Dear friends,
I went to Ireland with my family in late April/early May. Walking the land across the sea where my ancestors once lived, toiled, and broke bread was meaningful in all the ways I’d hoped it would be whenever I would daydream about “returning” to Ireland—as well as many ways I could not have anticipated. The landscape, the people, even the simple food we gathered at grocery stores for picnics and “homemade” suppers at the places we stayed had a lasting effect on my whole family, including our 8-year-old, who, upon pulling the car up to our home after a 14-hour day of travel, remarked, “It really is bittersweet, isn’t it? I am happy to be home but I also want to still be in Ireland.” My thoughts exactly. In fact I’ve had that “bittersweet” feeling for a few weeks now.
Perhaps “bittersweet” is just a good description of belonging in this world, especially in 2023, when our understanding of the world—the people and places and cultures and practices in it—has expanded so widely in recent decades. Personally, I long to encounter all of it, even as I know I never will because it is simply impossible. For one, I don’t have the budget nor time for an around the world plane ticket. I also hate flying. I also love to be at home. But also, it’s simply not impossible to encounter the incredible vastness of even our home planet (on this side of eternity, anyway). There is an expansiveness to all of creation that, even in our increasingly wide-view lens of the world, we cannot come close to even surmising, much less encountering directly. There is an expansiveness to all that simply is, even within ourselves, that no imagination is big enough to hold. This is to say nothing of God, who by nature is an eternally receding horizon of even more more. And yet, I believe, the divine still draws impossibly near—and lets us know in the eruption of spring’s delights, the blossoms and the buds.
All this bigness certainly could make us feel very small, but it can also be an opportunity to see this life now as we experience it as an endless adventure, a perpetual journey of discovery as we keep edging ourselves closer to those horizons within and outside ourselves. We can experience the particularity of where we find ourselves right now in our neighborhoods, our chosen families, our families of origin, even in our bodies as a place we are both sent from and return to. That’s what I think home is: a place to rest and restore but not a place to get lazy.
I suppose I was thinking of all this because last Sunday was Pentecost. There is something inherently “big” about Pentecost. I imagine the tongues of flame described in the Book of Acts descending less like fire and more like fat raindrops into puddles and ponds and dispersing the water gathered there. Those splashes came from somewhere. They had a place to leap from as droplets. They came from somewhere before moving onto the next thing.
I’m not really sure where I’m trying to arrive in this meditation I’m offering to you in this newsletter, but these are the words that have come to me as I’ve sought some meaning in that shared sense of the "bittersweet” in arriving home in Chicago.
I am also thinking of a conversation I had with my kid this week about the start of Pride month. We talked about how identity isn’t always fixed and how that is complicated and challenging for a lot of people. But our lives and experiences shape who we are and the kind of stories we tell about ourselves. Whatever our identities (always plural), I said, one thing is true and certain: You are a beloved child of God.
In my family, this is home, this is the place from which we are flung: our belovedness that comes from beyond us. But even that truth is not fixed or stagnant. It is dynamic, growing, deepening love, with every passing moment, which I know because of my own experience of loving my child. This, too, is bittersweet because, while begun in me, first as a twinkle in my eye, our lives together are a constant flinging away from and returning to.
I marvel at the possibilities that our connections to places and people hold. I think this is why I longed to “return” to Ireland well before I’d ever been and why I think that longing is only stronger now that I have. I wish this for everyone, to find home and to know it. To be flung from it and to return to it, over and over again.
Book News and Reviews
Officially, The Sacred Life of Bread is out June 13. But Amazon and Bookshop have already begun fulfilling pre-orders. If you’ve received your copy, it would be incredibly helpful and appreciated if you could leave a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Blah blah blah, algorithms, book sales, etc.
June 13: Come celebrate publication day with me at the Book Cellar in Lincoln Square in Chicago, and buy a copy there to support a local bookstore! I’ll be in conversation with my dear friend and fellow author Kelly O’Connor McNees.
July 30: Bookends & Beginnings and St. Luke’s Evanston will host me for an event to celebrate the arrival of the Celtic harvest festival. I’ll be doing a talk and blessing some homemade communion bread.
You can listen to my interview with Peter Reinhart on the Heritage Radio Network. Peter, a fellow spiritual quester and actual professional baker (his books have earned him James Beard Awards and have been an inspiration to my own baking life), wrote the foreword to the The Sacred Life of Bread.
Here’s what others are saying:
“A wonderful conflation of all that is theological and spiritual with the art of bread making.” —Library Journal
“Murphy-Gill gracefully weaves explorations of spiritual and physical sustenance, delivering some gems . . . and concluding chapters with recipes for the likes of Finnish rye bread and pizza dough with black emmer. The result is an offering Christians will enjoy taking a bite out of.” —Publisher’s Weekly (though I hope non-Christians can enjoy, too!)
“Each of [Murphy-Gill’s] 12 chapters explores connections between bread and life, whether it’s about the importance of resting dough before baking it, or how the discipline of sourdough starter is tied to transformation, a familiar story in liturgy. The author weaves stories of her very Irish-Catholic family, Episcopalian rituals (like communion wafers), and the lived experience of standing in cushioned shoes for hours, baking, thinking, baking. These revelations—at first startling—make sense in the whole of life, similar to the mystery of how ‘bread turns a mishmash of odds and ends into a meal.’” —Booklist
And a selection appeared in the Christian Century’s “Books Worth Reading” newsletter as the Quote of the Week!
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God Talk is an occasional newsletter about seeking and making meaning in the modern world. God is in the name but belief is not required for reading. Please support my writing by subscribing and sharing.