Panem Nostrum: The Divine Carb Encounter
When the Sacred Face Rises in the Sourdough Starter of Life
Not long ago, a strange thought hit me.
I was reading about face pareidolia—you know, seeing Jesus or the Virgin Mary in a slice of burnt toast—when I wondered: what if I went downstairs right now, made a sandwich, and there He was—Jesus, staring back at me from my toast?
First, I wondered if I would finish making the sandwich. Is that blasphemy? To make a sandwich with Jesus’ image on it? Or is it blasphemy, to not? Is it God’s will to be combined with lunch meat? I assume no ham. Right?
Yet, I feel like Jesus is bigger than a grilled cheese.
So then, I pondered, what if this was actually Jesus, I’m not saying previous sightings of grilled Chee-sus weren’t the actual messiah, but I’m just saying, what if somehow, and in some way, I was blessed beyond measure, and knew absolutely without a shadow of a doubt, that before me in brown toasty goodness was the true historical Jesus in my bread. What would I do?
I think some people would want to analyze the bread. They would want to know if Jesus would appear in Rye or a Sour dough or if the king of kings was only meant for good ole American sliced. Maybe a social media campaign would start, and carefully crafted memes would convert the un-breaded with so-called bread science, which would mostly consist of bread misinformation and propaganda.
That would undoubtedly lead to shrines. Maybe some kind of bread temple, like a full-sized gingerbread house but with Cuban and French bread pillars.
And of course a Jesus bread shrine would attract followers!
Bread pilgrims searching for the whole wheat miracle.
We’d have to set up a tour to come by, on the hour, every hour, to witness the bread and let the chosen bread sojourners ask the bread to grant them miracles?
Oh, what about the detractors? Would people scoff at these pharisees and demand that we take the bread to the masses. Would they then buy helicopters with money donated from televangelist campaigns so they could toss bread from the sky at the poor in developing countries?
I wonder if they would expand production to pouring nacho cheese on the poor.
That could be dangerous.
As I began to imagine the bread crusades and bloody bread wars, my stomach growled, and I realized something.
I was still hungry.
In life, there are so many ways we play with our food. We waste years building, begging, and binding ourselves to images, beliefs, and rituals that are supposed to make us feel less frail, less imperfect, less likely to die, less vulnerable, and ultimately less human.
We forget to enjoy our lives and end up disconnected from the full expression of our humanity. As psychologist Erich Fromm once put it, we become consumers of life and not appreciators – People who live “to have” rather than “to be.” We spend all our time collecting and protecting and prioritizing possessing, and in the end, we can point to all that we “have” but have experienced very little of anything.
We fail to taste the bread of life.
Which means, we stay hungry.
So, I think if I saw a divine image of Jesus in my bread,
I would just make a sandwich and eat it.
Because bread is made to satisfy hunger and isn’t that miracle enough.