Friday, March 6, 2009

Yeast Burps and Sweat

Peter Reinhart talks about the 4 levels of understanding anything: Literal, Metaphorical, Political (ethical), and Mystical (anagogical). He illustrates this with bread.

My wife and I once considered becoming bakers. We did not have the capital to start the business but it always held a certain fascination for me. The nature of creating and consuming a "transformative" food, as Reinhart presents it here, resonates deeply with me. I love good bread. I love the idea of making something that nourishes people in a very fundamental and literal way. I also love the idea of helping people to understand other way that bread can nourish them. It is no accident that our eucharist is bread and wine, both of them transformed and transformative. He doesn't get explicit about it here, but he is treading sacramental ground and just opening the door a crack to let us begin to see how God uses mundane and ordinary things to make invisible Grace visible and tangible.

All the world, every part of creation is a sacrament of God's grace. Bread is a good place to start seeing that. 

Listen to Reinharts talk here. It's about 15 minutes.


No comments: