PostEspresso.Net

I love making bread. I especially love making bread in the most ancient way I can. Sourdough. Of course, it is hard to mention sourdough to an American without their mind becoming fixated on San Francisco. It’s like they cannot understand sourdough starters and natural yeasts without remembering the (in)famous San Francisco sourdough bread. But sourdough is more than a kind of bread, it’s a technique that predates the gold rush of ’49 and all the westward expansion of the penultimate century. There would be very little bread if it weren’t for the sourdough method of using naturally occurring yeast and bacteria for leavening. At least it would probably all be a lot flatter. In fact, it was not until recent centuries that bakers began to use the kinds of yeast they use today. And of course, just because you use a sourdough starter doesn’t mean you will have sour tasting bread.

I like baking in the old way, the way it was done by generations and generations, before anybody knew what yeast and bacteria were. Making bread connects me to this past. I feel like I understand something of what my forbears did on a regular basis. I like that.

Learning to make bread sheds some light on my spiritual life as well. Sunday school never really taught me to appreciate the biblical references to bread making. It is hard to understand the Hebrew people making unleavened bread, until you’ve tried to make bread with sourdough leavening. It takes hours and hours. The old two hour baking method with yeast packets didn’t exist back then, nor double action baking powder. So also Christ’s parable about leaven mixing into flour makes much more sense when we think of mixing a sourdough leavening into a vat of flour. Its not just that the flour becomes leavened. Its more like the flour becomes leavening. But even if these realizations don’t change the overall meaning of how one might interpret these passages, learning to make bread still connects us to them in a experiential way. And that experience makes these passages speak more to me, makes them alive to me.

Perhaps none of this has anything to do with Cafe Grumpy. I’m not really sure. I could string on some thoughts about how the experience of going to Cafe Grumpy is somehow life altering, or paradigm shifting. But honestly, that wouldn’t be true. I did enjoy the experience, certainly. And maybe just being a smaller coffee shop that makes very good espresso is enough for me to give it a good recommendation. But the more I try to draw profound conclusions from the experience of it, the more I feel like I’m stretching the truth.

It’s funny, though, that making bread evokes a more profound sense of life and the world than a visit to one of the better coffee shops in the city. Maybe it’s because while bread-making seems mundane, I still think it is one of the most marvelous things that humanity can do. And while I wouldn’t call the espresso at cafe grumpy mundane, by any means, it simply doesn’t seem as marvelous and as surprising as “ordinary” bread.

When I visited Cafe Grumpy, I tried their flavor of the moment. It was a very different espresso than the ordinary, full of powerful lime hints, rather like drinking espresso flavored lime juice. I’m not yet sure whether I completely liked it or not. That’s not to say that I am unsure whether or not it was good. It was certainly a very well made espresso, a good extraction of the flavors, potent, a triple ristretto that I would drink again, if I could. I also appreciate the attempt to bring in single origin espressos. Espresso blends can be amazing works of art, but having a single origin espresso where I can sample all the flavors of just one region, or even farm, that evokes a deeper connection to the people and place that made the coffee. Right?

But at this point, I’m overcome by self-criticism. Who am I to say that making bread connects me to the Hebrew people of ancient times? Likewise, who am I to think that drinking a coffee from Ethiopia connects me to the Ethiopian farmers who grew it? The connections I think I feel, (or hypothesize feeling – to be more truthful), may only be projections. I am neither an ancient Hebrew nor and Ethiopian farmer, and the very attempt to portray them for myself, to create an image of them, begins to seem incredibly insensitive. I cannot define the one by their way of making bread nor the other by the coffee I drink. To do so would be a radical reduction the persons and people involved, bordering on a strain of racism. What if my sense of connectedness is only my own attempt to restructure the world around me according to a regulated, limited programme of expanding the horizons of my knowledge? What if my attempt to connect to others is at its base nothing more than a redefinition of myself undertaken from the safe confines of my own home?  But maybe this is too cynical.

Again the temptation to draw out of everyday life some kind of profound reflection on state of humanity tempts me. At every move this notion that I can extract profound truth assails me. When once I think myself free of it, by exposing the falsehood that my projections employ, I am again fallen under it’s power. The moment I acknowledge the failure of my unending quest is the same moment that I have again succumbed to the temptation. For I think I have again found something profound in my inability to extract the profound from the world around me. In reality all I have found is that I’m really nothing more than an armchair academic, who attempts to create things that are far outside his own grasp.

As I continue to reflect, however, I am beginning to realize that my addiction to coffee shops was never really about how I experience others, or how I experience the things that others make or do. Instead, I go to coffee shops to tell myself what I think about the world. I sit down again and again to re-examine myself, to re-evaluate my methods of dealing with the world and myself. In short, I go because I need to figure things out. I need self-reflection. The thing is, I feel the same way about making bread, or even just doing dishes. I feel connected not so much to others, but to the depths of myself, to the moment of simple application to the simplest of processes. Whether I’m kneading dough, or sipping on a macchiatto, or slowly scrubbing off the dishes, I’m finding a way to come to grips with who I am. All the rest is just a benefit of that.

And yet this new sense of myself would be utterly pointless if there were not also some means open to change myself. I don’t want to merely accept the person that I am, but to see that person become the one that God had in mind when I was born. I guess it all comes back to that for me.

I revise again.

I love coffee shops because I love the time to reflect on what my life could be. I love being able to challenge those aspects of myself that fall short. But mostly, I love those moments when I feel God’s encouragement to face all those things about me and my world that need fixing. I love those moments when I am sure of my calling, even if I’m still doubting. I love those moments when I feel inspired to write, even though I must constantly revise it all. I love those moments when I finally begin to see something, anything, as it really is.

I realize that I must guard against thinking that such revelations of the world necessitate exegesis. Not every coffee shop hides some profound truth about the world. Nor can my exogenous experiences of coffee give me deep insight into the lives of those who made it. But this doesn’t mean that my exercise of trying out new coffee shops and writing about them is fruitless. However, when I get the opportunity to set asside some part of my day, just to be alone with myself and my God, I find the deepest kinds of encouragement, and the deepest kinds of insight into who I am. Even if neither of those is ever profound, still I have profited in the exercise.