Perhaps the Most Delicious Metaphor for Faith Ever.

Thanks to a friend of mine, my new favourite book is Peter Reinhart's Brother Juniper's Bread Book. He lent it to me, I read it in less than a day, and then promptly went out and bought a copy for myself. As far as I'm concerned, anything with the subtitle "Slow Rise as Method and Metaphor," is already pretty awesome before I've even cracked open the cover. It's a theological treatise masquerading as a cookbook (well, baking book, techinically) and I can honestly say this is the first time I've wished for a cookbook to have less recipes. Because as much as I'll spend all summer making Peter Reinhart's recipes, it's his little essays on kneading and rising and the 'guiding principle's' of his craft that really got me excited.

Here's what I learned:

1. Bread is the simplest of all things -- just flour, water, yeast, and salt. Without the yeast it's just a lump, but add just a little yeast and it becomes alive, rising and growing into something greater if given nothing more than time and a hospitible environment.

2. The dough could keep on rising, if you let it, but at some point you must knock it down and subject it to some rather harsh kneading techniques. This gives the bread character.

3. The more times you go through the cycle of knocking down, kneading, and letting rise, the more character a bread gets. This process can be taken too far, of course, (leading to alcoholic, musy-tasting bread) but in general dough can handle much more knocking about and many more rises than most people think (as many as five!). This leads to a wonderful crackly crust and that unmistakeable 'thunk' sound when it's done.

4. In the final process which makes dough into bread, the baking, the yeast engages in one final orgy of rising, causing the bread to spring up out of the pan and into that fabulous loaf shape. This final spring is the yeast's death throes, as the living organism within the dough dies, leaving only a finished loaf.

This is, of course, the basic chemistry of bread making, and I could have learned it from the Joy of Cooking just as easily as Peter Reinhart. But what Peter Reinhart did was subtly, but firmly, place that chemistry within the language of Christianity. Simply put, he showed me that bread baking "serves as a symbol for all that encompasses the meaning of life" and that it can push us towards an understanding of the good, the noble, and the holy.

I am nothing more than a lump of dough, striving to become bread. It is only the leaven within me that gives me the possibility of becoming more than I am at the moment. It's really a very small thing, this yeast in me, but it is that little bit of leaven that leavens the whole lump, that tiny extra ingredient which makes me fully alive, fully human, and which causes me to grow and expand in ways previously undreamt of. I have been knit together, fearfully and wonderfully, out of the very simplest of ingredients, and now I am rising.

My experience at Regent over this past term has been one of both progression and regression. I am learning about what it is to live (and survive with sense of self intact) in Christian community, what it is to learn history and culture from a Christian viewpoint, and what true Christian leadership is like. I am also feeling young, younger than I ever have in my life as a Christian. These friends and colleagues and teachers of mine seem ancient compared to me, full of wisdom and experience and a faith which passeth all understanding. Or at least my understanding. I'm just a green kid barely out of her undergrad with little world experience and even less faith experience. Simply put, these people (with all their flaws) have character, and I don't. At least, not yet.

As far as I can see, God mainly uses one thing to create character: suffering. I dare not pray for it, but I know if I am ever to be a truely Godly person I must suffer in some way. It needn't be persecution or torture or any high-profile sort of suffering, but it must be some sort of unpleasant experience which I have not hitherto known in my mostly fairy-tale life. So while I don't want to suffer, I know I need it to grow. I need to be knocked down so that I, like bread, will have character.

Peter Reinhart's book finally gave me the answer I'd been implicitly searching for as to why I have not yet suffered. In the back of my head, I've been wondering for quite some time. Does God not want me to have character? Am I so weak that any suffering would crush me and so God must coddle me like a hot-house flower? Or is it that I have been reading wrong all this time, and that suffering is not, as it would seem, essential to create Christians with character.

But it's none of that -- it is simply that I am still in my first rising. You see, creating a whole Christian person, like making good bread, takes time. Having had the leaven worked into my doughy self, I'm now rising, bubbling up as the yeast spreads throughout my whole person. When the time is right, when I have sat in a warm place long enough and have 'doubled in size,' then I will be knocked down and kneaded out, and then I will begin to have character. I say begin, because this brutal experience (whatever it entails) will no doubt merely be the first of several risings before my days as dough are done, and I can finally become what I was meant to be all along: bread.

I could go on enthusing in this metaphorical fashion for many more paragraphs (I haven't even gotten into what this metaphor does for the Lord's Supper!) but I think you get the point. Suffice it to say, I love it, and thanks to Peter Reinhart not only do I have some fabulous new recipes to try out, I also have a new metaphor for understanding the warp and weft of my own so-called life.