands - and those of my son. Bread baking is an ancient art that I adapted with the guidance and wisdom of the best bakers listening to my instincts and responding to the needs of my family.

My apartment kitchen has been transformed into a nanobakery largely as a search for a book that I am writing on the spirituality of bread and the Eucharist. I didn't understand that even before the oven was preheated, my cooking offers my family a lot to think about. It started a year ago when we traveled to western Michigan to plant heirloom grain on a small organic farm that was to be harvested the following year and then turned into flour for bread and communion wafers.

On a crisp October morning that could not have been a more idyllic autumn day, we pressed our hands to the ground, blessing him and thanking God for all that the seeds would provide: nutrients to grow and a place to take root. We picked up handfuls of wheat berries harvested from the previous crop - an unbroken circle - and stroked them in the ground mostly in a straight line.

This experience gave my family the opportunity to physically connect with the land, to learn more about agricultural practices and to share brotherhood with those whose vocation is to take care of the land. My young son also grasped the gravity of our actions. He too put his hands on the ground and closed his eyes in prayer.

The opportunity to reflect theologically was there at every corner, ready to be weighed up by old and young minds alike: what does it mean to be an administrator of Earth? How can we city dwellers, not farmers, take care of this soil, ensuring future generations the same right to bread?

At home I cook with these questions in mind and I spend a lot more time, energy and money making loaves with flour milled from sustainably grown and harvested wheat. My bread does not become the body of Christ during Mass, but the holiness of the Earth and its administrators are revealed to me as I mix the dough.

In The Bread Baker's Apprentice, Reinhart describes the baker's challenge as "evoking his full potential from wheat, finding ways to unravel the tasteless starch molecules. . . attempting to release simple sugars that are intertwined within complex but unassailable starch carbohydrates. In other words, the baker's task is to make the taste of the bread exceptional by extracting as much aroma as possible from its ingredients. It is done in a simple and ancient process, fermentation, which is probably responsible for the origin of life on Earth.

Active yeast feeds on sugars released from wheat after it has been hydrated. As a result it releases a gas and a sour liquid sometimes called a "hooch". Fermentation literally transforms the ingredients from one thing to another. The baker's task is to keep that yeast alive until it's time to cook, where he releases his last "breath", giving the loaf a last awakening and then dies in the hot oven. The yeast dies to give life to the bread, which is then consumed and gives us life.

Who knew that such a profound spiritual lesson could be lived and shared in your kitchen?

A couple of years ago I listened to a speech given by the theologian Norman Wirzba, whose best work focuses on how theology, ecology and agriculture intersect. He said to the public: "Eating is a matter of life or death".

In my personal practice I have discovered that in the baking and crushing of bread we have the opportunity to experience the mysterious relationship between life and death in both profound and ordinary ways. Wheat is alive until harvest and grinding. The yeast dies on high heat. The ingredients are transformed into something else.

The substance that emerges from the oven is something that was not before. It becomes bread, a food so substantial and nutritious that it can even mean food itself. Breaking it and eating it gives us life, not only the nutrients needed to sustain physical life, but also what we need to sustain a spiritual life.

Is it any wonder that Jesus multiplied the loaves with the fish as one of his miracles that proclaim the kingdom of God? Or that he often broke bread with his friends and followers, even during his last night on Earth, when he said that the bread he was breaking was his own body, broken for us?

Bread - cooked, given, received and shared - is really life.