O Master Baker, shape me as Thou will (poem)

A devotional poem inspired by the sourdough process

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This piece was inspired by Susan Kuenzi's post Bread sustains life: lessons from the sourdough baking process, in which she looked at each step of the process as a metaphor for our own spiritual lives. I'll explain more in the Afterword, which you're welcome to read first if you prefer to know the origins of this piece beforehand.

Photo by Nadya Spetnitskaya on Unsplash

O Master Baker, shape me as Thou will

When you created me,
I saw of myself only a humble bit of dust.
I was content, happy with my being,
A spark of Your joy in the heart of my soul,
And hoping, ah, hoping,
That forever could I remain.

But You knew I could be so much more.
For reasons I fathomed not
And to my great dismay,
You brought upon me the first
Of what I perceived as many sufferings.
Mercilessly you drowned me—dust into mud—
Affecting what I hoped,
In my love for old comforts,
Was but a temporary change.

Such was not my fate.
I cried to You, restore my being!
Make good your promise of peace!
Yet You ignored my pleas
And, leaving me abandoned in the dark,
A slow fermentation
Wrought transformation,
A new form for my smallness,
A new form in which
I ventured to hope for comfort.

But then you tore me asunder.
Why, oh why? I protested in despair.
Why hast Thou stolen half my being,
Leaving me broken, a fragment of what I was?
I pleaded to be made whole again, restored,
Ignoring in my bitterness that which You'd given,
That you'd replaced what You'd taken.
For in my clinging to what I was,
I saw not the infusion of fresh vitality
That nourished my soul.

Soon, as my new self became familiar,
Did the bubbles of my happiness dare to rise,
Only to be cloven, ripped,
Violently seized and split again—
Another part of me lost forever.
My suffering heart begged for succor:
Why is this happening to me?
Where is Your love?
Oh, can you not make it right?
Why must the world be so full of pain?
For as yet, even when my self was remade,
I could not understand my destiny.
I prayed to go back, to return to my comforts,
Promising to remedy my errors
For which You must surely be punishing me.

Yet twice more, thrice again,
Despite my lamentations, my recriminations,
My anger, my threats to abandon You,
You inflicted upon me this loss, these hurts,
Time over time, rending all I held dear.
Even indeed, even as I strove
In heroic faith to accept my lot,
These cycles of brokenness and joy,
I began to doubt You.
Such suffering—what purpose could it have?
Why allow You such torment?
Why allow You, in your omnipotence,
So much violence and loss?
Perhaps I was wrong to think you even real.

I could not understand, for I could not see,
Nay—could not believe—that mine, as for all,
Was a destiny beyond all reckoning,
Beyond conception,
As suddenly I was buried alive,
A landslide desiccating my soft, moist body,
The bubbles of my joy smothered and crushed.
Oh, the times!
My little self scattered, lost in the cataclysm,
Everything I'd known brutally buried.

And even then, as if I was but a plaything
For Your sadistic delight,
You beat me, folded me
Head over heels, heels over head,
One arm, one leg twisted into the other.
Oh, the cruelty!
Over and over you rolled me, flattened me,
Shaped and reshaped—pressure unbearable!—
My protests unheeded in the tempest.
With each pause I hoped for peace,
Only anon to roil, roil, roil yet more.
What purpose and reason in this madness could there be?
I must not be worthy,
Not worthy to live, not worthy to love,
Or be loved.

When at last the chaos did cease,
I knew not who I was—
A form so unlike any
In the commonplace mind.
So much had I lost,
Yet…somehow I was much more.
And despite the insufferable agony of trials,
My essence remained.
That spark of joy yet—always, forever—untouched,
Ready still to rise and grow,
To bubble and blossom,
Rising, expanding.

Chance I dream to find rest at last?
To find peace in this new reality?
Indeed, these ordeals had ended,
Yet one more remained,
One still more terrible than the rest.
From a long, quiet calmness
Wherein I hoped eternally to dwell,
You viciously slashed my breast
And thrust me into a furnace of hell,
My dreams shattered in damnation's flames.
The oppressive heat seared my open wounds,
Scorched my skin,
Penetrated to my heart.
Surely death now would be my sole consolation,
And indeed I beseeched You:
Let it come quickly! this annihilation!
If You've any mercy,
Spare me from this fiendish torture.

