What’s left

Here we are with crusted mounds of traffic-weathered snow on the edges of roads, dragged grey through the long weeks of February, an oscillating weather pendulum punctuated by sheets of cold rain and dumps of snow and now at the end we’re wondering what’s next. In the kitchen, though, it’s mostly been sour rye, risen and proofed and baked hot, a thick chewy crust and memory after memory of my Buffalo childhood and the smell of Kaufman’s rye bread drifting over the neighborhood, and when I slice this bread and toast it lightly and skim a thin sheen of butter the rich earthy caraway seeds and the springy dense texture of this bread satisfies some primordial memory, maybe that of ancestors in the wilds of cold northern Europe equally satisfied with a tear of this bread, frothy and alive and bubbling as it’s built, a mostly forgotten grain these days and as we head into Lent I went to an ecumenical Christian service and liked that they used the traditional, remember you are dust and to dust you shall return, the rough texture of ashes beneath his thumb and onto my forehead and those words are liberating because you who read this and I will both in three hundred years be dust again and with that certainty we can and should do what we will and in this season of want I remember so many past years when I believed in the trajectory of the church and thought it an institution that weathered the ages because of some grace and after these recent years of unending revelation of decades-long indifference to the abuse, molestation and rape of children by innumerable priests I continue to feel an anger and rage toward those men who used the power and moral authority of the church to intimidate and silence the very people they vowed to lead and protect, and the administrative, institutional authority of God’s church on earth crushed so many girls and boys that it’s hard for me to go into a church because when I do I want to interrupt the priest saying Mass and challenge his holy vows because I think of all the times I served as an altar boy for years and years and it’s only luck that a pedophile rapist priest was never assigned to my parish because then it would have been me and my friends whose lives would have been torn apart and filled with fear and doubt and mistrust but instead it was a parish over there, and over there, and over there and I feel an anger that can’t be forgiven but even with those feelings when I walk into a church there is a texture to the silence and I feel the pull of the sacrament of the holy Eucharist and even when I feel such anger toward the priests and the institution of the church the ritual ceremony sacrament they perform or conduct connects me back again to an even older, deeper mystery of life and death and the life of a soul or spirit and our unending desire to know and feel what lies beyond the edge of death and if the church sells its gold and vestments and art and churches and properties and jeweled chalices and priests are the people who hear within them a silence that calls to be voiced then perhaps the church has a chance and will not succumb to the fate it currently faces, a slow fall into indifference and irrelevance, and now, as these forty days unfold I wonder what’s left of the church I knew and gospels are filled with references to bread and after a long generation of bad bread in this country, the past decade or two have given us remembories of what bread is, fermented with wild yeasts and shared among neighbors and friends, constantly used and saved and used again, grown and depleted time after time, a continuous nurturing of life even when it slows down and rests in the fridge in an old pickle jar, a chunk of starter just waiting for warmth and wild spores floating through the air.