G.K. Chesterton wrote that there are some things that are worth doing even if you are very bad at them, like blowing your nose or brushing your teeth. While it makes sense to pay someone else to build your house or fly an airplane or take out your appendix, it doesn’t much seem appropriate to pay someone who is better at it than you to kiss your wife.
It is my own humble opinion that among these things that Gilbert, that delightfully agitated Englishman, would have each of us do, even if we do them poorly, are: singing at Mass, dancing at weddings, and cooking. Much ink1 has been spilled about the first, and the second is (I hope) rather obvious and self-explanatory. I wish to weigh in on the third.
I love cooking, and with some practice, I’ve become increasingly comfortable bopping around the kitchen, whipping up some of my favorite dishes.2 When I’m stressed, or bored, or lonely, the thing I most want to do is chop some onions and garlic, throw them in a pan with some olive oil, and make something up based on whatever else I’ve got on hand.3
But there is obviously a lot more to cooking than this. The formidable ritual of cooking, of formulating in the mind an image of some finished product and then working to bring that which is imagined into reality, is far too sacred to be left in the hands of machines. It is intensely human, an exhilarating participation in the creative energies of the God who speaks life into being and sustains all of creation. Cooking is sacramental; we use our bodies to communicate love through bread and wine (and pasta) to those who gather at our table. We feed because He first fed us.
And yet, even the most brilliantly creative artist is, in a sense, a child in a sandbox. The inventor simply looks around at the things around her and puts what she sees together in interesting and novel combinations. The composer, the engineer, the sculptor, the carpenter, the architect: each of these geniuses is merely taking things that already exist and rearranging them to make something new. No matter what we make, we can only use the ingredients in the pantry.
Meanwhile: God, the Cosmic Tailor,4 has fashioned for us a bespoke reality. Everything is measured and measured again, and spoken into existence only once it is perfect, made to exact specifications for a specific need. No human can create this way. In fact, there should be a different word for what we do, because it seems rude to use the same word. The Living God is a maestro, beckoning into existence whatever he desires, simply by desiring it. We mash bits of Play-Doh and sand together and call it a blueberry pancake.
The imposition of this reality is, for me, most palpable in the kitchen. It is here that my creative pride is crushed by the weight of my own finitude. In the adventure of food preparation, I am bound by the ingredients in my pantry, to be sure, but no matter what ingredients I start with, the finished product is never quite what I set out to make when I fetch5 the cutting board from the drawer. I am a fallen and sinful human being, which is of course my excuse for absentmindedly leaving the pasta boil for too long.
Still, we strive for ever-elusive perfection. I cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. It allows me to do something, and to continue trying to do it as well as I can.6 One of my favorite aspects of cooking (after, of course, the eating) is the endless tinkering. Next time, a smidge more garlic. Maybe shallots? I wonder what would happen if I added honey to this chili? This spirit of innovation is not borne of dissatisfaction with what is, but of hope for what could be. Imagine a perfectly seasoned and perfectly cooked steak—it’s theoretically possible! Why not keep trying ’til we get it right!?
My experience with cooking has been much the same as my experience with singing at Mass and dancing at weddings: a gradual process of self-discovery, wherein I begin to do a thing, choosing to forget for the moment that it is a thing that would be done much more efficiently and pleasingly by some other person with an ounce of training. In a momentary lapse of excruciating self-awareness (and the wondrous cascade of youthful confidence that always accompanies any good risk), I discover the marvelous truth of such things: it is only by beginning to do something, before we have a framed certificate on the wall that says we are qualified to do it, when we just freaking cut loose and go for it, it’s only then that we start to actually learn how to do it.
In this way cooking (and singing and dancing) are sacramental, because they remind me to stop being so dang scared and live, I mean really live in this gloriously haphazard collection of cells that the King of Glory decided to entrust to me, and to use these marvels of art and science that we call bodies to receive grace and mediate it through ourselves and into all those gathered around the table, a table of human beings fully alive,7 which is, of course, a table of Glory.
1 Or at least, the blogosphere equivalent of ink.↩
2 Heavy in the rotation these days: Chicken fajitas, 2AM chili, and a pasta dish that started out as carbonara before I started adding to it random things like chicken and zucchini.↩
3 Also crucial to this process: music. Loud music. Usually my Spotify Backer playlist.↩
4 I think we all have our own little personal images of what God might be; this is one of mine.↩
6 Adapted from the Oscar Romero Prayer, which was, strangely enough, not written by Oscar Romero.↩
7 Adapted from a famous quote from St. Irenaeus of Lyon: “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.”
↩
No comments:
Post a Comment