The Body of God
I love cooking. I give food every year for Christmas (it will be twelve varieties of fudge this year), and cook from scratch most of our meals.
But my favorite things to do are make wine and bread. In some ways the processes are alike, because in both what you do in the beginning affects the end, but mostly you don't make it so much as you midwife it through growing and becoming what it is. Of course, bread takes five hours, and wine takes six months, but the process makes me think. It's the yeast that does the work in both cases. I nurture it along, warming the water just a bit before I add it to the flour, raise it in the oven where the pilot light gives it warmth. I add half the sugar to the wine, adding the other half three days later, stirring it daily for the first three days to make sure the yeast doesn't settle before it's done working. Touching the bread dough after kneading it is like touching human flesh, perhaps the fleshiness of a thigh or a buttock. I work it, fold it, press it, feeling how the bread responds to my hands. It's different every time, just like every lover is a new experience, how even with someone you've been with for years there's always something new to discover with each other.
I'm pagan. One of the deeply satisfying things that I do is to make the bread for ritual. Some groups use a small cake or cookie or something. I always prefered bread, possibly some fruit. If I could drink wine, I'd use my own wine in ritual too. As it is, we go with fruit juice. But it all works, all these things are, in our beliefs, the body of the sacrificed God who dies that we may eat. So cooking is religious, an act of worship. We say that all acts of love and of pleasure are sacred, and people think we mean sex. They've obviously never served a loved one their favorite meal, laughed with friends, tenderly cradled a frazzled child while they try to fall asleep...I find the aura of the gods blessing me, and smile, and ignore the fact that my leg's falling asleep and I'm tired myself.
And fresh bread with sweet butter melting into it is a sensual experience.
May the body of our Lord bring health to our bodies and life to our souls.
But my favorite things to do are make wine and bread. In some ways the processes are alike, because in both what you do in the beginning affects the end, but mostly you don't make it so much as you midwife it through growing and becoming what it is. Of course, bread takes five hours, and wine takes six months, but the process makes me think. It's the yeast that does the work in both cases. I nurture it along, warming the water just a bit before I add it to the flour, raise it in the oven where the pilot light gives it warmth. I add half the sugar to the wine, adding the other half three days later, stirring it daily for the first three days to make sure the yeast doesn't settle before it's done working. Touching the bread dough after kneading it is like touching human flesh, perhaps the fleshiness of a thigh or a buttock. I work it, fold it, press it, feeling how the bread responds to my hands. It's different every time, just like every lover is a new experience, how even with someone you've been with for years there's always something new to discover with each other.
I'm pagan. One of the deeply satisfying things that I do is to make the bread for ritual. Some groups use a small cake or cookie or something. I always prefered bread, possibly some fruit. If I could drink wine, I'd use my own wine in ritual too. As it is, we go with fruit juice. But it all works, all these things are, in our beliefs, the body of the sacrificed God who dies that we may eat. So cooking is religious, an act of worship. We say that all acts of love and of pleasure are sacred, and people think we mean sex. They've obviously never served a loved one their favorite meal, laughed with friends, tenderly cradled a frazzled child while they try to fall asleep...I find the aura of the gods blessing me, and smile, and ignore the fact that my leg's falling asleep and I'm tired myself.
And fresh bread with sweet butter melting into it is a sensual experience.
May the body of our Lord bring health to our bodies and life to our souls.
posted by Alexandra Lynch at 6:50 PM
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