WEEK
7
Old Believer

Isn’t an agnostic just an atheist without balls?
—Stephen Colbert

“Would you call yourself an atheist, Dad?”

“Not as long as Grandma’s alive,” I’d told Katie one Sunday morning as I kneaded dough.

Sunday bread making had progressed from an event to a habit to, within a surprisingly short time, a ritual. This of course meant that I wasn’t participating in that other ritual more commonly associated with Sunday mornings, going to church—perhaps bringing to an end a family tradition that began, in this country at least, with my great-grandfather, a Russian priest who immigrated to establish the very first Old Believers church in America.

The Old Believers broke off from the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century after the Russian Orthodox Church introduced reforms, mainly related to ritual, intended to bring uniformity to practices in the Russian and Greek Orthodox churches. Some of these reforms, such as changing the direction of procession around the church (Orthodox services include a lot of circling around) from clockwise to counterclockwise, proved too radical for the faithful, who broke away and formed their own church, for which they were heavily and sometimes violently persecuted. Which is how great-grandpa ended up in America in 1908, founding the Old Believers church (still active to this day) in Marianna, Pennsylvania, where many Russian immigrants had settled to work in the coal mines.

For years, Anne and I had dutifully dragged the kids to church and Sunday school, weathering protests and temper tantrums, because Christianity was an important part of both our families’ cultures—I was raised an Episcopalian, Anne a Roman Catholic—and we thought the kids should at the very least be exposed to that heritage. They could make their own choices later, as adults, as to whether they wanted Christianity to be a part of their own lives.

I had already made my own decision, even as I continued going, week after week, becoming increasingly sympathetic to the childish behavior in the backseat. Once in a while I even begged off myself, professing urgent work in the garden or the workshop, guiltily letting Anne do the dirty work of lugging the kids to church. Finally I stopped going except for Christmas and Easter; then I stopped attending altogether. I blamed the endless potluck suppers and uninspiring sermons, but these petty complaints mainly made it easier to come to grips with the fact that I had simply lost my faith.

This is not to say that I am antichurch or against organized religion in general. I am neither for nor against. I know a great many people whose faith brings them irreplaceable comfort and meaning—I suspect my great-grandfather found few atheists in the Pennsylvania coal mines—and the church has through the centuries provided a moral beacon and filled important social gaps left by secular society. For me, however, attendance at church felt like a charade, an increasingly uncomfortable one at that, once I had come to grips with the fact that I was no longer buying any of it. I was willing to leave open the possibility of some kind of higher being who created the universe (although that made me feel uneasily like the proverbial goldfish who is sure there is a God, because who else changes the water twice a week?), but surely not the God of the Old and New Testaments, an omnipresent, personal God who listens to our prayers and takes an interest in our lives. In truth, I wasn’t sure if I was an atheist, an agnostic, a deist, or something else. I know I didn’t believe in any kind of heavenly afterlife, although I found myself forced to reevaluate this certainty after my father (himself a religious man) died suddenly and prematurely over twenty-five years ago. Shortly afterward, he’d visited me in my sleep on a couple of occasions—his appearances more vivid than any dream, so real, in fact, that they could only be described as visions—to let me know he was still there if I needed him and, most importantly, to comfort me in my grief. I had just turned thirty, the age when I think adulthood really begins, when we are finally ready to leave the extended adolescence of college behind. These visitations by my father were disquieting because if I accepted that I had been visited by a spirit, I must therefore accept that spirits, and an afterlife, exist. After a while I concluded that these apparitions were more likely a cheap parlor trick of my mind than a proof of God’s existence, but then, sadly, Dad, as if in rebuke, stopped coming around. In retrospect I wish I’d suspended judgment a bit longer.

In truth, the kids weren’t the only reason I had attended church. I liked the ritual and the tradition. I found repose in repetition, in reciting prayers and singing hymns that I’d known for nearly half a century, in sitting in the same pew each week. Fortunately I found that my new Sunday morning ritual—baking—took me out of myself in the same way.

I had come to love my early mornings alone in the kitchen, the silence and the stillness broken only by the chirping of waking birds in summer and the hiss of the steam radiators in winter. All week I’d look forward to sliding across the wood floor, bowling-alley slippery from flour dust, in my socks, as I skidded around the kitchen. I’d come to cherish the feel of the dough in my hands at that magical point where it passes from sticky to smooth and elastic. In the same way that I used to take pride in not opening the prayer book to recite that one last prayer after Communion, I tried to bake without looking at the recipe: 2⅓ cups all-purpose flour, 1 cup bread flour, ⅓ cup each rye and whole wheat—I knew it, you might say, like I knew the Lord’s Prayer.

This particular morning, as I watched the poolish gently bubble while upstairs everyone else slept, I couldn’t escape the fact that, having given up searching for God, I had started searching for perfection on earth. I wasn’t merely baking bread; I was on a pilgrimage for heavenly bread. What’s more, I was seeking perfection in the food most associated with Christianity.

The symbol of Christ’s body. The staff of life. Why had I chosen bread? I didn’t know the answer, but suddenly I was troubled by the question. Might this quest be about more than crust and crumb after all? And if so, why should that be upsetting? There must be something else going on, I told myself, and just like that, this Sunday morning deflated on me like so many of my loaves, crushing me underneath a great sadness, a grief, a longing I hadn’t felt in many years.

What was I trying to connect to with this ritual, this almost spiritual quest for perfection? Or should the question be, not what, but who? No, no, no; the notion seemed absurd, too pat, and way, way too Freudian. I wanted badly to dismiss it, but I was shaking now, overcome with loss. As I sat over my bowl of poolish, full of life, life that would be extinguished within hours for the benefit of my family, I inhaled deeply, filling my lungs with its yeasty aroma. I ached for the release of tears, but all I could coax from my hardened, nonbelieving soul was a single teardrop, which I let fall, unceremoniously, into my bread.