The Gospel according to sourdough
Wednesday, November 5, 2025
Trish Vega
Anastasia and I have been inseparable since 2023. No, she isn’t my new gal pal that I met at church. She’s my sourdough starter.
Many people hopped onto the sourdough bread-baking trend as a pandemic hobby. It makes sense! Baking sourdough is a long process, and all of a sudden, people had a lot of time on their hands. And let me tell you, people get REALLY into it. So much so that it’s common amongst sourdough aficionados to name their starters (the fermented flour, water, and natural yeast concoction that gives a loaf its rise). Yet my introduction to sourdough came post-pandemic, not because I was bored, but because I needed healing.
I started making sourdough bread during a hard season of my life. I was processing grief, woundedness, and disappointment. A friend happened to share a bit of her starter with me, and I took that as an opportunity to take up a hobby to at least give my mind a break from hard things. I did not expect it to be a major vehicle for my healing.
The ingredients are astonishingly simple: flour, water, and salt. However, the process of making a fermented loaf surprised me. From start to finish, making a loaf of sourdough can take three days. There are particular techniques needed to craft a successful loaf, but perhaps the most important factor is a hidden one: time. In between all the kneading, stretching, folding, and shaping, I needed to wait.
At first, this challenged me. Waiting isn’t my strong suit. But then I would discover with awe that after a few hours of letting the flour-water concoction sit, it would miraculously turn from a shaggy, dense mess into a smooth, airy dough ready to be baked. And I did absolutely nothing.
This has been a strong metaphor for me about the nature of God’s grace.
In the midst of a painful season, I often struggled with self-sufficiency and trying to “hack” healing. My mind was often preoccupied with what books I could read, meditations I could do, or podcasts I could listen to in order to make me heal faster. But the reality is that the Lord, our Divine Physician, is the only complete healer and that the only way to let Him work is to surrender to His timing and initiative.
As silly as it might sound, the process of waiting for my dough to ferment and rise gave me a gateway to understand that reality more tangibly. There was nothing I could do to shortcut my loaf to be ready. In fact, if I played with it too much it would ruin it!
The same holds true for the movement of grace and healing in my heart. The Lord was working and bringing about new life in me in the hidden and in the waiting. There were some things He wanted me to participate in, but the majority of the work was on Him to do, and on me to wait. It was praying with this metaphor that I ended up naming my sourdough starter Anastasia, Russian for “resurrection,” so that whenever I bake, I may be reminded of God’s life-giving grace.
At face value, it can sound kind of dumb that I receive so much deep insight from bread. But in thinking about how Jesus taught in the scriptures, He is no stranger to using simple things and experiences to speak to profound realities. I mean, just take a look at the parables!
To take it further, the Catechism teaches us in paragraph 293: “Scripture and Tradition never cease to teach and celebrate this fundamental truth: ‘The world was made for the glory of God.’ St. Bonaventure explains that God created all things ‘not to increase his glory, but to show it forth and to communicate it,’ for God has no other reason for creating than his love and goodness”. It’s no accident I learned about the glory of God’s redemption in nature’s process of sourdough fermentation. Turns out God actually created it to be that way.
How crazy it is that the Creator elevates such humble things as flour, water, and salt into images of his saving grace. Yet thus is the power and generosity of our God! He loves us so much that He can’t help but sprinkle the Gospel everywhere. I pray that we all may have the eyes to see it more and more.
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