52 Loaves by William Alexander Read Free Book Online

make their own choices later, as adults, as to whether they wanted Christianity to be a part of their own lives.
    I had already made my own decision, even as I continued going, week after week, becoming increasingly sympathetic to the childish behavior in the backseat. Once in a while I even begged off myself, professing urgent work in the garden or the workshop, guiltily letting Anne do the dirty work of lugging the kids to church. Finally I stopped going except for Christmas and Easter; then I stopped attending altogether. I blamed the endless potluck suppers and uninspiring sermons, but these petty complaints mainly made it easier to come to grips with the fact that I had simply lost my faith.
    This is not to say that I am antichurch or against organized religion in general. I am neither for nor against. I know a great many people whose faith brings them irreplaceable comfort and meaning—I suspect my great-grandfather found few atheists in the Pennsylvania coal mines—and the church has through the centuries provided a moral beacon and filled important social gaps left by secular society. For me, however, attendance at church felt like a charade, an increasingly uncomfortable one at that, once I had come to grips with the fact that I was no longer buying any of it. I was willing to leave open the possibility of some kind of higher being who created the universe (although that made me feeluneasily like the proverbial goldfish who is sure there is a God, because who else changes the water twice a week?), but surely not the God of the Old and New Testaments, an omnipresent, personal God who listens to our prayers and takes an interest in our lives. In truth, I wasn’t sure if I was an atheist, an agnostic, a deist, or something else. I know I didn’t believe in any kind of heavenly afterlife, although I found myself forced to reevaluate this certainty after my father (himself a religious man) died suddenly and prematurely over twenty-five years ago. Shortly afterward, he’d visited me in my sleep on a couple of occasions—his appearances more vivid than any dream, so real, in fact, that they could only be described as visions—to let me know he was still there if I needed him and, most importantly, to comfort me in my grief. I had just turned thirty, the age when I think adulthood really begins, when we are finally ready to leave the extended adolescence of college behind. These visitations by my father were disquieting because if I accepted that I had been visited by a spirit, I must therefore accept that spirits, and an afterlife, exist. After a while I concluded that these apparitions were more likely a cheap parlor trick of my mind than a proof of God’s existence, but then, sadly, Dad, as if in rebuke, stopped coming around. In retrospect I wish I’d suspended judgment a bit longer.
    In truth, the kids weren’t the only reason I had attended church. I liked the ritual and the tradition. I found repose in repetition, in reciting prayers and singing hymns that I’d known for nearly half a century, in sitting in the same pew each week. Fortunately I found that my new Sunday morning ritual—baking—took me out of myself in the same way.
    I had come to love my early mornings alone in the kitchen, the silence and the stillness broken only by the chirping of waking birds in summer and the hiss of the steam radiators in winter. All week I’d look forward to sliding across the wood floor, bowling-alley slippery from flour dust, in my socks, as I skidded around the kitchen. I’d come to cherish the feel of the dough in my hands at that magical point where it passes from sticky to smooth and elastic. In the same way that I used to take pride in not opening the prayer book to recite that one last prayer after Communion, I tried to bake without looking at the recipe: 2⅓ cups all-purpose flour, 1 cup bread flour, ⅓ cup each rye and whole wheat—I knew it, you might say, like I knew the Lord’s Prayer.
    This