Manna
“Recognition.
Repetition. Reverence. Receiving. Those are the ways we grow to know that we
ourselves are integral parts of the whole. We, too, are manna.”
Gunilla
Norris (Becoming Bread, p.30; Bell Tower, 1993)
I have
discovered that making bread takes knowledge and patience. Assembling the
ingredients, putting them together in exactly the right way, and then waiting
for the rise—it’s an all-day process. It’s not like making soup where you can
just throw meat and vegetables into a pot, pour in some broth, and walk away
for several hours. I’ve surreptitiously watched the bakers at Breadworks here
in Birmingham as they divide a large quantity of dough into three of four parts, take each pile and slam it down on the floured dough board and then
fold and push and fold and push. Breadmaking takes strong muscles and stamina.
Too much kneading and the bread is tough, too little and it’s full of
holes. One must be dedicated to excellence and feel “called” to make bread day
after day. But once you’ve eaten good, handmade bread, there is no going back
to the mass-produced product.
Gunilla
Norris makes the point in her beautiful little book, Becoming Bread,
that in assembling the ingredients we first must recognize them and appreciate that
they are gifts—the wheat, the yeast, the oil and water, oats and honey sometimes—are
gifts of the earth. But if they are to become bread for our nourishment, we
must be get involved. Norris writes, “A midrash tells us that ‘when the
world was created God made everything just a little bit incomplete. Rather than
making bread grow right out of the earth, God made wheat grow so that we might
bake it into bread. In this way we could become partners in the work of
creation.’” (p.29-30)
Just as
bread nourishes our bodies, our minds require nourishment too. Good books, real
conversation, and a challenging education stretch us and knead us into citizens
of the world. They teach us to be concerned for others, to realize that we are
all in need of nourishment, and as the Dali Lama says, we all just want to be
happy. I read an article recently that said geneticists have found that there
is no “racial difference.” The color of our skin is merely an adaptation, a
matter of latitude—in colder climates, lighter, in hotter climates darker.
Otherwise, we are one people.
When we
receive one another as sisters and brothers, when we accept our alikeness, when
we break bread together, “we are released from our narrow self-absorbed view.”
(Norris) When we have reverence for others and for the earth, we find that
life is very good indeed, and we become manna for each other.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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