In Which I Eat a Piece of Bread

The practical consequence of my funeral meltdown was that Matt got on Amazon and ordered an expensive bag of apparently magical flour. I say expensive and I am not exaggerating. For a tiny bag of flour, it feels to me like we have sold away our children’s future.

The little Amazon box arrived while I was over at church, in bible study, trying to be satisfied with the book of Romans, trying to grapple with Paul, to nail down the difference for the Christian between status and experience, and what part really do the emotions play in the Christian life.

Sometimes they seem like the only thing. Other times they aren’t there are all. What you feel and what you will are like two unruly lines that occasionally intersect, but more often are flying off in divergent directions.

The emotions are so powerful, when they are there. And then, their absence can be just as overwhelming. It’s not really surprising that this whole culture should be feelings driven, that the inclinations of the gut should so often be conflated with the way a person thinks things have to be. It is equally not surprising that other cultures and situations have done their best to tamp down and control the feeling side of human nature so much so that an outsider can’t find traces of them at all.

The Christian, says Paul, who is in Christ, has been set free from sin. But that status isn’t very easily felt. The experience of the Christian is to struggle with every faculty to both understand and to live that reality. And because feelings often belie that truth, Christians are always running back to sin, trying to sit down with it and rest a while, trying to be a slave to no one, neither righteousness nor sin. I’ll just be myself, I say, but I can’t. I am bound, slave like, one way or another.

I rushed in the back door from bible study and shouted for the children that we would be staring spelling in three seconds, and then I looked at the impossibly small bag of perfect flour. Would it be possible for me to eat a piece of bread and not fall into the emotionally overwrought insanity that has become my daily food consumption?

Because it’s one thing to try to struggle against sin, but the ordinary Christian’s struggle against doing evil has been compounded and confused by there being nothing proper for the human person to eat. It’s not just a matter of righteousness–where is your food from, and how was it grown or killed, and what are you going to do with it–it’s a matter, for some, of life and death.

Not me, yet. But, well, every day it feels like it. The struggle of the ancients to produce food enough to survive has devolved for the modern person into a litany of cutting things out, checking labels, vigilant care against toxicity, weight gain, and that’s all before you get to ‘buy local’. So much emotional and physical energy is bound up with what it’s ok to eat that increasingly I’m finding there is not emotion enough left over for other important components of what should comprise a normal life.

So Matt mixed up the bread, and let it rise, and then put it in the oven, and when it came out, I ate a whole piece. The children watched me and tried to snatch bits off the edges but I shouted at them to go away. Their lives are full of regular flour. They should enjoy it while they can.