I wake up each Wednesday before the sun, rolling straight from bed into the kitchen, where twenty-five pounds of dough await me, bubbling up over the sides of a plastic tub. In the silence, I wash my hands, flour the counter, and methodically shape fourteen loaves—half multigrain, half cinnamon swirl.

For me, the movements are a form of prayer—not a prayer articulated in words but through my body. My arms express gratitude for the marvelous process that unravels glutinous strands and builds up strength in dough so that I might stretch and fold the entire mass. My nose takes in the pungent scent of fermentation, amazed at the power of microscopic yeasts. My shoulders ache with the stress of a busy week, while my hands rejoice at the touch of flour, tired of all the time spent attached to the keyboard. The process is a well-choreographed routine, timed so that I can watch the sun rise out the window over the sink while crusts crackle and cool, ready for packing just in time to make it to my ten o’clock class.

“It’s bread day!” remark my classmates as I walk through the halls of Duke Divinity. I make my rounds, distributing the loaves I’ve made for my subscription bread share: four to admissions, four in lecture, and a handful in the student lounge. During the bustle of graduate school, where I’m studying the theology of bread, this weekly ritual grounds me. It’s only with flour between my fingers that I begin to process all that I’ve read, only while shaping batards that I can begin to write any paper.

Baking for me is a point of connection with generations of women and men who have followed similar routines, a method of reflecting on the strength and wisdom of my own senses, and a tool for creating community in response to the hunger that surrounds me. It’s a central metaphor of my own religious practice—the making and eating of it have long been central to my own awareness of God. When the world appears out of control, and my internal anxieties threaten to overwhelm, I find peace in a God that claims to be known in morsels of bread.

Bread has been the core of the human diet since the dawn of agriculture. Its techniques are simple enough to continue generation after generation, and yet its science is so complex that not even the five-volume book Modernist Bread can capture it all. 

Historian William Rubel writes of bread as the simultaneous blessing and curse on humanity: “If you have seen subsistence farmers working fields by hand with a scratch stick or even a horse-drawn plough, or seen a wheat crop being harvested by hand scythe, you will understand what a hard life farming was, and that bread, life’s staple, and thus a blessing, has also from the dawn of agriculture until recent times been a curse.” 

It’s no wonder nearly every culture tells stories through their bread, nearly every religion offering an account of the staff of life.

In my own religious tradition, we see manna in the wilderness as God’s provision of a bread that does not require this intense labor. It’s a foretaste of the promise that God will reverse the curse upon Adam and Eve—that there will be a day when the soil no longer sprouts thistles or thorns, when we can feast without the threat of famine lingering nearby. We chew upon stale wafers and crusty loaves, which we grotesquely yet beautifully call Jesus’s body. We believe in our bellies and on our tongues that, in calling himself Bread, Jesus transformed the symbol of painful labor back to a sign of liberation to come. We proclaim in our eating the wild expectation that our lives become inextricably linked in the sharing of a single loaf—that like the flour softened, unraveled, and hydrated upon the introduction of water, our communion transforms us in complex ways, too.

The world and her haunting needs are overwhelming; it seems that everyone is merely grasping for some semblance of control. While our culture values individualism, speed, and security, while it idolizes technology and prizes constant virtual connection, our bodies and minds long for the slowness of companionship—a community of friends with whom we share bread.  

Neither bread nor spirituality offers a simple fix to the myriad fears that assail me, but I know that when I mix together flour and water with a touch of yeast, they will slowly cohere into a cool, sticky dough. First, though, I must step back and wait, admitting my own lack of control. Patience, I’m told, is a virtue. I believe it tastes like the sour bite of rye. I know that when I shape it and bake it, it will flourish into a crusty loaf. And I know that when I hand it off to the people I love, they will feel, for at least a fleeting moment, a sense of respite and delight. 

Sometimes this feeling, this flavor, this offering of a bite of hope is all that carries me into another day, because with generations of bread makers and breakers behind me, I know that when I’m baking, I am never alone.

Kendall Vanderslice is a baker and writer who studies the intersection of food and religion at Duke University. Her first book, We Will Feast: Rethinking Dinner, Worship, and the Community of God, will be released May 14. Email us at [email protected].