Ecstatic Hunger
Ecstatic Hunger
Sharon Rose Christner
On Brothers & Heaven’s Many Breads
At the Family Cupboard, the diner in the blizzarded cornfield, when our food has not yet come, before the couple at another table notices our ecstatic hunger, before they miraculously pay for our meal and our parents wonder at the sight, there are only two things to do.
One: eat the bread. The bread of waiting for more bread. Both of you, little brothers, could use the calories, and it is rarer than birthdays that we are at a restaurant, and it is not easy to wait. You are jumping in your seats, knowing that the more-bread will be the true bread, toasted and buttered and topped with a perfect and golden egg. Study the for-now bread—it looks like a plain roll until you look closely—and you will find pockets of air as large as the tips of your seven and five-year-old thumbs, caverns for butter and for the rectangular packets of red jelly which you’re not sure is really jelly. You will find the border between its crust and its flesh, and try to pry them apart until you find they are knit together.
Two: look at the paper placemat printed with folded hands surrounded by tiny prayers: Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Jewish. For you, Caleb, the mat is just a place to win a game of tic-tac-toe; yours, Asher, is a place to drum your spoon and fork. But study the large clasped hands, the words of four faiths. Prayers are everywhere in these small diners of central Pennsylvania.
Your own hands are ever moving, but, since you are always thinking about food, you know how to close them to ask for something good, how to open them to receive. Our mother’s family is Jewish, but we do not know that placemat prayer. Our father’s family is Christian, but we do not know any of the other three, and for that matter neither do the Family Cupboard employees, because they’re all Mennonite. So are we, halfway and kind of. You and our little sister look like our father for now, while you are small, all golden-headed and overalled, but your hair will grow dark and curly like mine and our mother’s and you will start to wonder what strange combination you are. We are made of many things that do not easily fit together, like challah and home-raised ham, and none of our prayers appear formulated at table settings. But consider each placemat prayer and inside the floral trim you will find familiar things: some notion of thanksgiving, a convoluted way of saying food (thy bounty, thy gifts, bread from the earth), and someone they call Lord.
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Now that you are older, and have heard and seen it thousands of times, study this Germanic lump of a word: Lord. I know I am the one who pores over words, that you two would rather be thinking in terms of numbers or cinnamon rolls. But look at this one: it may help you someday. Behind Lord you will find lourde, predictably enough in middle English, with the same meaning we use today. Further back you will start to find that lord has lost, over the years, something of its middle– it was once lowerd, loverd, or lhoaverd, and before this in the Old English it was hlāfweard, from hlāf, which means “bread, loaf” and weard: “ward, guardian, keeper.” A lord is a loaf-ward, the one who guards and keeps the bread.
He keeps this bread, in theory, to provide for the needs of his hlǣfdīġe (lady; “loaf-kneader”) and of his hlāf-ǣta (servant; “loaf-eater”). This is a noble idea if he keeps the loaves for them, and becomes somewhat less noble if he tends to guard the loaves against them. Either way, the lord and all in his household are given their identities in relation to the loaf. I imagine Anglo-Saxon castles as little pockets of fortified bread.
While this bread-meaning of lord was still fresh in usage, it was used to translate Dominus from the Latin translation of Scripture. And so to the speakers of a certain iteration of English, the Lord Himself was the great Keeper of the Breads.
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Imagining God is difficult enough. Now imagine God in all his heavenly glory surrounded by angels and archangels and also piles and piles of bread. His treasuries have the greatest stock and store of savory ryes and sourdoughs. Around him, the clouds on high are puffing to their brims with biscuits and all that is baked and good. Cirrus lefse; cumulonimbus brioche. And the storerooms are surely as full with roti and arepa as with baguettes and Sara Lee’s; there are certainly as many taftans as Texas Toasts, and far more bings and babas, if respective earthly population has anything to do with it.
