muffins as metaphor

I made English muffins today for the first time since last summer.

Since classes are over at Duke, my work schedule and location has changed, putting me back on the lunch shift at the Durham restaurant, and making the muffins, which are our hamburger buns. The recipe has several steps that require some attention. First, I mix warm water, honey, and yeast, add some flour and then some more flour, then eggs, oil, and salt. I let it rest for twenty minutes and add more flour and let it rest again, this time until it doubles. Then I roll out the dough, cut the muffins, and let them rest another twenty minutes before I brown them on the flat top and finish cooking them in the oven.

At least that’s how I did it today.

We have a handwritten recipe that goes back to the opening of the restaurant and the guy who taught everyone to make the muffins. His notes provide the basic framework, but we have made changes – adjustments – as we’ve gone along, tweaking the recipe to make it work better. For instance, when I first learned to make them last summer I was told to let the dough rest thirty minutes. Today the guy who is the main lunch guy told me he had learned twenty minutes made for a better muffin. At least that’s what works for now. It will change. Trust me.

Eat, Pray, LoveGilbert

Whether a kitchen or a congregation – or any other organization, when we gather ourselves in groups we move toward codifying the way we do things, creating rituals and recipes to make sure we do things right. Often, I think, the things that become written in stone or scripture or on recipe cards began as metaphors of discovery and imagination – statements of faith – but, once passed down, become statements of the status quo because perpetuating the institution rises higher and higher on the agenda. I’m not sure there’s any way around it.

But we don’t have to succumb to it.

The basic movements I made this morning matched those I made a year ago, but I had to pay attention to how I did the familiar steps to make them work. There, in the baking of the bread, I learned again that life are faith are mixtures of all that changes and all that stays the same. I don’t allow either to remain vibrant if I hold to close to the letter of the recipe, not allowing for anything new to come into the mix.

It’s the breaking of the bread that is the vital ritual for me in worship – our most enduring ritual of faith. Tonight we sat with a group of folks from church over coffee and the conversation turned to some of the different ways we celebrated the Lord’s Supper during Lent and the way different people responded to the varying modes. On our walk home, as Ginger and I continued the conversation, it struck me that Communion also needs to be tweaked, if you will, to stay alive. Or perhaps it’s better said that I need my heart tweaked when I come to the Table, since the point is not for the congregation to adjust to me but for me to take my place in the recipe that is my community of faith and adjust to the mix that we might make of ourselves a joyful offering to our God.

At least that’s what the muffins told me.

Peace,
Milton