I like to cook and I like to watch the food channel. One day I was watching one of those gourmets wrist deep in a pile of bread dough. That is one thing I have not been too successful or even spent much time in trying.

People often speak of the "patience of Job" but it might be more accurate to speak of the "patience of bread". Making bread takes patience. You cannot hurriedly knead and you must wait for the dough to rise. When you see a loaf or fresh-baked bread, you are looking at a chunk of the baker's life.

The Eucharistic bread however is different. It is the bread of impatience. Because it contains no leaven, you do not have to wait for any yeast to rise. Just pop it into the oven as the recipe says.

Like the bread of the original Passover, described in Exodus, it was unleavened --no need to wait for the action of yeast. The Master Chef who oversaw the first Passover meal did not want his diners to think they were attending a leisurely banquet..

"You shall eat with haste." said the Lord - one of the few injunctions that contradicts the admonitions which our parents always give to us as children when we are eating at the table. God was telling them - eat and run.

They were to stand at a table with belts around their waist raising up their hemlines so they could literally run without tripping. They were to have sandals on their feet, not barefoot as was the custom, a walking staff and ready for journey

The Eucharistic Bread of the New Passover shares this urgency. But a bread of impatience may not be what our impetuous age needs. We already have too many McDonalds, Burger Kings, and Wendys. We really don't need drive up windows on the side of the church to take communion; though some people would love that. Perhaps the very last thing we really need is. another impatient element to reinforce the modern atmosphere to which we are now completely conditioned.

Being patient is the one thing that we are not allowed. We simply cannot wait in the store, on the highway, or at the Liturgy, and Eat and run. That's what God told his people. The Liturgy does not tarry long after communion. The presider says a closing prayer, blesses the people and sends them off in the peace of the Lord.

If the Liturgy itself supplies no room for patience, then we must make that room by spending time with the Christ reserved in the tabernacles of our churches. The story is told of one Baptist minister visiting his Catholic priest friend.

When the priest genuflected before the tabernacle containing the reserved Blessed Sacrament; the minister asked what this foreign gesture signified. When the priest explained that we Catholics believe that the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ is truly and substantially present under the appearances of bread and wine.

The minister looked pensive for a moment, not being able to share that same faith; but said to the priest: "If we believed that the Son of God was present in the box, genuflecting wouldn't be enough. It would take a crow bar to remove me."

Perhaps all too often in our impatience we forget what the tabernacle contains. We walk by as if it were a common bread box; yet how strange to decorate a bread box with candles and flowers.

This Eucharist is no ordinary food. It is the spiritual food that fully restores, truly nourishes, and completely satisfies; not the body, but the spirit; not the flesh but the soul; not the stomach but the mind. And as one well known theologian often says, "You are what eat."

Nothing could be more true when we speak of and eat of the Eucharistic body of Christ. The food of the tabernacle is the reverent bread that pays the ultimate compliment: I love you. I want to remain with you. The unused bread that is reserved in the wooden or brass or gilded box is called a tabernacle. But the consecrated bread consumed by us in faith makes us walking tabernacles of flesh and blood.

It is the bread that respects the rhythms of human existence. To be human is precisely not to have things happen automatically, all at once, as soon we ask.

In the development toward maturity, life itself demands that we take time, that we have plateaus, that we wait, that we be patient. The Eucharist, the bread of impatience, may be in fact the greatest gift and lesson that God could give to us for our age.