May 24, 2024 |
WLSU, Conversions - Part 2
| The Rev. Philip DeVaul
WLSU, Conversions - Part 2
I was 41, standing in my kitchen with my hand in a bowl full of flour and water and salt, and I did not hear God talk to me. I didn’t hear much of anything, other than the same Ella Fitzgerald album on endless repeat from the speaker on the kitchen counter. I was about 5 months into leading our church in a pandemic. I felt isolated and stir crazy and very tired of my beautiful family. I was insecure about the future of our church, which felt small compared to the fact that I was scared for the future of our country. On top of that, In the last month our dog had died, and we had moved into a smaller house. I was confused and exhausted and heartbroken.
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.
