It’s miraculous, seeing something come back to life. When I took it out of the bag, it was as dry as the Colorado air that preserved it for our journey. These flakes of starter seemed lifeless. And against my hopes, part of me feared they were. Part of me feared that this community of half-wild yeasts – our housemates for the last few years – wouldn’t wake up. But faithfully, I gave them some water, and a little maple syrup. Which they seemed to appreciate. The starter frothed with what I hoped was new life. So I gave them a little more flour to eat. And the next day I did the same thing. A little more flour, a little more water. Patiently, tentatively, quietly hopeful I trusted what had worked on our last cross-continent move.
And it worked! After settling in to a new apartment, in a new city, in a new country, I returned to something familiar, grounding. A simple, weekly loaf of bread. Something delicious and ordinary, nourishing and sustaining, a regular guest at our breakfast table. But also, something else. Baking bread each week isn’t only a practice of putting food on the table. It’s a practice where I remember my connections.
They’re easy to lose track of, our connections. The world has never felt so small. The whole world seems to be at our fingertips. With a wipe we can see and hear from people half-way around the globe. Some people we know, and countless people we don’t. So while the world seems smaller than ever, it also feels lonelier than ever. We can see and read and know so much. But so much of what seems to be fingertips away is disembodied. What connects one part of the world to another is somehow, no clearer, no more obvious, for all the smallness of our world.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Reminders of our connections can come in unexpected ways. If you’ve dedicated yourself to a spiritual practice, you know what I mean. Perhaps you meditate. You focus on your breath. Your muscles and nerves. You notice this mindful intention spreading through your whole life. Maybe you walk through the world with particular care. You open yourself to the wonder and awe in a majestic park or a humble sidewalk. And you find your place in it alongside the family of things.1 Maybe you pray. You encounter something deeper and greater than yourself. Some Ultimate that puts the rest of life in perspective.
Or, maybe none of those cut it for you. Some of us have abandoned or forgotten practices we knew in another life. Some of us never had ones to begin with. Some of us are fine with that. But still, you may hunger for something that connects you to the depth of the world.
I won’t tell you that it’s easy to know where to begin, reminding ourselves of our connections. It isn’t easy finding the depth and meaning there. And at some point or another, many seekers wonder, “Where do I even begin?”
You might be asking that question now. A couple of years ago, I had the honour of exploring this question with some other hungry seekers. As we got to know each other’s spiritual lives, we realized something. We realized we were everywhere on this spectrum. A couple of us had been dedicated to a practice for decades. Some were exploring spiritual practices for the first time. And most of us were somewhere in between.
Between conversation and shared practices, something struck us. The greatest source of spirituality for us was in our everyday lives. In finding meaning and connection in the ordinary. In grinding coffee. When doing the dishes. While spending time with grandchildren. It seemed to be the most natural and approachable source of touching the deep.
In this morning’s reading, we heard how we often frame spiritual practices. We talk about them like they are inherently removed. Removed from other people, removed from our bodies, removed from the ordinary. We believe them to require extraordinary amounts of study, of contemplation, of isolation. And that anything short of that is too mundane to transform us.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Over years of baking bread each week, I’ve discovered that. I have discovered what many people did in that class I facilitated. But I didn’t start baking with that attitude. I started doing it for fun. I am almost always making something or other, and baked goods have long been a favourite creative outlet of mine. I hadn’t yet folded bread into my spiritual life. But I could see the outlines of potential there. There is something ritualistic in feeding my sourdough starter each week. There is something meditative in kneading the dough. Pulling, stretching, and resting it into loaves. And it also connects me to something older than myself. My mother baked bread when I was growing up, and her mother did too. And so on and so on, back to whoever that first, ancestral baker was.
This bread is a practice full of potential. On its own, it’s a soul-practice that feeds my creative spirit. But that’s not quite a spiritual practice for me. A spiritual practice requires my intention. It also takes connection. Remembering my connections to what is deeper and greater than I am. You may have also heard that I am a Pagan. I have studied and practiced Paganisms for most of my life now. One of the most enduring relationships it has brought me has been with Demeter. The ancient Greek goddess of agriculture and the harvest. Honouring her seemed natural for a weekly bread-baker.
And it has been. Between one step of baking and another, I pray an old hymn to her. It centers me at the beginning of the week. And as I do, I join that ancient poet in remembering Demeter as a force. As “present at sowing, heaping, and threshing.” As the power of “growth and blooming.”2 And praying this way reminds me of all the ways this ordinary practice connects me to the world. It reminds me to consider all the hands involved in baking. This bread connects me to our new home, too. When I brought my starter back to life, I brought it back with our city’s water. I brought it back with this country’s flour, and a kiss of this country’s maple syrup. All things touched by the people, plants, and animals who live and love here. Who create this beautiful world in spite of all its injustices. Things which touch all of you.