If you sense you are made of strange ingredients, it may help you to ponder how many recipes he knows. Yes, this Bread-Keeper shows no partiality to the breads of any certain oven. Among his heavenly doughs he must have the recipes no one has dreamed up or attempted, with ingredients made from cereal species not yet discovered or engineered—and not just the recipes, but also the warmest and most glorious instantiations of them, ever-fresh and ever-baking. Maybe he ships his store out in loaves, maybe he is saving it up for a great feast at the end of the age, and maybe now and then he sends bits of it down like snow for us, the people below.
Our ancestors were hungry, having left slavery in Egypt to wander the desert, and it was time, they thought, for some bread. So the Lord said “I will rain down bread from heaven for you,” as if it were the simplest thing, and sent down a house specialty no one had seen before. It had the flakiness of filo dough and the melt-away of Hokkaido milk bread, neither of which had been seen on the Earth to that day. It did not need to be scythed, threshed, or winnowed: it was all of the nutrition and none of the work. They say it tasted like honey-wafers, but the people ate it for forty years and did not, it seems, get fat or sick or die too young. Many children of Israel were born and raised on little more than God’s morning wheat-flakes and a quail here and there—like subsisting on Wheaties and KFC—and yet they survived to reach the land that was promised them.
The special meal came with special instructions. They were to take only what they needed for a day—a daily bread, an exercise in trusting the keeper—for anything hoarded up in larger amounts would rot. The exception was the day before Shabbat, when they were permitted to take two shares. They could bake it if they wished, or boil it, and, tiny miracle added to the great one, it would keep, without rotting, until the families had shared their Sabbath meal around whatever table they could find as they made their makeshift way toward a new home.
I do wish I had a warm kitchen memory to bring to your mind here, to bring you home from desert wandering; a memory of domestic joy, baking challah with one grandmother or Amish milk bread with the other. Or a hardworking father’s bakery on a bustling main street market somewhere in the Midwest or Middle East: how he would rise at four to make the bread rise at five, how the aroma of his baking filled the air and our clothing, how he tirelessly kneaded and sold to be the keeper of the bread and of us.
I have no such remembrances to serve you. We have never cooked quite like either side of our family, and we are a bit of a mystery to them both. Though our father is skilled at making many things—tables, pantries, most of our house—his baking skills peak at toast. You remember: the bread we ate was mostly the bag kind, limp wheat squares that could last a year in the freezer, always less than two-fifty for a loaf, the beginnings of sad sandwiches. There were the occasional Discount Potato Rolls that smelled so strange that you two and I would place them over our mouths and noses and try to breathe through them, our lungs becoming one with the potato. Out-of-season matzoh, if that counts, was sometimes in the pantry. (Pantry comes from panaterie, from panataria, meaning the bread-room, or precisely "the room of the one who has charge of food." It was not the room of the loaf-ward but of his steward.) Our mother is a good steward, and so we generally had those breads which were meant for nourishment and not for savoring.
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The exception was communion. For a time, we wandered among churches as if in the wilderness. Some congregations passed to us broken crackers, occasionally matzoh, upcycled from the first covenant. Others used tiny bits of sandwich bread, like dollar-store manna. But a few churches gave us a taste of perfect sourdough, spongy and savory in a way that made us sure this had once been someone’s body. And we thought: why not? If the God of the cosmos can put himself in human form, why not in bread? It is infinitely more miraculous for a universe-maker to take the tiny form of man than for man to take the form of bread. That first leap is the farthest.
We tried to pick the largest pieces, and wondered if this was wrong. It was, after all, a time for examining one’s intentions. Was it wrong, too, to enjoy this aftermath of a violent sacrifice, to trap for as long as we could a God incarnate in our mouths?
