Recently, while going through my recipe box, I came across a worn index card with a recipe written out by Ben.
Grace’s Yeast Rolls.
I didn’t even have to read the recipe to be instantly transported back in time.
There I was, in my early twenties, seated at the dining room table of my future in-laws, at our first meal together, the table beautifully set with a two-tiered candelabra, candles blazing, and the Wedgewood china, the silver, and the cloth napkins, all carefully laid out on a beautifully embroidered tablecloth. Beth and DuVal, Ben’s parents, had gone all out to welcome me.
The meal began when Beth picked up a small bell and rang it, and through the swinging door between the dining room and the kitchen came an older black woman in a white uniform, whose name was Grace Smith, bearing our plates.
I hope my mouth didn’t fall open in shock. In our house, our mother had always served the food, or depending on the meal, we helped ourselves. We had never had a black person dressed in a uniform waiting on our table. I felt like I was on a movie set in some updated version of a movie like Gone with the Wind.
You all know that I don’t like to be waited on, and I’ll have to admit that I squirmed in my seat, wanting to jump up and help—but I remained seated and silent through that meal anyway.
After she had brought out the plates, Grace made her way around the table bearing a basket of her rolls in a silver bread basket, lined with a linen cloth, and each of us took one, or maybe Grace served each of us, I don’t remember. My roll ended up on my bread plate, along with a soft pat of rich butter.
As soon as I politely could, I took the still warm roll in my hand, tore off a bite sized piece, buttered it, and reverently raised it to my lips, for I already knew, from its fragrance, that eating that roll would be a privilege that I would not soon forget.
And here I am, telling you about that moment forty four years later.
I’ve forgotten the rest of that day’s menu, but I will never forget those rolls.
Or the person who created those rolls–Grace Smith.
Like many black women her age, Grace was a domestic worker in a white person’s home, since few other options for work would have readily available to her, a black woman, when she entered the workforce I’m guessing sometime in the 1950’s.
Every day, Grace would arrive at the Hicks house, and while getting other housework done too, she’d prepare all the food for an expansive evening meal. Grace didn’t cook any old thing either. She made apple pies and other desserts from scratch. At Christmas, she turned out hundreds of Christmas cookies. Her crab cakes were legendary.
After completing the day’s work at the Hicks house, Grace would return to her home in the midafternoon to take care of her own family’s needs, and then she’d come back into town a few hours later to serve the dinner for the Hicks family. Then, she’d clean up after the meal, and go back home for the night when she was done. Out of financial necessity, she spent more hours in the Hicks household than she did her own.
Grace did not have to make yeast rolls from scratch. I’m sure that Beth and DuVal would have been just as satisfied to eat some simpler bread, or store bought rolls, but if Grace served rolls, they were her yeast rolls.
Those rolls make me think of the bread that Jesus served to the five thousand. Remember at the beginning of Chapter 6 in John’s gospel, Jesus feeds the hungry people by multiplying the loaves and fishes of the boy who had brought them along, probably packed for him by his mother, not wanting her son to be hungry.
They may have found that the bread that Jesus distributed to them was just as enticing as the rolls that Grace served to all of us. No wonder they went seeking Jesus the next day, hoping for more of that bread.
So in today’s gospel, Jesus tries to explain to the people that the bread he has to give them isn’t just bread like the bread that he gave them when they were hungry, and that he himself isn’t just Jesus the carpenter’s son. Jesus is the bread of life itself.
Jesus said to this crowd, “I am the bread of life.”
They didn’t understand. Jesus went on to say to them that everyone who has heard and learned from God comes to him, and that he, Jesus, is the way to eternal life.
That is, the bread that Jesus gives for the life of the world is himself—not just a bit of himself here and a bit of himself there, carefully rationed out, but all of himself, extravagantly and with abandon, with such abandon that he ends up on a cross by offering the generous gift of himself.
This generous offering of ourselves is what Jesus hopes that we too will bring to the world. That’s why he tells the disciples later to abide in him, as Jesus himself abides in God, for God is the source of Jesus’ ongoing and profligate offering of himself, the offering that brings life, the offering that ultimately brings life even out of death. When we abide in Jesus, God becomes the source of our generous giving as well.
Grace worked for Ben’s family so that she could provide for her own family.
I wish I’d spent more time talking with Grace, getting to know more about her own life. I wish I could go back and ask her more about her family, and ask her how she decided to work for our family. I wonder whether or not she was paid decently, or had any benefits built into her work, like paid vacation, or a retirement fund. Like everyone else in the family, I’m ashamed to say that I too ended up taking Grace and all she did for Ben’s family for granted. Our conversations never went far beyond what was happening in the moment. I won’t have the chance now to ask Grace about how she felt about her work, whether she resented the hours she had to spend away from her own family, whether she wished she had done some different work. I’ll never know because she died a while back. The last time I was with her, I had the privilege of feeding her one day when she was in long term care at Carriage Hill and could no longer feed herself.
Although I didn’t recognize it at the time, and whether Grace knew it or not, and she might have resented having to be, although she never let on—I realize now that Grace was a bread of life person in Ben’s family in addition to being the bread of life for her own family.
Grace’s roll recipe isn’t the only one in my recipe box that makes me think of the bread of life.
I also have the recipe for my grandmother’s yeast rolls. I don’t remember eating these rolls, although I’m sure that I did as a young child. But I’ve heard about these rolls from my mother, who gave me the recipe.
When my grandmother, Lola Peele, was a young woman, she married my grandfather, a farmer and a widower with four children. She moved from her life in a small North Carolina town out to the country and into the farmhouse my grandfather had built, which did not yet have electricity or indoor plumbing.
In addition to all the other work my grandmother did, she also cooked on a big woodstove in the kitchen for her family and the farm workers and anyone else who visited, including the hungry people who were passing through the area and who’d come to the back door asking for something to eat during the Great Depression. By the time she ended up confined by arthritis to a rocking chair, my grandmother had cooked a countless number of meals, all graced with her rolls or biscuits or cornbread, for no meal was complete without bread.
My grandmother’s work in the house sustained my grandfather’s work in the fields, and with their mutual labor, they raised six children, including my mother, whose stories have helped me recognize that my grandmother, as well as my grandfather, functioned as the bread of life for their family, generously giving all they had and putting in all their energy for the greater good.
My grandmother died when I was in the third grade. My main memories of her are of an elderly woman devastated by arthritis, pretty much confined to a chair in the last years of her life. I wish that instead of running past her and out the door to play, I’d spent some time talking with her, asking her what her life had been like, and what she thought about day in and day out, as she sat so still and in such pain, worn out by all the giving she had done for so many.
I doubt she would have described herself as the bread of life for her family, but as I look back into that time, as I hold the recipe card with her yeast roll recipe in my hands, I know that my grandmother, Lola Stephenson, like Grace Smith, was the bread of life for many in her time on this earth.
I have been blessed to be surrounded throughout my life by disciples of Jesus who have been the bread of life for me.
I’ll bet that you have “bread of life” people around you as well, graciously and wholeheartedly sharing themselves with you, and for you.
We too, can be more than just ordinary people living ordinary lives. Jesus calls on each one of us, as his disciples, to be the bread of life in this world–
to be heavenly bread,
to give ourselves, with abandon and with love, for the life of this world.