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Monday, July 24, 2006
Wonder Bread
While Joanne and I got out of town a few days to celebrate our 44th wedding anniversary (yikes), our son-in-law Victor plunged into overtime work in bakery school.
It was an intensive 1-week course in breads of every kind -- baguettes, brioche loaves, sweet curly challahs, savory ryes, and a whole lot more.
Even when the course was officially over, he took our daughter Sharon to his kitchen classroom for an afternoon of rolling and kneading and whatever else it takes to turn flour into bread.
We came home to a kitchenful of bread loaves, far more than we could or should ever eat all by ourselves. Joanne toted off a dozen or so of them to give away at her office. You'd think she was Alice Waters the way her co-workers responded.
That was last week. Today is Victor's first day working in the kitchen of Cesar, our very favorite tapas restaurant. Woo hoo. We modestly expect a little VIP treatment there from now on as next of kin.
Unfortunately, at our age less bread equals better health. Even so, it is so way cool to have a professional cook right in our own family, and at one of the Bay Area's top 100 eateries.
The overflowing bags of bread loaves remind me of the time Jesus fed 5,000 people with a mere 5 loaves of bread and 2 little fishes. (Read the story in John 6:1-14) That meager menu came from one young boy's lunch bucket. At the end of that impromptu picnic, lo and behold, the disciples scavenged up 12 basket loads of leftovers!
Now, I have no problem believing it was an outright miracle. I mean, Victor's prodigious output last week makes almost anything about food absolutely credible.
But I recently saw another take on the story, in the movie "Millions." St. Peter himself shows up to counsel a young English boy about God's way with the world. About this story in particular.
"So," he says, "When the lad offered up all of his bread and fish, the people around him were quite a bit embarrassed. You see, they'd hid their own lunches in their pockets and purses, holding back so Jesus would find the food some other way. Now though, the boy's generous gesture put them all to shame.
"So, first one, then another, sneaked their own morsels out and passed them on with the plates being circulated by the disciples. On and on, all around the crowd, the amount of food actually increased. Selfish hearts melted; helping hands multiplied. And all because one boy gave so freely of all he had to give."
On its face, that interpretation denatures the supernatural in a flash.
But I wonder if it doesn't call you and me to another kind of miracle that doesn't depend on divine interruptions of the course of nature.
The kind where we see... feel... sense... simply the right thing to do, and then we go ahead and do it. The best we can. The best way we know how. And that sparks others to do what they can, the best way they know how. On and on, a miracle grows and grows.
So pass it on. There's bread enough and to spare.
The Bread of Life!
posted by Jack Buckley at
3:33 PM
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