This time of year brings my thoughts back to the bakery of my childhood. I grew up around bread and my earliest memories are of my dad as baker, my first serious job was in my dad’s bakery and if you get the deGroot family started on Lakeview Bakery stories it could turn into a long night. My father’s simple explanation for why he became a baker was that there was no room or future in the family construction company for another son, so at 13 my dad apprenticed to the village baker. There was never a nagging encouragement for any of us seven children to take over the Lakeview Bakery but there might have been some regrets at times. When I read Stones for Bread, I realized again that my dad had hands for bread making and bread was his passion more than pastries. He would often take in his hands a fresh loaf from the cooling rack, and just look at it, knowing intimately what made its perfection or why it fell short.
Parrish’s novel as spiritual journey is what captured me most and it made me wonder about what that might all have been like for my dad, who as a young deacon was called upon from time to time to prepare the communion table at church, taking his hand-made sandwich bread and cutting it into white squares on a Saturday evening, at the end of a long week of early rising. For sure it was all holy service to him who was quick to share the bakery’s good fortune and he created a work environment that holds many holy memories for all of us siblings and in some ways his early heart condition was a body broken for his family. The days before Christmas and New Year were particularly intense and bone wearying and yet somehow fulfilling.
I love that Bethlehem, in the Hebrew language, means House of Bread and that Jesus calls himself the Bread of Life and that he is tempted by his adversary to turn stones to bread because in his humanity he got hungry like we do, for the taste, smell and texture of bread but could resist, knowing that we all need more than that to live.