God Save the Bake Sale!

For as long as I can remember, family dinners were never a spectator-sport. Regardless of your skill in the kitchen, you were expected to contribute something to the feast, especially at holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. Whether it was as simple as smearing peanut butter on celery stalks or as elaborate as dry-brining big-bird, your hands were going to get messy and that's all there was to it. If you proved yourself enthusiastic in the face of this inevitability, you might be rewarded with more complex tasks. For me, this started so early that some of my oldest memories recall me perched upon a countertop stirring a pitcher of sweet tea (correctly pronounced as one continuous word). 

Cooking is one of the few remaining acceptable forms of tradition. In many areas, including spirituality, tradition has become contemptible. We are averse to the idea that much of who and what we are and are about is not our own but the imprint of those with whom we've spent formative amounts of time. This aversion, though, does not diminish the inescapability of traditioning, and in the kitchen this truth is on display. We learn to cook from other cooks and we cook like them. And even if we learn to cook from a cookbook or a YouTube channel, we learn to cook like the person cooking. Our food is related to their food--our tables are connected.

There's, of course, a greater dimension to cooking. In Supper of the Lamb--a book that is never actually on my shelf because I keep giving it away--Fr. Robert Capon writes one of the few (perhaps only) theological cookbooks. Like a good priest, he starts by rejoicing in God’s good Creation: "It is a gorgeous old place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries, and it has enough textures, tastes, and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have." The superfluity of wonders in Creation gives way, if we’re well-formed, to wonder and gratitude.  "Unfortunately," Capon continues, "our response to its loveliness is not always delight: It is, far more often than it should be, boredom." Here he stresses how recognition is the refrain of appreciative wonder with the world. It is participatory, not passive--it makes us stay with something long enough to see in it and with it so as to look beyond it. As Capon concludes, "half earth's gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become." 

God is willing to teach us, but we tend to dismiss the sacramentality of His Creation. This delusion that the created world exists autonomously from the vital presence of God is the focus of another great book on the place of eating in the Christian life, Fr. Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World.  In it, Schmemann calls for a return to what he terms the eucharistic character of human life, asserting that "the only real fall of man is his noneucharistic life in a noneucharistic world." Fallenness afflicts all facets of life, trickling down even to how we eat. Even so, according to Schmemann, this secularizing of eating has not been successful: "Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence. A meal is still a rite—the last 'natural sacrament' of family and friendship, of life that is more than 'eating' and 'drinking.'" This indomitable quality to humanity's hunger for sacramental communion with God, grounded in incarnate reality, becomes fully manifest in the Eucharist, the sacrament of sacraments: "In the Bible, the food that man eats, the world of which he must partake in order to live, is given to him by God, and it is given as communion with God." Eucharist confronts our materialism when it comes to eating and everything else. We are made to sit with the food we’re given, to feed upon it from the heart with thanksgiving--wonder becomes worship.

The imprint of this encounter is meant to attend us as we go about our whole week. Our participation in the Eucharist conforms us again to a eucharistic character of life that is meant to be lived continually. There is no facet of life left untouched by this call to grateful attention. And that returns us even back to the eucharistic (and we may even just say Christian) spirit of cooking. Here again, Capon shines: "Between the onion and the parsley, therefore, I shall give the summation of my case for paying attention. Man's real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are. That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God's image for nothing." Inattentiveness, the lack of that appreciation, in this light, emerges as completely unnatural for the Christian creature: "...every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him…[r]eality slips away from him; and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world: an idol." In the sum of things, the calamitous worship of dead idols is not for us, perhaps, a matter of setting up little molten statues so much as it is a matter of delusionally believing we may dismiss reality. As I once heard an art professor at my alma mater say: "To be bored is an expression of supreme ingratitude, and maybe even nihilism."

I propose that an antidote to this ingratitude and daily practice in eucharistic living is the act of cooking, even badly. I would go further to say that of the forms of cooking that might restore through demand our capacity for attention and its final form of eucharistic gratitude is the noble art of baking. Baking requires us to be fully present to the task, with precision and love all at once. I would dare say that baking something from scratch can become a spiritual discipline. But we have to be willing to start, and here emerges another challenge. Cooking, baking, any sort of creating--they all require us to be willing to be inept for awhile as we learn, and maybe just always. We have to let go of pretense, and in doing so we find ourselves capable of jollity again by becoming amateurs.

Amateur simply means a 'lover' and it is contrasted in our time with the term 'professional.' Amateurs do not entertain the delusion that they might 'make a living' doing their activity, but understand their activity more as something that 'makes them alive.' Amateurs abandon transactional expectations and are capable of doing things for themselves. But there is a sense of fear that attends this, as my mentor John Mark Reynolds notes: "This is hard to do. We are taught to either be good at something or stop doing it." The necessarily faltering path that attends growth in love becomes impossible for the person who refuses ever to look incompetent. Yet this impulse, left unchecked, will restrict us from anything at which we cannot be immediately capable--and that, I'd suggest, is a short and lame list of pursuits.

If we are willing to look a bit foolish, we might find it possible to become saints. As Reynolds notes: "there is a sweet humility in being bad at things. That is good for me. Trying and failing is not just fine, but enjoyable, leaving tasks for eternity. The fruit of my amateur efforts is enjoyable in a deep way to my family and friends just as their attempts at art are wonderful to me." There are few people more lovable and attractive than those who believe in doing something and pursue it with a jolly sense of humor. We take ourselves less seriously, we take each other less seriously. We find that we are drawn together again.

The church bake sale is no small accessory to the church’s life--it may actually be the crucible of a transfiguring joy. It is a hospitable space for amateurs to gather in their unprofessional skill and jolly error--it becomes a place for real people to attentively and gratefully appreciate other real people. It requires more preparation and work than any fundraising it accomplishes can justify. The bake sale is the venue for displaying incarnational creativity, offering it with humility as a service--and so it becomes the gymnasium of formation in eucharistic virtue. The bake sale is an image of the Kingdom of God: of the little glories of the home and homeland brought into the luminous City of God, at which point I can only assume they are set before the Lord in the same manner that children may bring home their 'art' from preschool. And what can this do but bring a smile to His face?

God save the amateurs who bake, badly and then better. 
God save us from the hell of ingratitude and boredom. 
God save the bake sale!