In May I drove up to Bishop’s Ranch, which is an Episcopal
retreat outside of Healdsburg, for a conference. I left my car at the lower end of the parking
lot and found a path that went the back way up the little hill to the
conference center, and when I came out of the trees at top I found a remarkable
sight. There, as expected, was the grand vista
across the Russian River valley to Mt. St. Helena, but at my feet, growing on
the side of the hill in a small patch about the size of this room, was a
beautiful stand of grain. It stood dense
and tall and free of weeds. The pale
gray-green ears were already fully-formed, and rippled gently in the breeze. I stopped in my tracks, gazing with admiration. Also curiosity. There was a little hand-lettered sign posted
there, that said “Heirloom Sonora wheat,” but it gave no indication as to who
had planted it, or why.
I passed the wheat patch repeatedly over the next couple of days,
on the way to and from my car. I meant
to ask one of the ranch staff to tell me more about it, but I never got around
to it, and the conference ended with me none the wiser. In fact I pretty much forgot about it until
the week before last, when I got a phone call that cleared up the mystery. It was from Elizabeth DeRuff, an Episcopal
priest friend whom I last saw almost five years ago when she came here for the service
formally installing me as Priest-in-Charge of St. John’s. We hadn’t gotten much of a chance to talk at
that event, so Elizabeth began the call by catching me up a little on what
she’s been doing.
She told me that in the years since I knew her at St.
Gregory’s Church in San Francisco, she had become passionately interested in
sustainable agriculture. She tried for a
while to set up an educational farm in Marin County, where she lives. But some developers outbid her for the land
she wanted, and in the meantime she became more and more focused on questions
about bread, and the wheat that it is made of.
She was calling me, it turned out, to see if I would like to come up to Bishop’s
Ranch last Saturday to help harvest her first crop of wheat. I said I didn’t think I could make it on such
short notice, and then she asked me if my congregation in Petaluma might like
to have a share of the flour once they’d threshed the grain and ground it in a
stone mill.
Because Elizabeth’s purpose is not just to play wheat farmer. She planted her crop at Bishop’s Ranch
because Episcopalians from all over the country meet there, and she wants to
get church communities to start to think more deeply about the bread that we
place on our altar tables every Sunday. We
put it there in the climactic act of our weekly offering of worship. We invoke the Holy Spirit over it and proclaim
it to be the gift of God for the People of God, and the Body of Christ. We eat it together to experience the life-giving
truth of our communion with God and with each other.
And I could go on and on, as sacramental theologians have
done for centuries, about the symbolic significance of this bread and the
ritual by which we eat it. But what
Elizabeth is asking is how it might deepen our engagement with the symbol if we
thought about this bread as food. She’s
asking how much more nourishment it might give to our souls if we knew where it
came from and how it is made. She’s
asking what difference it would make if we experienced this holy eating not as
a separate species from the eating we do three times a day, every day, but as
its supreme embodiment.
Now, we’ve already been engaging with these questions here at
St. John’s. I arrived at this church five
years ago yesterday, and I hadn’t been here more than a couple of months before
Susan Hadenfeldt approached me about using homemade bread for communion in
place of commercially-produced wafers.
So for almost five years we’ve been worshipping with bread that Susan
and others make by hand in our own church kitchen. If you’d come by our office last Wednesday
morning you would have smelled it baking.
It’s not always consistent in the size or shape of the loaves, or their
thickness or texture. Sometimes it’s perfect,
but sometimes it’s too dry and crumbly, or too floury, or too hard. It takes time to break it up, and it’s
difficult to get the size of the pieces just right, so there’s enough for
everyone but not too much left over.
It would certainly be more convenient to just use the little
wafers that you buy from the church supply company, which are stamped out by a
machine so they’re perfectly uniform.
They keep for months, and you just count out the exact number you need
and put the rest back on the shelf. But
convenience isn’t the highest value in the Christian religion. That variable, perishable homemade bread
speaks to what is most precious and eternal in a way that those dry little
wafers just don’t. It’s a little like
the difference between getting a Hallmark Card for your Birthday and one your
child made herself.
On Elizabeth DeRuff’s website, whatsupwithwheat.com,
I found this quotation from the Kentucky farmer and poet Wendell Berry: “Eating with the fullest pleasure – pleasure,
that is, that does not depend on ignorance – is perhaps the profoundest
enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and
celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery,
from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.”
This is as good a description of the Holy Eucharist as you
could ask for. The Eucharist is an
enactment of connection, an experience and celebration of dependence and
gratitude. And it is meant to be
pleasurable, in the fullest sense of the word.
But almost hidden in Berry’s very apt description is a critique of how
our culture has diminished the pleasure of eating. It has reduced it to a few simple
considerations that are flatly utilitarian: food, we have come to believe,
should be quick and convenient to prepare; it should be pre-packaged in standardized
individual portions; and it should be cheap.
We have come to see eating as the equivalent of putting fuel in a
machine, and that the system that does this most efficiently is the best.
Berry sums up this attitude toward eating in a single
word—ignorance. More often than not,
this ignorance covers up ugly truths about how our food comes to us—truths
about the erosion and compaction and sterilization of the soil, about the
overuse of petrochemicals and the depletion and pollution of groundwater, about
the collapse of genetic diversity, and the inhumane treatment of animals, and the
over-fishing of oceans, about the exploitation of migrant labor. But we are also ignorant of what is beautiful
about our food, and the whole fabric of complexly interwoven relationships that
put it on our plates—relationships that are evolutionary and historical, familial
and social, economic and ecological. We
live at a time when there is a growing hunger to remake those connections, to
begin to re-weave the fabric of culture and nature that holds us in life. And why shouldn’t Christian churches, with
our focus on holy food, be at the center of this process of healing?
In church we enact our interconnectedness, we celebrate our
dependence and gratitude, with a symbolic meal of bread. It can only enhance our experience of mystery
to know where that bread came from, and what was the true cost of producing it,
in water and soil and energy, in time, and labor, and love. It matters whether reverence came into the
picture only at the moment that bread was placed upon the altar, or whether the
whole process of ploughing and sowing, cultivation and harvest, of threshing
and milling, of mixing and kneading and baking was, in some sense, an act of
worship, of which our ritual blessing and breaking, our taking and eating, is
the consummation and the crown. Because
when we eat with the consciousness of just how precious and miraculous this
sacramental food really is, we receive the gift, not merely of a piece of
bread, but of the love and mercy of God that gives life to the world.
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