Still—are You there at all?—
My appeals, even from a soul so desperate as mine,
Went unheeded in the silence.
Until, when the utter limits of forbearance had I reached,
When I thought that I must surely perish,
There awoke a faint glimmer,
A soundless herald deep within my being,
A transformation of novel design
A knowing that yes, I would die—
My old self of dust and water and effervescent happiness
Would most certainly die,
Every thought and idea of self demolished,
And in their place, the dawning realization
That from the very start
You, O Master Baker,
Knew for what purpose for which you brought me into being.
That least bit of dust, of flour,
Now become, by Thy hands,
And by Thy love,
The sustaining bread of life.

Photo by Monika Grabkowska on Unsplash

Afterword

In Susan Kuenzi's post, I particularly noted these lines that likened God to the baker and us to the bread:

Lots of steps to this process…shaping, folding, and more.
How is God shaping you spiritually and emotionally during this season of your life?

I left a comment for Susan in her post to this effect:

I enjoy that you draw analogies from the relationship of the baker and the bread to how God might be relating to us...through making the starter, getting mixed into bread, getting kneaded and squishes, getting shaped and baked—what seems to us a pretty intense process!—to ultimately turn us into something we might never have imagined when we were but a tablespoon of flour.

This intense process, which we usually interpret as unwarranted suffering, is what I wrote about in Characters who don't know how the story will ends. We, as characters in this drama of life, don't typically understand the destiny for which we were made. God, the Master Baker, does, and in His love—does a baker not love the loaves that he or she is making?—subjects us, the bits of flour that begin the process, to a long stream of what we interpret from a purely self-centered point of view. Clinging to our limitations and to our egoic ideas of who we are in our smallness, we protest vehemently against the perceived pains and sufferings that God seems to be inflicting upon us, but only because we don't understand where they're leading, what's at the end of the process.

But God knows. He most certainly knows, and in His love wants to liberate us from those limitations that we impose upon ourselves. If we, then, can attune to that understanding, then we not only realize that the changes and transformations are necessary, but we welcome them and even celebrate them as is demonstrated in the lives of many saints. And once we cooperate with the transformational process to carry us to the destiny for which God has planned for us, we overcome this "suffering" and embrace it truly as grace.

The idea of God as a baker also reminded me of a prayer that appears in Whispers from Eternity by Paramhansa Yogananda, the title of which is "O Divine Sculptor, chisel Thou my life according to Thy design!"¹ You can see the influence of this prayer on the title of my poem.

Reflecting on all this along with Susan's post, I wondered, "What would be the experience of the bread? How would the bread, starting as but a tablespoon of flour, perceive what to it much seem like a harrowing process of being soaked, repeatedly torn apart and fermented, kneaded and shaped, and finally slashed and baked?" I thus wrote this piece to express that perception but did so in a retrospective of one who, having reached the end of the story, finally understands why everything had to happen exactly as it did, for that is how sourdough must be made.

As such, I hope that it might inspire you toward that divine understanding, even and perhaps especially during times of struggle and confusion.

O Master Baker,
In my heart full of love,
My soul full of trust,
My mind full of peace,
I will, with all my strength,
Whether I understand or not,
Embrace every transforming gift
With which you bless my life,
Even though they shatter
My delusions and limitations,
That I may fulfill the destiny
For which You did create me.
Shape me as Thou will.

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1. Here's the full text of that prayer:

Every sound that I make, let it have the vibration of Thy voice. Every thought that I think, let it be saturated with the consciousness of Thy presence.

Let every feeling that I have glow with Thy love. Let every act of my will be impregnated with Thy divine vitality. Let every thought, every expression, every ambition, be ornamented by Thee.

O Divine Sculptor, chisel Thou my life according to Thy design!