Mud Pies of the Spirit

On imitating God as a beloved child | RCL, Proper 14, Year B

Ephesians 4:25-5:2

A photo from 1917 of child actors Katherine and Jane Lee making mud pies

Let me tell you the story of a baker. She began by watching. As a 4 year old, she would stand by her father as he mixed the flour, water, salt, and yeast to make their weekly pizza. On Saturday mornings, she’s petition for muffins and would wait with rapped attention as the batter rose above the pan in the oven. In her play, she would imitate the actions she saw, putting dirt and water, flowers and leaves into concoctions of her own—mud pies and cakes.

Eventually she began helping, pouring in a couple of ingredients here or there—a teaspoon of salt, a cup of flour. When her birthday came around, she wanted to make her own cake with her father, a guided process of mixing and baking, cooling and icing. Here and there her father would offer some advice or general commandments he hoped would stick, important truths like “never make a cake from a boxed mix,” or “no whipped cream worth eating comes from a spray can.” But mostly it was a process of learning by watching and doing.

Her family discovered the Great British Bake Off. Night after night they would watch serious amateur bakers work through making cookies, breads, cakes, and myriad other creations—all in hope of a handshake from the famous baker Paul Hollywood and the coveted cake stand awarded to the final winner. Through watching, she learned judgement—what makes for a good bake or a bad one, what kinds of flavors work together and what don’t. She even learned a vocabulary of judgement—terms like proofed or under-proofed, airy or stodgy.

This baker continues to grow in her craft through practice. Over time her watching and imitating, her work alongside and on her own, will lead her to the capacity to make wonderful foods that will bring delight to friends and family. Eventually, she will even be in a place where some child might come to watch her, imitating her movements of mixing and rolling, baking and icing.

The story of this baker could have been the story of a musician or an artist, a scientist or a carpenter. It offers a pattern that is common to all human growth and learning, the path toward maturity. Children begin by imitating in play, then imitating in practice, and eventually they achieve the skill to be imitated by others.

But what if the end in mind isn’t to be a good baker, but a good person? What if the definition of a good person is someone who is like God? Those may seem like aims that are out of reach of the means of common human transformation. Yet, in the letter to the Ephesians, Paul offers just such a vision: “Be imitators of God, as beloved children.”

Only recently, cognitive neuroscience has begun to understand how this pattern works. It relates to two central regions of the brain, the frontal cortex and the hippocampus. In research looking at how we plan actions, scientists observed a movement of neural activity from the frontal cortex, which is involved in decision making to the hippocampus where deep memories are stored. The understanding these scientists reached is that in order to plan future action, the brain goes back to the store of memories to look for maps. For example, if you plan to bake a cake, you will go to your maps for making one, informed by your previous experience with a recipe as well as your history of watching others bake.

In a conversation about this research, the writer Cal Newport suggested that it could be utilized for forming how we take on learning new ways of being. For instance, if you say you want to be a writer, then one aspect of doing it would be to fill your hippocampus with maps for how the work of writing is done. And in fact, that’s exactly what many beginning writers do. One of the most popular and enduring features of the Paris Review has been the “Writers at Work” interview in which masters of the craft talk about their writing process. When you discover that Hemingway wrote 500 words a day, every day, or that Zadie Smith uses programs like Freedom and Self-Control to block the internet from her computer, a young writer is given a map for how the work gets done.

And so it is with our life as followers of Jesus. The work to which we commit ourselves is learning to live increasingly as Jesus himself would live if he were us. That Jesus is both human and God, enables us to see the end goal of our becoming. Can we as human being be like God? In Jesus we see the affirmative yes—we are called to be students of Jesus, and as students we are called to learn how to be like him. We do that learning just as our young baker did. As beloved children of God, we’re to come alongside God and make mud pies of discipleship, and grow from there to mix our own recipes of Christlikeness as an offering of love.

Part of this imitation, our growth in discipleship, will come through filling our mind with maps and recipes for a life in God’s image. If we read the biographies of great Christians, there is a reason we will often find that reading the Gospels and the lives of the saints were formative practices for many. Such narratives, far more than any lists of rules, help show us how the work of discipleship gets done. Like a child we should begin by careful watching and move from there to see how those patterns of life feel as we imitate them in our own contexts.

Mud pies don’t make for great desserts, though they are fun play. But the amazing chocolate cake my daughter made? That was well worth feasting on. In our life as disciples, though we may start with the mud pies of the Spirit, the end toward which we are moving is a good, rich, delicious blessing for the world. But how do we know when that begins to come? How will we recognize when we are growing in our imitation of God?

The answer is love. As St. Ignatius of Loyola put it, God is “Love Loving.” The more we are like God, the more fully we are living into God’s patterns of life and truth, the more loving we will be. It is that love that will be our fullest imitation of God. It won’t be perfect, but neither is a homemade cake as good as that of the best pastry chef. Still, as I type these words, I can’t help but hope that perhaps some baker in my household will decide to get to work making one. A world filed with “Little Christs,” as the name Christian originally meant, all offering their homemade, God imitating love, would surely make the world a place of greater blessedness. It is a possibility we can begin to enact, right now, by watching our Father in heaven, and Jesus our teacher, as we begin to do what they do in our own kitchens and households, our own bodies and lives. Amen.