Liturgy Bread: Homely Work

Last updated on: November 11, 2020 at 9:48 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Liturgy Bread: Homely Work 2020-11-11T21:48:24-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Freshly baked bread smell fills our house. Hope is baking the bread for the liturgy tomorrow at the School and College.

Each piece has a special stamp and the fact that we cannot just eat this sweet smelling bread is difficult: behold liturgy comes quickly, but not quickly enough. I made the case that our son and his friend Andrew could eat the bread with Biblical precedent, but Hope shushed me and shewed them out of the kitchen and away from the shewbread. She pointed out there was ham (another fine smell) and plenty else to eat. We could wait until tomorrow and eat in our outdoor chapel under the live oak tree.

Today smells like fall, even if the temperature is still late summer.

Fall comes slowly to Houston, one day the average temperature is no longer in the nineties, a week of seventies will trick you, and then the eighties come again. The wise notice that the nineties have not returned and that the nights are getting colder. This week we will see some sixties. Pumpkins have been carved, candy distributed, and now our turkey day decorations are appearing. My Madden game, received each Christmas by Hope’s good grace and played slowly, is moving toward the playoffs. Hope cleaned out the cupboards and the fridge getting ready to stock up for the Holidays. The cupboard looks bare, but expectant, waiting for the harvest to be gathered from HEB.

We have done a good bit of cleaning, moving, readjusting the last few weeks as the seasons changed. Friends have fought many good fights in the name of civilization, but as Hope makes liturgy bread and a home she is making civilization. Her tasks today created order, cleanliness, good smells, and an element of divine worship. Baking liturgy bread is not standing at the altar. Baking liturgy bread is not the mental fight for classical Orthodox civilization. Hope is doing classical Orthodox civilization. Our house was a pandemic haven and needed a good cleaning. Our home had been our retreat, a fortress, and now had to be restored to normal time.

She has made the house smell good, swept it clean, filled it with wonderful music lest a worse stench, dirt, and pandemonium return.

I have seen the David in Florence, so beautiful that even memory jolts me awake. I have been to the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, and had a perfect afternoon on the Isle of Skye. I have trembled and wept at the sacred beauty of the Hagia Sophia, the greatest Church in the world.

Our homely work is not like these great works of God and His inspired artists. Baking the liturgy bread produces lumpish dough and then cakes that we will eat together with our friends and colleagues tomorrow. This does not seem like much until we recall that this is just one work of a unified Christian civilization that transcends time.

Hope has joined millions of women all over the world in the past, present, and future baking the Liturgy bread. She has cleaned and I have worked with her to make a home ready for Thanksgiving. We are clearing, cleaning, creating in our small house as a promissory note for the cleansing of polluted nature and defiled cathedrals. We join the faithful in many lands in this small work, taken together the small is made great by God, and so a great spiritual cosmos is created: an icon of the world to come. Our house is emptied and made ready, like many Christian homes, waiting for Christ to come and be born of Holy Wisdom. Our Liturgy bread is baked and when our Father in Christ blesses that bread and we eat together, we join with countless people and recollect the Lord’s death until He comes.

Our small work is part of the greater work, a small cleansing of the profane, sacred smell within the true City that was, is, and is kept in safety for all time by the intercession of the Theotokos.

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