I am learning how to make sourdough bread. Once upon a time, this was how all bread was made. Wild yeast is drawn from the air into a flour-water mixture and left to ferment in a jar on your countertop—thus everyone’s “starter” will taste slightly or muchly different, depending on your air.

Starter is much like prayer. Prayer looks different for one person to the next. But, just like the starter that needs to be fed a little flour every day to keep the hungry yeast happy, everyone needs to pray every day. Even if you only bake bread once a week—or go to Mass on Sunday—that starter needs to be fed or it will fall asleep. If starved, it won’t be good for baking, which is the point of it all. And so it is with your soul. A little prayer every day will keep you awake; fail to prayer and you will begin to drift into apathy. You will likely emerge from Mass as one helluva flat loaf.

But—praise God—there is an abundance of yeast in the air! If your soul has fallen asleep, you can always begin again.

At times, I feel I am floating in ink.

Have I been damned like the leviathan that Saint Columba banished into the deep? Am I to be forgotten here, forever aching to return to the light flickering far, far above?

And then I hear the smallest voice. It is like a gentle current rising from a crack in the ocean floor—rising to stir the water in which I find myself suspended. It says to me:

In the stillness is where you will find Me. In the silence where nothing can be heard but My voice, even be it the faintest whisper. Here, the sun cannot blind you, salty breezes cannot swoon you, crashing waves cannot deafen you. Here, you will discover who you are, for I dwell within you, and I am the Light who reveals all. 

Here, only I AM.

And it is then that I realize I am breathing—I am alive. I am not lost.

I am found.