"I've got the wonderful love of my blessed redeemer way down in the depths of my heart! (Where?)"

Last week I was playing with Peter in the family room and we had put on a CD of Sunday School songs. It's been a while since I spent time with SS songs, but listening to these at times silly, at times profound songs brought me back in my mind to my childhood.

I have known many Christians, men and women, who have faith crises and struggle to comprehend God's love in a fallen world. Is it any wonder? As I listened to these songs I heard the repeated theme: I have Jesus. I am happy. End of story. If this is the way Christians are programmed, it's little wonder that when bad things happen, when life doesn't turn out as we had hoped, when our children get rushed to the hospital at a week old, when our parents die before they get to meet all their grandchildren, when our friends disappoint us, that we feel guilty for feeling sad and anxious. Because deep down in our souls, where we can't even make out the sounds any more, we feel the beat of the Sunday School songs, "and I'm so happy, so very happy, I have the love of Jesus in my heart!" The subtext is that if I'm not happy, I must not have Jesus in my heart.

Now, I understand that the primary goal of young Christian education is to provide a place where children can experience the unconditional love of God, find that church is fun and hopefully a place where they can experience God's love through the Scriptures and the teachers and their friends at a young age. The songs may facilitate this fun aspect. But they sell our children a cheap gospel. A gospel that doesn't allow us to mourn death, disease and suffering. That simplifies the message of Christ as a religion of happiness, rather than a religion of Kingdom living and changing and redeeming the world.

This is a place where the Psalms would help us. Our children might be warped for life if we focus exclusively on Psalm 137, to be sure. But are we warping them for life by focusing only on the good things about the Christian life? We need to teach our children from a young age that the Christian life is the way of the cross, the way of suffering, the way of service. A grounded exposure to the Psalter doesn't leave us hanging in misery, though. It reminds us that though we suffer, our salvation is made sure. We don't enjoy the full benefits of it yet, but in this miserable life that sin has brought about, we can hope.

Here's the beginning of my campaign to change the words of the Sunday School songs: And I'm so hopeful, so very hopeful, for I have been baptized and belong to Christ. What does it mean to have the love of Jesus in my heart anyway??? Can a child really understand this?

Quick update

I'm trying to meet deadlines for two papers for which I am lead author and one paper where I'm advising a grad student, which is the explanation for my sparse postings this week. That, and, Christy got a job! I'm thrilled to no end for her new opportunity but it adds a constraint to all available time in the family until Peter starts school in August. I guess it eases up a little since Peter determined that he's not that into t-ball and would rather not stay on the team. We pretty much agree that he's not ready for that yet and I'll be working with him to build the skill and discipline that he'll need to play next year.

My latest news is that I joined a gym. I've been a member of one gym or another most of the time since 1999 but this one far outshines them all. Besides about 30 treadmills, each with their own personal TV, they seem to have about every piece of lifting equipment known to man, and a way cool rock climbing wall. What surprised me most, and what I will likely never use, is the full size billiard table in the men's locker room. My new membership came with 3 free training sessions and my trainer just about killed me tonight. I feel great right now but I expect I'll be cursing him in the morning.

I hope to blog about the role of the Law in the Christian life, as soon as I have a few minutes to put the thoughts together carefully. For now, you can read what my college classmate friend Christie (no relation to Christy :) wrote on the subject earlier this week.

Never trust a bearded man

I never thought I'd be a facial hair guy. My father wore a beard for probably the last 15 years of his life (and I think it took five of those years for it to grow in fully), and the primary reason was to keep his face warm on cold winter mornings during deer season. Since I was not afflicted with a hunting hobby, that was not a good reason for me. And as a morning runner, facial hair can be more of a problem than a help since it tends to freeze up and develop rather uncomfortable icicles. Finally, Christy was pretty adamant that she didn't care much for facial hair.

But then, I realized that the two Red Sox players Christy found most attractive (Jason Varitek and Tim Wakefield) both had goatees. I wasn't sure if I could grow one, but during the summer of 2006, I was studying wall to wall for qualifying exams and didn't really care to shave anyway. Why not give it a try? I think it took a full two months to grow in well, but Christy actually liked it and that's all I needed to keep it and learn to groom it well.

Although she's hinted at it in the past, she finally admitted tonight why she thinks it works for me... "It covers a multitude of chins." Ouch. :)

Obama

I have sort of liked Obama from the beginning. I still remember sitting in a hotel room in Rockaway, NJ trying to get some work done when I heard his breakout speech at the DNC in 2004. That was the same trip in which we got bad news about the work we needed to do on our house if it was to sell, and in which I almost saw the Yankees get no-hit from the nosebleed section. Definitely one of the best-pitched games I ever saw. Nothing like a Red Sox fan leaving Yankee Stadium to the sounds of "New York, New York" NOT sung by old Blue Eyes (back then, at least, they played the Sinatra version after a win and the Liza Minelli version after a loss).

