In my mind’s eye, I can still
see my grandmother’s kitchen as clearly as I can see my hand in front of me. I
can see her kitchen table - the place where we ate breakfast together
every morning - which also served as a banquet table of sorts when the whole
family was together.
Of necessity, it was a large
table. Like many immigrant families, hers was large. My grandmother had twenty
pregnancies and twenty-two children. Only nine made it to adulthood - five
girls and four boys - but when you add spouses and their children, my grandmother’s
kitchen filled up very quickly.
The table was also the place where meals were prepared - meat, poultry, and
pork were tenderized and fish and shellfish were seasoned with generous amounts
of salt, pepper, onion and garlic (lots and lots of garlic) as the basics and
then, depending on the menu, with fresh or dried seasonings like sage, basil,
oregano, thyme, parsley, and saffron.
It was the rare occasion that meat was served alone. It was always in a
casserole or a stew, in a pot roast or a loaf, a soup or a pot pie, and always
surrounded by tons of vegetables, fresh out of her garden or from large jars
which she had put up: potatoes, carrots, squash, turnips, beets, string beans,
tomatoes, broccoli, etc.
The menu varied, depending on what the butcher had on sale or what my
grandfather and uncles and boy cousins (“the boys” as she called them) had caught on
their fishing trip when they took my grandfather’s boat off the coast of New
Bedford, MA or had gone into deeper waters off the island of Cuttyhunk.
The one item on her table on which you could also depend was bread. Now, my
grandmother was an excellent cook - I can’t think of a thing she made that I
didn’t like - and at the risk of sounding like Oprah in that Weight Watcher
commercial, I’m going to say it anyway, “I love bread.” Probably more than Oprah, I love bread.
Now, if you’ve ever had real bread - especially if you’ve made or been part of
the process of making real bread - you know the difference between real bread
and processed bread. I’m probably going to date myself, but I’m now old enough
that I don’t care anymore, but I remember the first time my mother brought home
something called “Wonder Bread”.
How many here will admit that they remember Wonder Bread?
How many still eat
it?
Mother was sooOOoo proud, sooOOoo pleased to be able to bring home to her
children bread that was different from anything she had been fed as a child.
This wasn’t some recipe created by some peasant in a fishing village in the old
country. This was wasn’t some ancient recipe but something created by smart men,
modern men - actual scientist in a real laboratory - that was made from a
scientific formula.
Not a recipe, a formula, see?
It wasn’t ancient, it was modern. Not from a kitchen but a scientific
laboratory. Not heavy and dark but white and light as a feather. Why, it was a
miracle of modern science. It was a wonder, is what it was.
And so, it was called
WONDER Bread.
Except, we hated it. I mean, we kids didn’t say that, of course. Not to her face. We
must have had a sense that one day, it would be our turn to be the parent,
longing to please our children in a way that our mother or father never could.
As
my mother hovered over us at our kitchen table, we each took a bite of the
bread on which she had slathered margarine - not the pale, creamy, sweet
tasting butter from our grandmother’s house, but that deep yellow spread that
didn’t taste or smell or feel anything like real butter.
She seemed so eager to please us, so excited to be so different from her own
mother and establish herself as a mother in her own right, that, well, we
smiled and then oohed and aahed until she clapped her hands with joy and turned
her back to head into the kitchen.
Once her back was turned we kids looked at
each other around the table. Our eyes silently conveyed our chagrin and a
resignation to our mother’s romance with the miracles of modern science.
We knew that whenever we wanted real bread we could just head downstairs to our
grandmother’s apartment and she’d always give us a thick slice of her bread -
sometimes slathered with real butter and her strawberry preserves or dripping
with orange marmalade; other times, depending on the season, we would have a
real treat of fresh warm bread, right out of the oven, slathered with butter
and then topped with fresh slices of peaches or pears or apples from the fruit
trees in her yard. Sometimes, as a special treat, she would take some of her
freshly ripened figs, mashed and cooked with honey, which would become a fig
jam.
It was no wonder to us that Wonder Bread could never hold up to the weight of
real butter and slices of fresh fruit or a thick layer of fresh fruit
preserves. Or, in the summer, a thick slice of beefsteak tomato. There was
simply no comparison. But, Wonder Bread was not created for that. It was
created to make more bread available to more people at a fraction of the cost.
It was a utilitarian ethic at its finest, efficient best: The greatest good for
the greatest number.
Wonder Bread may have been a miracle of modern science, but we kids had already
tasted something that was a mystery.
Somehow, someone, somewhere way back in time had figured
out that taking a living thing - a fungus called yeast - and added it to ground flour and
sugar and water - the basic elements of life - and if you had the patience to watch it rise
and fall and then rise and fall again and then if you kneaded it with the strength of your
arms you didn’t know you had, and then baked it in in an oven - could create something
that, mysteriously, would sustain and nourish life.
It was the difference between tasting a scientific wonder and entering the deep
mystery of the alchemy of the very stuff of life.
Earlier in this sixth chapter of John, we read that Jesus had just finished
feeding 5,000 people with just five loaves and two fishes. The people were so
astounded by this miracle that they followed him out on the Sea of Galilee to
see what other miracles this prophet could perform.
But Jesus pointed them beyond their present reality and toward the mystery of
life. He told them that His life was the
central ingredient of Life. He said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever
comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be
thirsty.”
Our bodies are still nourished and sustained by the bread of this world, but
our souls - ah, but our souls - require a different kind of substance and
nourishment.
We were born into this world, as Teilhard de Chardin says, not as
human beings to have a spiritual experience - No! - but as spiritual beings to
have a human experience. We need the bread of this world for our bodies, but we
need the Bread of Life - Jesus - to nourish and sustain our souls.
Every Sunday, we gather together as a community of faith and listen to the
ancient stories of God’s intervention in the drama of our lives. We sing the
old, old songs which tell the story of Jesus and his love. We profess our faith
in the ancient Creeds, and confess and receive absolution for our sins, offering
prayers and petitions for ourselves, one another and the world.
It is then the job and the privilege of the priest to gather up all these various ingredients -
the elements of our worship that act as flour, sugar, salt, yeast and water - and offer prayers
of gratitude over them and make what we call “a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving”
over the simple, basic elements of creation so that we - together, people and priest - our work - the
sacred liturgy of our lives of faith which we call Eucharist - the words of our
faith become flesh and call forth the true presence of Jesus,the Bread of
Life, that our souls may be nourished from the bounty of creation for this life and the life to come.*
We are spiritual beings who are here, on this fragile earth, our island home,
to become human beings so that, when our work here is done, we may return to our
Heavenly home as spiritual beings with the One who creates Life.
How any of that happens - how the simple elements of creation - bread and
grapes become wafers and wine - become the Body and Blood of Jesus, the Bread
of Life - is a deeper mystery than even the mystery of how the simple stuff of creation
becomes the Bread of the world.
It is more than a wonder; it is a miracle of faith in which we are privileged
to participate each and every Sunday, being the day when we remember and
celebrate the gift and the mystery of the Incarnation, the Miracles and Wonders
and the Resurrection of Jesus.
Hear again the words of life which feed our very souls: “Very truly, I tell
you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors
ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes
down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread
that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and
the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
I don’t pretend to understand it. I just embrace with deep gratitude the wonder
of it all so that our faith, our souls, may be nourished and sustained in this
life and the next.
Amen.
*I must say, I think I out-St-Pauled St. Paul with that sentence that is, itself, a full paragraph. I think he would be proud of me.
