Daily bread

One of my favorite parts of the Lord's Prayer is the line that says, "Give us this day our daily bread."

I love this line because of its abandon to trust that God knows the sort of bread we need for this particular day that's before us, and that God will provide it. I love that the request is for something simple and basic, that in this we ask for only what we need and leave the details up to God.

Last week I made homemade bread for the first time. Bread is my favorite food, but beyond making something delicious, I wanted to learn about this basic staple of humans' diets -- no matter where you go in the world, there is some form of bread -- and to feel connected to women who have baked bread throughout the ages.

I wanted to gain some sort of insight to why it was bread that God provided as manna in the desert, on what it means for Jesus to come in the form of bread.

I wanted to understand what I'm saying in a literal sense when I pray, "Give us this day our daily bread."

So I baked.

Although arguably all times are good times to be contemplative, baking bread is a good time to practice being aware of what you're doing, to let your actions become your prayer -- because there's nothing that's going to speed up the 10 minutes you have to knead dough or the couple hours you have to wait for it to rise and bake.

You might as well relax into it and embrace the fact that being human takes time.

Making bread, too, is a process that takes time, and even when it looks like nothing's happening, something's happening. The dough is rising while you go about the rest of your day, whether you're paying attention to it or not. That, to me, is reassuring.

There's a physicality of kneading dough that reminds me of God and Adam creating and naming animals together in the clay in the second account of creation, that hands-on relationship that shows us we are co-creators with God, that our work, too, is to make beauty, goodness and God's kingdom on earth.

There is something in the labor of kneading dough that reminds me being human means working, and it is through the dignity of work that I better know God, myself and what it means to be part of a community.

A certain amount of rest, too, is necessary, or else the dough won't rise.

It is the humble, simple ingredients of the everyday -- flour, water, oil, sugar, salt, yeast -- that Jesus says he is when he proclaims in John 6:35, "I am the bread of life." I love that he makes the everyday sacred, that as bread rises, so has Jesus and so will we, that all of this is how we attain our salvation.