Sourdough as Spiritual Discipline

Sourdough is on the rise. Though the COVID-19 pandemic has incited fear, panic, and partisan rancor, it has also revived older traditions that take time to cultivate and master, like bread baking. Many of us have decided to use the extra time on our hands in quarantine for baking sourdough bread.

Major news outlets have taken note of sourdough’s surge in popularity. The Washington Post reported on yeast and flour shortages brought on by the sudden influx of bread bakers. (Insider tip: when the supermarket runs out of flour, check your local farms. I ordered organic bread flour, wheat flour, and all-purpose flour in bulk from an organic farm near Durham, North Carolina.)

CNN published a piece about how baking sourdough was helping people cope with the anxiety associated with the pandemic. One writer confessed how the process of baking sourdough helped her handle the isolation. The New Yorker posted a humorous piece that chronicled the existential thoughts of sourdough starter. 

At one point in history, all bread was sourdough—“a dough made of flour and water fermented without yeast for baking bread.” Bread experts attribute leavening bread to the Egyptians, who used wild yeast (naturally fermented from the air, flour, and even our bodies) for brewing beer and baking bread.

How to Become a Spiritual Minimalist

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Do you have the strength to go without?

This is the question turning over in my brain for the last several weeks. It’s a question that was posed in something I read in December, which I’ll get to in a minute. It’s a question that’s forced me to answer some hard questions about the way I live in this, our modern world of luxury.

And I want to drill that word into our brains for a moment: luxury.

Since my “reading,” My wife and I have this thing where we randomly identify the luxury in our lives that we’re unaware of. A luxury that we’re unaware of means simply something that we take for granted; like a hot shower, for example. Anyone who’s travelled on a missions trip knows this.

I can vividly remember a trip I took to Nepal with a small church team. I was so excited to take a shower after hiking to different villages for days in the mountains. There I stood, in what was the equivalent of a spare closet with a spigot, dancing beneath a very low hose sticking out of the wall pouring ice-cold water down my back and head. We don’t know how good we have it!

Simple luxuries like this are the fabric of the developed world. We don’t think about hot showers or buying massive televisions or binge-watching shows or overeating all the time and the list goes on, doesn’t it?

And I haven’t even touched on our consumption habits. We live in a society where our towns revolve around consumption centers.

“Oh, they’re putting in a new Home Goods center {fill in the blank with any box store}!” I’m not suggesting these stores are inherently bad, just observing that our culture revolves around the consumption of goods.

Our consumption has mushroomed so much in recent years that Marie Kondo, the bestselling author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (which I highly recommend!), has her own Netflix show. Her minimalist approach has breathed new life into people’s homes and helped them gain freedom over their “stuff.”

The Spiritual Minimalist

Minimalism is an interesting word.

It’s popular in design, for example. My friend Myquillyn Smith’s design brand is all about “cozy minimalism” (another book I highly recommend!)

Minimalism is valued in the writing world as well. Ernest Hemingway comes to mind when I think of a writer who used a small economy of words to tell his stories. 

But have we ever considered applying minimalism to our spiritual lives? I’m not suggesting a reduction of spiritual practices or anything like that, I’m riffing on the idea that a person can reduce distractions in her life that impede her communion with God. 

Picture Jesus walking the road to Bethany with his disciples.

He has no home, no source of income that makes any kind of sense to a modern person. He relies on God to provide and protect him. He moves about his work in great freedom.

He is like a walking lily of the field—to pull from one of the images Jesus liked to use in describing something that was literally carefree or stress-less. 

You look at Jesus and there’s a simplicity to his life that is alluring. He’s a living example of minimalism. We find the principals we love about minimalism in artistic expression expressed in the physical and spiritual life of Jesus.  

Keep that image of Jesus walking with his disciples in your mind as you read through the next section.

That Thing I Read

So here’s what really hit me hard when I read it a few months ago.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (one of my favourite writers/thinkers) once observed the lowly lifestyle of Jesus.

Jesus did not bring attention to himself, and he did not attempt to lure the masses. He lived humbly as a servant. He did not benefit from earthly possessions, nor do we get the sense from Scripture that Jesus desired possessions during his ministry.

“He did not trouble himself with house or home,” writes Kierkegaard.

Jesus did not seek shelter, the love or the romantic company of a woman, nor was he drawn to things that “usually claim the attention of men.”

It was a beautiful life, he says; even romantic, when you think about it. But then Kierkegaard asked something that got my attention: Is it appropriate?

“The question,” says Kierkegaard, “is whether a human being may venture to express the same idea.” Meaning, should we seek to be foot-loose wanderers?

I won’t keep you guessing. Kierkegaard answers this question: Yes.

I was beyond intrigued.

But there was a condition to his answer: A man or woman may so venture if he or she possesses the needed strength.

Strength? I thought. For what?

Here’s where it gets good. The strength to:

“lose himself in the service of the spirit that it never occurs to him to take care for meat and drink; if he is certain that want will not distract him, and that distress will not confound for him the structure of his life and teach him to rue that he did not first master the simple things before he presumed to understand more—then he may indeed venture, and his greatness will be more glorious than the serene security of the lilies of the field.”

This idea of possessing such strength to live “without” gripped me for days. I talked my wife’s ear off about it while considering whether or not I possessed the strength Kierkegaard described.

So, I created this short quiz in my mind and ruminated upon it with my wife while driving the PA Turnpike over the Christmas break:

1. What can I live without?

2. What pleasure(s) or luxuries distract me from spiritual intimacy with God?

3. Have my desires mastered me?

4. Am I willing to lose myself in the service of the spirit?

5. When was the last time I fasted in order to draw close to God?

I’m going to end here for now.

My challenge to you is: take the quiz. If you can get nitty-gritty-honest with yourself I think you’ll find it beneficial.

And, I’d love to hear your reflections. Send them along. Or, we can start a “Thread” here in the newsletter—it’s a cool option that allows us to meet up digitally and discuss topics; kind of like a comment thread but in real time.

In the next installment of Further Up, I’ll share Seven Insights to Spiritual Minimalism that I’m developing. And again, I’d love your feedback on them.

And Finally

The subtitle to this post is “Regaining Our Spiritual Grit.” As I reflected on whether or not I possessed the strength to grow deeper in my spiritual life, it occurred to me that I may have gotten soft spiritually.

When we’re on fire for God in those early years of our faith, everything is so new and fresh; we possess a kind of “edge” that helps us see the world for what it is and how it affects us. We begin to notice things about our lives that need to change.

But familiarity breeds contempt. It’s a sad reality that time and familiarity with “church culture” can deaden our spiritual grit and make us soft and flabby Jesus followers.

I’m excited to shed the flab. Some evidence of this is The Saturday Stoke. I designed this short podcast as a way for me to encourage and challenge you guys—my brothers and sisters in the faith. And it’s lit me up. I can’t wait to dig into the Word and my books for nuggets that will spur us on towards love and good deeds.

If you’re all in on shedding the spiritual flab, then let’s get to it. See you here again real soon!