I had always wanted an electric oven, and got to purchasing one when I retired. Almost a year after that, I still have to read the instruction manual.
Not that I did not take steps towards using it. Already I have several recipes, mostly for pandesal whose unavailability in the house got me to thinking of getting myself an oven in the first place. Of course, I could repair to a bakery, or arrange with the delivery boy, who regularly honks his horn as he passes by the house on his creel-fitted bicycle, for our daily supply, but I would have no assurance of its freshness or taste, and, what most matters to me, its hotness.
And so one day after Morning Prayer, I confided to the wife, together with my reflection on that day’s scripture readings, my intent to acquire a competent electric oven, allotting for the purpose my last allowance as a judge. Love shone through her mystified look and within the day she accompanied me to an appliance shop.
Aside from the recipes, I have inquired as to where I could buy bread flour and rapid-rise yeast (the eggs, sugar and salt I can openly filch from the kitchen).
No question then about my readiness or daring (which more than makes up for my lack of experience). Regardless, I have not got around to baking my first pandesal.
If I use this day as a yardstick, the answer to this puzzle readily presents itself – a thousand and one items daily get in the way of my career as baker, among other things.
Last night, when we inquired why no water came out of our faucets, the guard at the gate told us of a leaking pipe, and that he decided to close the valve out of compassion for the house concerned. We happen to own the house concerned and so this morning, without delay, I contacted a pipefitter and had the materials procured. This took until midmorning when I finally sat down to write this. But soon the clock reminded me that I should start preparing lunch, a task which, including the eating, fell on me since I have the house all to myself.
While I washed the rice cooker, I asked myself why food always trumped other human concerns? And I recalled what John wrote, how the crowd followed Jesus, not so much because he taught and healed them as that he fed thousands of them through a miraculous multiplication of five barley loaves and two fish.
Knowing their thoughts, Jesus told them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled.”
Why, if on a daily basis someone could feed me, and spare me the trouble of having to work and earn my bread – not to mention having to cook and afterwards wash the dishes – I would look for him or her, too.
But I remember Jesus’ advice, that more than anything we should work “for the food that endures for eternal life,” the bread of God that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.
Really, if only for the connotations, I should start making pandesal, to remind me of the bread of God; indeed, of Jesus himself, who feeds me with his own body and blood at Holy Communion, when I receive the host and wine the priest has consecrated, which requires faith, the very same that Jesus asks for from those who wanted, not the food that perishes, but the food that endures for eternal life.
When they heard about the bread of God, the imperishable food which gives life to the world, the crowd asked Jesus, “Sir, give us this bread always.”
And Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”
Clearly, just as every tree evokes the cross, as Joseph Mary Plunkett tells us in his poem, so every bread, even the one I still have to make with my still untried oven, suggests the bread of Holy Communion, the Lord Jesus himself.
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