Storytelling, doctrine, and spiritual formation

But I do remember how mad I was, how mad we all were, that she always gave a loaf away. But she was adamant. She always gave a loaf away because her mother always had, because to be blessed bread had to be shared, and not in her kitchen would there be eating of unblessed bread. It did not matter to her that the loaves she gave away were finer loaves-lighter, more skillfully made-than the loaves arriving in turn at our back door. And that was not thought of as Eucharistic theology, although of course it was. It was not thought about at all. It was living as life had always been lived, and the reason for it was not a theory but a traditional practice.

When I was in my middle thirties my mother stopped by unexpectedly as I was taking bread out of my own oven.

"Two loaves?" she huffed. "And what will you be doing with two loaves?" I offered her one. She eyed it and me with equal suspicion.

"With smaller pans, that batch would give you three," she commented, finally. "There's no need for such big loaves. Smaller will do, and then there's three." She looked at me again, her face harsh with perplexity and a suspicious disapproval, caught, no doubt not for the first time, between her daughter with the doctorate and the memory of her mother, for whom I am named, her mother who had but three or four years of schooling altogether, in rural Ulster.

Without the Eucharistic theology, the three-loaves habit is hard to distinguish from peasant superstition, and I admit I came late to respect for such things. And yet without the practice, without the habits shaping the lives of those sitting in the pews, what happens at the Eucharist deteriorates just as profoundly, descending into superstition or else evaporating into meaningless arcana and nostalgic sentimentality, into wordgames worth less than a hot loaf of bread, into mere notions no better than tasteless bits of store-bought stuff and half a sip of sugary grapejuice.

I suspect that my Grandmother Murphy would have known how to name the troubles faced by the fine young man who found himself so unhappy in his new house: it was not blessed. Or perhaps was bought with unblessed money. One way or the other, of course he choked on it. Faith, by this measure, is not something you know or understand. It is something you have learned to do; it is far more closely kin to a craft or an art that no one masters but by doing it, under persistent supervision by an elder. Its coherence is not physically demonstrable causal systems, but the symbolic and psychological tropes and figures within which spiritual lives are lived.

Roberta Bondi argues that the work of theologians is connecting individual spiritual experience with the great received heritage of doctrine, but that work, she explains, consists in the telling of our stories.ll Marcus Borg explains how, in his own life, intellectual assent to doctrines felt meaningless until he understood that the immediate experience of God was indeed part of his own ordinary life; at that point, his own stories about his own life started making sense in a whole new way and his commitment to the work of theology gained a tremendous new energy.12 Wendy Farley laments the distortions introduced into doctrine when doctrine dominates worship to the exclusion of stories and practices that arise from encounters with the immediate presence of an omnipresent God.l3 The life of faith, the liveliness and the vitality of religion in our day, depends very centrally upon the stories we tell one another about our own immediate encounters with an incarnate God. And the work of "spiritual formation" as such, then, is learning to understand and to tell the stories that will teach us how to recognize God's activity in our own ordinary week.