So this how this practice feeds not only my Paganism, but my Unitarian Universalism as well. Our Seventh Principle reminds us how interconnected our lives are. Interdependence reminds us that we are not islands in the ocean of our lives. Rather, we live because others live. And others live because we do. What we do matters. I draw a lot of the wisdom from the well of this Principle. That has been one of the most grounding parts of our faith. It isn’t an abstract ideal. It’s a virtue we bring to life. Spiritual practices remind me of this. They strengthen and comfort us. They prepare us to look for other ways to live our values.
This is how baking became a spiritual practice for me. Over the years, I’ve tried defining what makes a practice like this spiritual. What I have come to understand is that spiritual practices are a kind of homework. That might not sound very exciting, especially for anyone getting ready to go back to school. But here’s what I mean.
When we go to worship – to consider what is worthy as a colleague of mine says – we go deep together. Together, we connect to our Principles, to our sacred stories. The things that are deeper and larger than each of us. And spirituality, especially spiritual practice, is how we do that deepening work on our own, so that we are able to show up as our best selves when we’re together. As Rev. Jen Crow observes,
“When we sit alone in prayer or meditation, read the great teachers, walk, or do yoga, our hearts open and soften; we can achieve clarification, discernment, and communion with that which is larger than ourselves, calling us back to this world, to compassion and kindness in all that we do.”3
Our spiritual homework, in this way, prepares us to act in the world. It nourishes and deepens us. It digs a clear well from which we draw our sustenance. How it affects us and our world ripples out from these intentional acts. We know the work of living a principled life isn’t easy. We need ways to sustain us if we are going to be faithful for the long haul. Those practices may begin in the smallness of our own lives. Self-care practices remind us to be generous to ourselves and others. Grounding exercises calm our bodies, equipping us to engage conflict with care and courage. Commitments to baking and gardening that remind us we are part of a greater whole.
The activist and educator adrienne marie brown teaches us to begin right where we are. In her work Emergent Strategy, she shares that:
“...what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system. Grace [Lee Boggs] articulated it in what might be the most-used quote of my life: Transform yourself to transform the world. This doesn’t mean to get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet.”4
Putting Crow’s and brown’s wisdom together puts the value of spiritual practice into focus. Practice opens and softens our hearts. Practice prepares us for our life’s great work. That work needs the sustaining depth that spirituality can bring.
We know this as ministers to one another, whether that’s our vocation or not. I can’t deny that showing up as our best selves takes an immense amount of energy. But when I pray and meditate through kneading dough and baking bread, I remember what I truly believe. I draw the water I need for my cup from this deep well. And when I am done, I can feel the difference. My breathing is deeper. My muscles are more relaxed. My thoughts are more focused, and I feel prepared for what our life asks of me.
Baking bread, as it happens, is teaching me something about beginning a ministry here, too. Trust what you know, but watch what happens carefully. Care fully. Persevere, even in the face of mistakes and setbacks. What I notice, what I reflect on, when I am practicing on my own informs what I bring here. That way, I am showing up as my best self with all of you.
Our very lives are the first places we practice our values. As people of faith, this includes the deepening work of tending to our own spirituality. It can be hard to hold on to our Principles when the world contradicts them. Spiritual practices – whatever they are – give us ways to connect deeply with the deepest truths we know. This includes the conviction that what we do matters. That we can transform our world, together. The times when that is hardest to remember are the times when we need even the smallest reminders. So as we leave this place of deep connection, I send you off with these blessings.
May you find your way to an ordinary well that nourishes your faith.
May you draw out its cool waters to fill your cup.
And may you share that cup with the world.
This sermon draws some material from one I gave at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Boulder in 2025, while updating and expanding its considerations. Moving as a minister from the United States to Canada is shifting my frame of reference for our faith from the Shared Values back to the Eight Principles—which returns my attention Interdependence as the throughline between these modes of Unitarian Universalism.
1. Mary Oliver, "Wild Geese" in New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press: 1992), 110.
2. Orphic Hymn 40. To Eleusinian Demeter, trans. Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 5, 10.
3. Jen Crow, "Down the Mountain," in Not for Ourselves Alone: Theological Essays on Relationship, ed. Burton D. Carley and Laurel Hallman, 101-109 (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2014), 103.
4. adrienne marie brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 53.