I think he offers a vision, and a moderating voice for me, a disenfranchised conservative. After Bush II, I am very worried about investing too much hope in a good outcome when the candidate appears to be faith-driven at some level. And of course, the Wall Street Journal is giving him a daily skewering for his vacuous rhetoric.

Obama's rhetoric may be vacuous, but every time I see McCain speak, his head seems vacuous. I know McCain is a genuine American hero, but that itself doesn't make him qualified to be president. And he has a record of working with both sides to achieve common goals. But whenever I hear him speak, it's obvious those aren't his own words. Even Ronald Reagan had a gifted speech-writer, but what made him the Great Communicator was that his speech-writer had a way of getting his words on the page, and he was then able to deliver them passionately and convincingly. I don't get that sense with McCain -- it seems like he's touting someone else's ideas and is not completely convinced himself. Hasn't 8 years of a puppet presidency been enough for one generation?

Count me as firmly undecided. At least until I figure out what Obama actually believes.

What they say

People at the office seem to like the bread. Not too many people around today and it was almost gone when I left.

I got frank feedback from a senior faculty member who seems to know something about food. First, it is not sour enough. The starter has been developing yeast well, but is not yet old enough to have the sourness from the bacteria. So time will hopefully address this problem.

Second, the crust is not hard enough. I need to mist the oven. Something I've thought about but didn't think I needed to do. I'm still not sure I want to do that but I'll keep thinking about.

Finally, it was a little underdone. I realized that too and planned to bake the next loaf another five minutes. Maybe I need to mist the oven to keep the crust from overcooking while it hardens.

On the plus side, he said it rose well, which he has never been able to do.

The result

My most recent loaves come out looking very nice indeed. We'll cut one of the loaves to have with spaghetti tonight and take the other to work tomorrow.

The morning rise

I got up to feed the baby at 6:30 and found the dough bursting out of the bowl. I punched it down right away and after feeding the baby, I kneaded it, rolled it and formed round loaves. I put it in the oven on my way out the door for work and anxiously await the report on the outcome -- and the taste test this afternoon.

I've found that it takes about 45 minutes in a 350 oven. We can't put a cold pizza stone in a hot oven or it will crack. The options are to heat the stone and then put the loaves on it or put the loaves and the stone into a cold oven. I do the latter and it works fine.

Bitterness

Am I really a bitter man? Well, I certainly have bitter tastes: dark roast coffee, hoppy beers and high cacao-content dark chocolate suggest that I am bitter, bitter, bitter.

I am bitter about some things, to be sure. I am bitter about substandard math education in Christian high schools. Corporal punishment. Legalism. Poverty. I guess the list could on -- there are some things I could be bitter about but am not and a lot of other things I used to be bitter about but no longer am.

In fact, Christy (the woman who I convinced to marry me) accuses me of being too perky, too optimistic. Someone suggested recently that it is important to embrace both the dark and the light. Even our liturgy brings us through the darkness as we recognize and admit our human plight in confession before hearing the assurance of pardon and the proclamation of the Gospel. The Psalter is full of darkness and light. Perhaps as a result of my background, I am too afraid of the dark. As suggested in Psalm 121, the moon has smitten me and I fear it. But the promise of Psalm 121 is that the sun shall not smite me by day, nor the moon by night.

Sourdough has been a teacher to me in these two weeks. Against the bitterness of the bacteria, the yeast forms, multiplies, grows. I have to allow the starter to sour before I can use it in bread. If I use it before it is sour enough (as I did), I get not bread, but dense cakes of baked, dried playdough. I'm trying to embrace the sour parts of life as a source of fullness.

New beginnings

I guess I've attempted blogging twice before but soon realized that, like most bloggers, I had little interesting to say. I suppose that hasn't changed much, but the relatively small amount online about sourdough baking suggests that a place where I can log my loaf attempts will serve me at least, and may help others too. Perhaps I'll have the occasional brainwave that I'll feel vital enough to post on any number of other topics, but for the readers' sake, I sure hope not.

