Rector's Blog: Conversions - Pt. 2

For whatever reason, COVID-19 did not bring about a crisis of belief for me. That is not a brag, just a strange statement of fact. It had been 21 years since the moment on the hillside when I heard God’s voice and realized I believed. 21 years later, and I was pretty sure I believed in God at least once a day every day. But I was in despair because I wasn’t sure I believed in people anymore. I mean, I knew people existed, I just wasn’t sure why, or what we were doing with this gift of life. A lot of despair there.

And though I believed in God, I did not hear their voice. So, I did what many sensible White men did during the pandemic: I started making sourdough bread.

A parishioner I love very much gave me some of his starter and a basic recipe and I went at it. If the sea made me realize how small I was when my feelings were too big, making bread somehow made me feel like I could actually do something when I felt powerless in so many other ways. There are many feelings from the pandemic we have not processed. We have no idea, for instance, how to grieve over a million people dead – we just don’t have the cultural mechanisms in place to process the enormity of that. Likewise, I don’t think we have really dealt with just how powerless we all felt for so long. How little we felt we could do to make things better.

I was no different. I may have been in charge of a church, but I felt powerless and useless. I would work 40-50 hours a week and not feel like anything happened.

And then I started making bread. I loved it immediately. Like the first time I heard Sgt. Pepper or the first time my wife and I made eye contact. That kind of love. And I know. I know how ridiculous that sounds. How dramatic. And I am not saying I’m great at making bread. I’m just telling you that in the middle of every single thing being terrible, Love showed up, and it looked like carbs.

I began baking several loaves a day. Literally. Working from home full-time, and co-managing our three kids, there were times when I was baking 20 loaves per week. I didn’t care that we couldn’t eat it. I began dropping them off on people’s front porches. Parishioners. Friends. Whoever wanted some. Next door. 20 miles away. If I couldn’t give them communion, I could give them this bread. Not that that was why I did it: My narrow mind didn’t make that connection for about a year. I just loved it. And I loved the people I couldn’t be with. And I thought, "well I love you here’s some of this bread I love making.”

In some way, I think of those days in the kitchen with my hands in the dough much like I think of the moment of conversion I described last week: who I am right now can be traced back to that little kitchen and that isolation and heartbreak and the joy I found in making something I loved.

In one of the stories Jesus tells, he compares the Kingdom of God to the tiny bit of yeast that a woman works through the dough to make it rise. The yeast, or leaven or starter is alive. And you work it into the dough and the whole thing is transformed. The whole thing comes to life. You don’t see the transformation because it’s not immediate - it takes its time.

I find myself thinking about how I started making bread for me while I was not knowing how to love others. And then I found myself making too much bread and having to give it away. Soon I found myself wondering whom to give bread to next, making lists, planning driving routes. Before I knew it, I was literally praying for the people while working on the dough. There I was remembering that I loved people again – not that I had stopped loving them. I had just forgotten how and what it meant.

A big part of my vocation is having hope and faith in the people God puts in my life. And that always starts with loving them – always. The love brings the faith and hope to life. When I did not know it and could not see it, God was working that love into my heart like leaven, bringing me back to life.

And I’ve begun to believe that that was conversion too.

We tend to see conversion only in the moments we are knocked off the horse and blinded by the light. But for most of us, conversion works more like leaven – the unannounced, and at times unnoticed, reviving of our souls over days and weeks and months and years of constant interaction with the relentless grace of God.

Maybe you haven’t heard God’s voice loud and clear. Maybe you know conversion anyway. Think on the things that make you realize who you are. Think of the times that have made you know love, made you see what you already believed, transformed you. Those pieces of your life that you don’t know how to talk about because maybe they sound silly or maybe you worry you can’t do them justice. But regardless of what anyone might think, you know something shifted within you and there is now a Before and an After.

Conversions.

Next summer I’m planning to go on sabbatical. I will take three months to step back from my work at the church and rest. I will also use some of that time to look more closely at these places of conversion. I will head back to that hillside in Italy where I heard God. It’ll be my first time in 24 years – now as a priest, with my family walking alongside me. And I will spend some time in various kitchens trying to understand more about how food has been a source of conversion for me. I am not hoping to recapture some lost magic. I just want to devote some energy to really understanding my conversion.

While I’m gone, the church is going to eat food and talk about conversion too. And seek the holiness there. Because even when we’re apart we’re in this together. And we need to develop eyes to see where God is showing up and making us who we are. We want to understand our conversion.

I’ve used that word a lot, conversion, and it makes some of you uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable too – that’s why I keep saying it. I believe that you and I are made from love and that we are made for love. And I believe that we don’t always live as if that is so. We are filled with doubt and anxiety, struggle and strife. And yet sometimes we experience transformation – we feel ourselves drawn towards our own belovedness, and in that belovedness we find ourselves. I’m a Christian and I see Jesus as the choreographer of that movement, as the voice on the sea, as the leaven that makes the dough rise as my heart is broken open and my eyes are turned outward, and my hands are made useful again.

You don’t need to hear a booming voice and fall over. Love shows up. And where Love shows up, God is there.