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Once, after I was grown and gone, I accidentally took Catholic communion. The line snaking toward the altar was unavoidable once it got to the pew; to avoid blocking the others I thought I had to go forward. Suddenly, I was in front of a priest and, suddenly, I had a host in my hand. I had not been quick enough to cross my arms. I walked a few steps, unsure what to do with it. One is supposed to eat it immediately, but I am not supposed to eat it at all. Officially, except in extreme circumstances such as imminent death, non-Catholics are not permitted to receive the Eucharist. But there was nowhere to put it but my mouth. It was a most astonishing bread: it had neither texture nor flavor, nor irregularity in shape, and dissolved almost immediately, leaving no trace that it had ever existed. If I could choose a food for people to eat in remembrance of me, it would not be a Catholic communion wafer. But if I were imagining the most miraculous site for transubstantiation, this would be it. The littlest bread magnifies best the Lord’s gracious power to come down to meet us.
When he “took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body given for you,’” there developed some disagreement about how literally he might have meant this. Some have said wholly literally, and others have said less so. Then there is the question of yeast: the Roman Catholic Church insists on unleavened bread for their communion; the Eastern Orthodox Church insists on the leavened. To the Western church it is a matter of approximating the unleavened bread of Jesus’ Passover meal; to the Eastern it is a matter of the bread rising to demonstrate the life and resurrection of Christ. Protestants range all over the place. It is a long story, and there have been a great many other factors, but the short of it is that there are now thousands of separate and exclusive breads and tables, even a few with physical fences around them. At the moment, the bread-table of Christian communion is one that’s rather split apart.
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In Hebrew the word for bread is lechem, its root לחם meaning both “bread” and “struggle.” Our ancestors ate the bread of affliction, that is to say, bread. You may recognize that root from the place the Lord was born: Bet-lehem, the house of bread, the house of war. Even in English, they say, bread comes from Proto-Germanic braudaz, “broken piece, fragment,” from Proto-Indo-European bʰera : “to split, beat, struggle.”
When we speak of breaking bread, we do not imagine a dinner table surrounded with people who refuse to speak to one other, or those who feel that they have more right to the bread than the others, or even those who share begrudgingly or partially. We expect a sense of harmony. Perhaps all things belonging to a bread-keeper require some kneading, pressing, dividing, and re-forming. But for now, this means we don’t all eat together.
Imagine my surprise, then, at entering timidly from a winter night into the bright gold and swirling mosaic of a basilica in the heart of Rome, so far from our cornfields, now knowing to sit while the others go forward, only to be invited and urged to share in the bread and the wine. Imagine telling them you are not, in fact, Catholic; and being told in return, “Yes, we know, please take and eat. You know the Lord.”
The man sitting next to me was a Lutheran from Munich. He, too, was invited to the table. I am still not sure how or if those priests in Trastevere found permission to distribute the holy sacrament to Christians outside of the Roman Catholic Church. This congregation was not a parish, it turned out, but a collection of Romans who gathered to befriend the poor, tend to the sick, visit prisoners, and give bread to the ones whose hunger has grown ecstatic.
And so, I followed them. They brought sandwiches on soft pancarrè to the blinking fluorescence of the policlinico, when the hallways of the hospital filled with sleeping bags after dark. They took off crusts when teeth were lacking. They brought rolls and soup to the Pope’s own shelter beside St. Peter’s gates; to the colonnade and its neighborhood of tiny tents; to the doorsteps of churches filled with cots; to the train station, its piles of bodies and belongings. They invited their guests to take the bread, asking to sit beside them and eat the same. Twelve baskets left over, wheat grown from good soil. It may help you, when you wonder what you are and what you are made of, to know what to do with the bread in your hands.
When we speak of breaking bread, we imagine a warm hearth and welcome, a full and varied table, all things freely given. When I think of communion, I imagine our togetherness in the snowed-in diner: eating the rolls as they are brought to us now and then, saying a prayer, waiting for the real thing.
Sharon Rose Christner
Writer & Loaf-Eater
Sharon’s writing is published or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Plough, Susurrus, Philadelphia Stories, The Philadelphia Citizen, and elsewhere. She is currently writing a book of narrative portraits of homelessness around Vatican City.
Photography by Zoe C.