Why sourdough? It goes back to a day in 1995 when I heard an ad on the radio for Samuel Adams beer, in which Jim Koch discussed the nature of Sam Adams' production process as small batches, "like those my grandfather brewed on the kitchen stove". My teetotaler roots (family and college both) prevailing, it never occurred to me that someone might be able to make beer in their kitchen. After a bit of asking and searching online (not an easy thing to do in 1995!) I discovered that the nature foods store around the corner from our house sold the equipment and supplies for making my own beer at home. With no kids at the time and some spare time, I started collecting bottles and making my own beer from a can of malt and a pack of yeast.

As I was reading about the history of brewing and homebrewing in particular, I encountered the ancient German beer purity law of Reinheitsgebot. Under this law, the only ingredients allowed in beer were barley, water and hops. With the exception of a Christmas brew in which I used winter spices, I attempted to create my beer as purely as I could, with the exception that I used live commercial yeast instead of relying on natural yeast as the old Bavarians would. Homebrewing was fun -- it was generally cheaper than buying good beer by the case and I enjoyed both the process and the product immensely. Not to mention that it was a hit at parties; just a few months before we left Connecticut, I ran into former colleagues who remember me as "the guy who brewed his own beer".

The problems with brewing is that it is labor-intensive, time-consuming and fills the house with a very strong, rich barley smell that non-beer-swilling wives don't enjoy very much. For a while, I would brew when Christy was away at work for the day and when I could air out the house before she got home. But when child #1 arrived, the days of brewing were sadly set aside, at least for a while.

The joy of the product is self-evident, but the process was even more fun and fulfilling. In many ways, since studying the daily office in college, I have been drawn to some of the monastic methods and at times even wondered if the monastery would have been a good vocation for me (but the costs, perhaps, outweigh the benefits...) I really like the idea of doing menial tasks with the hands to free the mind to focus on higher things: prayer, meditation, just finding space in the day to commune with God and brother. Brewing provided me with some of this monastic focus. When brewing had to go, I found similar space in the very menial work of filling little communion cups at church (you know, the plastic shot glasses of wine/grape juice used in many Protestant churches). I found this a particularly helpful time to pray for members of the congregation, in this particular case, that they would be filled with the presence of the risen Christ in the sacrament.

During the summer of 2006 while in grad school and sharing child care duty during the weekdays, I began to look for ways to break up the day and realized that bread baking provided many of the benefits of brewing, but could be confined to three 15 minute spurts of activity -- easily accomplished with a 3-year old in the house. Mix and knead. Go to the gym. Punch down and knead. Go to the library. Form loaves on the pizza stone and bake. Play with the kid. House fills with a great smell. Bread is amazing.

Christy liked the bread and I graduated from using loaf pans to forming round loaves and baking on a pizza stone. Then, I started baking loaves to use in communion.

Sometime after I started my current job assignment, I was discussing my bread with a senior member of the faculty in my department who sneered at my use of Fleischmann's yeast rather than a proper yeast culture in a sponge. So I started looking online to see where I could find a good starter. What I discovered was that I could order away for a King Arthur New England culture, several different starters claiming to be the authentic San Francisco strain, and of course Carl's starter. Or I could be brave and create my own starter. The old Betty Crocker cookbook has a starter recipe, but it uses commercial yeast. I found other starter recipes that used potato starch, honey, numerous kinds of flour. Then I found a recipe for a starter that used flour and water. This reminded me of the Reinheitsgebot and I gave it a shot.

After two days (and a strong desire to do something productive after a minor surgery) it looked like my starter was appropriately bubbly and so I put it to the test. The result was a couple of moderately tasty hockey pucks. I fed the remaining starter and let it ripen for a full week, feeding it daily. I found that if I increased the volume of flour a bit, I no longer had the watery alcohol layer known as hooch.

I let the dough rise overnight this time, punched it down in the morning and let it rise on the pizza stone until mid-morning when I felt it had risen sufficiently for a successful baking. This time, it came out very nicely, though the taste was a bit heavy and the bread was still a little denser than I liked. I fed the leftover starter and stuck it in the fridge, where it continued to bubble. Today, I took the starter out right after church, fed it and let the sponge form all afternoon. By dinnertime, it was nicely frothy, smelled great and looked quite ready to mix.

At Christy's suggestion, I attempted to use the KitchenAid dough hook, although the result was not quite what I wanted. Seems like a double loaf recipe may be a bit large for our mixer and it overwhelmed the hook. I also lost some of that monastic feel by using a power tool rather than my hands to do the work. I somehow feel a need to put my fingers in the dough to feel like it's my own bread.

This dough is rising quite nicely and I just punched it down to rise again overnight. In the morning, I'll form two loaves and rest them on the pizza stone during the work day tomorrow, and bake them in the afternoon. I'll report back when I taste :)