Momma’s Bread
Of many childhood memories, the most vivid include memories of family mealtimes. In part, this is because of shear size: “family” included Mom, Dad, two older sisters, a dozen and a half foster kids, and me – twenty-three, to be exact, at its largest. We shrunk after that as new theories in Foster Care required sending some of the guys off to a boy’s ranch, rudely breaking up our resident baseball and football teams.
But even then, as for the mealtimes, intimate dinners they weren’t – they were far more like church potlucks where you have to fill your plate in haste before everything good is gone.
Yet more memorable than the hustle and bustle of the elbows you had to dodge as arms and hands reached from platters, to plates, to mouths, was mother’s homemade bread. It didn’t matter much to me whether the meal was chicken, pot roast, spaghetti or soup – or whether I got my fair share of any of that – as long as I got plenty of Momma’s bread.
To me, her bread was synonymous with wellbeing – give me thick slices of that bread with butter and a bowl of beans and I was in heaven!
Heavenly bread, indeed it was. And for this reason I took that bread very seriously. Bread, you see, was not only a central feature of mealtime, but a central feature of church time; to me bread was heaven, well, seven days a week…
I remember more than one time the preacher quoting scripture and declaring authoritatively, “Blessed are those eating bread in the kingdom of God.” I just knew that this was no ordinary bread; in the kingdom, it must be the king’s bread, just as any bread served in Mom’s kitchen was her bread. But if they had bread in heaven, I wanted to be there!
I tell you for sure, you would have been blessed to eat that bread in my Mom’s kitchen; how much more blessed, then, to eat bread in the king’s kitchen! So I wanted to know, who will eat this bread?
Here we were, a hodgepodge of 23 folk, ranging in age from about nine up, from probably most of the racial identities found in Central New Mexico, plus the Fiji Islands – yep, we welcomed into the group a set of sisters, two beautiful young ladies, one dark ebony, the other pale ivory; strange, huh? We eventually met their parents when these sisters, unlike most of the kids, went back to Mom and Dad; Mom was light skinned with blond hair and Fijian features; Dad as handsome as Mom was pretty but as black as a starless, moonless, midnight. No one cared; black was beautiful without anyone saying so or even thinking about it. And white – well, I was the whitest of the bunch and for me it just meant red sunburn the first few days of summer when we plunged into the Rio Grande on Memorial Day to exit on Labor Day for back to school and “leave the mud behind,” Mom insisted. I longed for a deep, dark tan, but lived through the summer with red-blotched white, glad to have the mud to cover it up, while wishing for some of the color God splashed on everyone around me. Red and yellow black and white, with brown in between; along with Mom’s bread, mealtimes were a virtual radiant display of living color. We lived ebony and ivory with south of the border harmonizing as Indian love call sang tenor.
So I just knew that like eating Momma’s bread anyone of any color or circumstance could eat heaven’s bread. It just didn’t matter the color of your skin, the accent of your native tongue, or background at all, God loved you even when you couldn’t be sure your flesh and blood Mom and Dad did. I never doubted my parent’s love, but many of these kids did. So with her bread Mom spread a table set with love for all, and if with her bread she did that, well, along with heaven’s bread God does, too. I was convinced.
So I asked. About heaven’s bread, I mean; not the preacher, I didn’t ask him, but I asked Mom. After all, she was the one who insisted I memorized scripture before I could read, and the 23rd Psalm became a staple of my scripture repertoire, and didn’t it say there, “You set a table before me…my cup overflows?” While David didn’t say so, surely there was bread on that table. So, how about it? Where does heaven’s bread come from?
Now I knew that Momma’s bread came from the oven, after hours of mixing enriched flour with water and yeast, and kneading it, kneading it, and kneading it and allowing it to rise to knead it all over again. But then as the emptied flour sacks went into dresses for my sisters, the bread sure as shootin’ went in to the oven. So does God have an oven?
Jesus is the bread, Momma said, confirmed by Dad, who was the real Bible teacher. Living bread; and yes, he went through the fire for us, they agreed because the Bible said so. He died, descended into hell, fought the devil good, tied him up tight then let him loose just a little bit. That’s why we have kids without Mom’s and Dad’s, it was explained. The devil hates everybody and is out to do as much harm as possible. Of course, people are responsible, too. Dad, the disciplinarian made sure we knew with a spanking or two, when deserved. It wouldn’t do to say, “The devil made me do it.” Such practical applications kept the subject from getting too deep. The chatter went back to the bread. So God serves Jesus…
“For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world…I am the bread of life,” Jesus said, said Mom. This led to deep discussions, or as deep as it can get with pre-teen kids gathered in a long, hard-wood floored living room after supper in the fall after the mud of the Rio Grande has been set aside till the next summer and we surrendered to cooler evenings indoors. So we can eat the bread of heaven now, I thought, said so, and others agreed. So we prayed around the room, sang a hymn, and thanked Jesus for the table he had spread right there in Momma’s living room with plenty of heaven’s bread for everyone to eat. Red, yellow, black, and white with brown there, too, received Jesus as the bread served by Mom but from a table in the kingdom of God. Heavenly bread for sure: prepared by God. But it was served by Mom, and received by kids who tasted and enjoyed bread in the kingdom of God because they had first tasted Momma’s.
