Bread in the Wilderness

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life;
he who comes to me shall not hunger,
and he who believes in me shall never thirst.” (John 6:35)

Each week at my parish, a few volunteers gather to mix leaven into flour and let it rise. We shape loaves, heat ovens, and bake tray after tray of bread while the sun moves across the sky and the morning shadows disappear.

The bread is sold and shared, depending on the need. Our small-town church provides a free supper for the wider community each week. A small refrigerator holds our tiny food pantry. As it has for millennia, bread forms the basis of Catholic social ministry.

God has a deep, consistent love of bread. Simple, sustaining; beautifully earthy in its nutty browns and soft golds. From the beginning of time, He has been revealing Himself to man as the Bread of Life. Whether it’s the priest Melchizedek offering bread and wine to the Lord for Abraham, the Israelites eating manna in the desert, or Christ Himself becoming Bread and Wine in the Eucharist, bread plays a central role in salvation history.

Symbolically, bread is deeply connected to nourishment and hospitality. Bread and salt are the traditional gifts a newly married couple receive when they enter their new home: “With this bread and salt may you never hunger and never fail to welcome the stranger as Christ.” Christ, who came to live and die for us, expanded the symbolism of bread as only God can. Instead of mere symbolism, He gave Himself to us as bread, to nourish His people both spiritually and physically.

Feeding Hermits

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Behold,
I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out
and gather a day’s portion every day.” (Exodus 16:4)

In the infancy of the Church, the first hermit went out to the desert to escape persecution. He found solitude and fell in love. St. Paul the Hermit lived for 90 years in a cave deep in the Egyptian desert. When Anthony of the Desert found him, St Paul was an old man living in perfect intimacy with God. A small spring provided his water, and each day God sent a raven to him, with a half-loaf of bread in its beak.

On the day of Anthony’s arrival, the raven brought a whole loaf to Paul, who knew a guest would arrive to share his hospitality. God loves hospitality as much as He loves bread. Whether He’s multiplying loaves and fishes to feed thousands or keeping a generous widow’s flour bin full throughout a famine, God delights in surprising us with His hospitality. For 90 years he fed St. Paul the Hermit on bread and solitude, until at the age of 112 Paul died and St. Anthony returned to bury his friend.

The Modern Desert

Here in the secular northeast, we often feel that desert isolation as well. Catholics here are few and far flung. Our community is scattered like the long-ago hermits of the Egyptian desert. We drive through snowstorms along curving backroads to be present at Mass. We check in on each other and find ways to open up our crowded, eternally under-construction houses to each other for rest, fellowship, or retreat.

Those of us who practice our faith can sometimes be tempted to look around, as St. Anthony did before he encountered Paul, and think too highly of ourselves. But then we go out, to bake bread with our neighbors and rediscover humility in the hospitality of God.

Our weekly baking sessions bring us closer to each other, reminding each of us of the ways we can learn sanctity from our brothers and sisters. They also connect us to the community at large. They allow us to meet people who are close to God though they haven’t met Him yet. Bread is the medium, as it has been since the dawn of time.

Ora Breads

The Benedictine motto, Ora et Labora, underlines the link between prayer and work. Christian prayer is never passive, it’s always a labor – working with God to heal the world. Work and prayer are naturally interwoven.

At Ora Breads, we work together, hands shaping loaves or washing dishes. The skilled bakers lead and the less skilled support them. We’re learning together – learning to bake, to take direction, and to give our time and energy generously.

We’re not always good at that generosity. Life is a slow school of virtue, and like so many Christians before us, we’re constantly tempted toward complacency. Filling the days with ora et labora – prayer and work teaches humility, consistency, and the love of neighbor so essential to Christian living.

Like so many monastic enterprises throughout the life of the Church, Ora sells bread as well as sharing it. Bread sales support the parish and cover the costs associated with baking. It can be a challenging line to walk though. Small ministries that grow too large in the commercial world almost inevitably lose their purpose and flounder towards profits or growth.

It’s important for us to maintain a schedule that allows for intimacy. If I don’t have time to ask how the head baker’s pet snake is doing, or how another baker’s friends in Haiti are handling the pandemic, I’m missing out on the essential, Christian aspects of the process. We’re a community first. Hair tied back, floury aprons fluttering, we look like anachronist medievals gathered around our founder, Fr. Paul Dumais, as he teaches us to fold and shape the loaves – pausing to pray as the Angelus bells ring.

We aren’t medieval. We are just Catholic bakers, with triumphs and failures, colorful hair, tattoos, and a baking playlist light on chant and heavy on ’90s goth bands. The work is simple and repetitive, it’s been done for thousands of years with few changes. But we can look at the loaves taking shape under our hands and pray: “May those who eat you never hunger and never fail to welcome the stranger as Christ.”