How a bowl of udon
traveled here

4,000 years ago · upper Yellow River, China

An earthquake buried a village.
One bowl was turned upside down in the soil.

In 2005 they lifted that bowl.
Inside were noodles — thin strands of millet.

Someone’s supper.
Four thousand years, bowl and all.

821 · Sanuki, Japan

A flood broke the wall of a reservoir.
The court sent men, and after three years the work was still unfinished.

A man named Kukai came down.
It is told that the wall stood again three months after he took charge.

The secret was not engineering. People gathered.
What fed them, it is said, was noodles.

That is how udon began — as food for people who work.

1985 · Daejeon Station, Korea

Steam engines had to change cars every 150 kilometres.
So trains stood a long while at Daejeon. More than five minutes.

In those five minutes people came down to the platform.
A bowl of noodles cost 400 won.
They swallowed it fast and climbed back on.

Those five minutes were the warmest part of a long journey.

It is gone now. Trains stop for two minutes.

The landing

Daejeon Station was a landing too.
A place where boats arrive, and a place where boats leave.

Some people have been tossed about a long time before reaching shore.
Some have to set out again before they catch their breath.

In between, one hot bowl.

People have been doing this for four thousand years.

But one seat was empty

I have been a pastor for twenty-four years.
In all that time I fed people with words. That was my work.

Yet in a lifetime of churchgoing
I have never once eaten food cooked by my own pastor.

That empty place stayed with me.

I know many people have been hurt by the word pastor.
I did not think words could mend that.

So I cook on Saturday mornings

For those who work from dawn to night all week,
I wanted to offer an hour and a half with nothing to do.

We will not ask you anything.
Not where you came from, not what happened.
And there is no charge.

Eat, and go in peace.

Naru’s own taste

It will not be the best udon. It will be the most careful one.

I keep a book open beside me and learn one bowl at a time.
Some weeks will be clumsy. The care will not be.

Taking up the good hearts along that long road,
I mean to find a taste that is ours.

If a child who came along one morning remembers, years from now,
“that udon was really good” — that is enough.

There is an old word for this.

Hospitality.

Naru Udon is not a restaurant.
For an hour and a half on Saturday mornings, we serve a bowl to our neighbors.