A couple of weeks ago, I was on retreat with about 40 teenagers. These retreats are always an amazing, exhausting experience of Christian community, and this one was no different -- I'm so deeply thankful for all of the wonderful people I got to spend the week with.
On the retreat, I facilitated a session about storytelling, learning to encounter God’s love in the stories we share with one another, and beginning to see our stories as something for which to be thankful. For this Thanksgiving, I’d like to share one of my stories with you. Appropriately enough, it’s about food.
A few years ago, I was in a graduate school program called Echo -- it’s this strange sort of living organism of a program that’s part grad school, part service program, part job. We took classes in the summers at Notre Dame, and then from August to June, we were sent all over the country to work in Catholic parishes or high schools.
I spent the two academic years of Echo teaching at a Catholic high school in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is about as different from where I grew up as you can find without leaving the country. For starters, there are mountains -- lots of mountains. There are also Mormons -- lots of Mormons! I eventually grew to be really fond of both, but it took awhile for me to come around, and at first it was all very foreign.Fortunately, I was not sent to Utah alone. One of the essential components of Echo is living in an intentional faith community with several of your classmates.
Sidebar: Living in an intentional community is a strange and wonderful thing that a lot of service programs ask their volunteers to do, and it’s getting more popular at colleges and universities across the country for both undergrads and grad students. Intentional communities share meals and chores around the house, pray together, and generally serve as a built-in social life. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever gotten to be a part of, and all of my stories from that period of my life are better because of community. If you ever get the chance, you should definitely live in an intentional community.
That first year in Utah, I found myself in community with two other people, Tom and Fred. We lived in a tiny apartment in a massive apartment complex. We had sort of gotten to know each other a little bit over the summer, but there was still a lot of unfamiliarity when we all first arrived that August. I really wanted Tom and Fred to like me, but I didn’t want them to know that I really wanted them to like me, so I started looking for opportunities to impress them and make them think I was cool.
As I mentioned, our community shared meals -- we cooked for one another regularly. I had started tinkering in the kitchen as a college student, and felt like I was really starting to come into my own as an amateur chef by the time I started Echo. Most of that confidence, if I'm honest, came from lying on the couch watching cooking shows on TV and thinking to myself, I could do that, so perhaps I should not have been nearly so sure of myself.
One of the first couple of weeks in Utah, it was my turn to cook for my community, and I saw this as a golden opportunity to wow my new friends with my next-level cooking skills.
I decided to make chicken parmesan. I had never made chicken parmesan before, but the recipes I found on Pinterest didn’t seem that complicated: fry up some chicken cutlets, pour some tomato sauce over them, melt some cheese on top, boil some pasta, and bada bing bada boom, you’ve got chicken parmesan.
I head home from school on that Monday, stop at the grocery store having consulted my trusty Pinterest recipe, get what I need, and arrive home, ingredients in hand, ready to work some magic.
Step one in the recipe is to “assemble your workstation.” So I get out three little bowls, one for flour, one for egg, one for breadcrumbs. Step one, check.
Step two is to “heat olive oil.” So I pour the olive oil in a pan, turn the burner on high, and return to my workstation to coat the first chicken cutlet. Into the flour, into the egg wash, into the bread crumbs, and into the pan of hot oil, where it quickly reaches a pleasing sizzle. Satisfied with my work, I turn to prepare the next cutlet for frying.
Even though I had never tried to make fried chicken before, it turns out my community members Tom and Fred had, and they’re both sitting nearby in our tiny apartment in a massive apartment complex, watching TV in the living room with a growing curiosity about what is happening a few feet away in the kitchen. They know what I don’t: it doesn’t take very long to fry chicken, and the oil shouldn’t be too hot. For the moment, though, neither of them say anything.
I dredge the next cutlet, into the flour, into the egg wash, into the breadcrumbs… but when I turn back to drop it into the pan, I am greeted with a giant cloud of black smoke, billowing off of the stove.
I panic. For some reason, the first thing that pops into my head is that if I don’t find some way to get rid of this smoke, the alarm is going to go off in our tiny apartment in a massive apartment complex, and roughly 500 people are going to be very, very angry at me, which would not be a good way to impress my new community members.
With this thought in the front of my mind, and basically nothing else to keep it company, I grab the pan and frantically but wordlessly shuffle past Tom and Fred in the living room, through the sliding glass door, and onto our balcony -- our tiny apartment balcony on the fourth floor of a massive apartment complex -- put the still smoking pan down onto the linoleum-covered balcony, turn back around, and walk back inside.
Tom and Fred, God bless their beautiful souls, watch all of this happen with absolute tranquility. After I return to the living room, Fred does, however, silently and quickly go out to retrieve the pan before it can permanently adhere to the linoleum-covered balcony, brings it back inside, dumps some baking soda on it -- which is actually what you should do in case of a grease fire, by the way -- and turns back from the kitchen to find me, collapsed into a crumpled heap of shame on the couch.
They should yell at me. They should laugh at me. They should tell me what an idiot I am. But they doesn’t. It’s quiet for a moment, and then, Tom asks, mercifully and without a hint of condescension in his voice, “Hey Rob, do you want me to take over for you?”
Defeated and humiliated, I nod, and then proceed to pay very close attention to a spot in the carpet for what feels like the next several hours.
A short while later, dinner is ready -- delicious chicken parmesan, courtesy of the most experienced chef in the community. In the days, weeks, months, and years that follow, this will become one of the most-often referenced stories for our community, a story that always ends in fits of laughter. But for that night, there are no jokes to be made at my expense -- just three community members, sharing a meal and trying to survive our first year of teaching together.
Tom and Fred responded to my error -- an error brought on by absurd levels of arrogance and vanity -- with uncommon mercy and love, and to this day, we pinpoint that story as the beginning of our collective friendship, a friendship that has since been the source of innumerable stories of grace.
The holidays can be a tough and stressful time for a vast number of reasons. When your second cousin or mother-in-law or whoever starts burning the fried chicken, and then tries to melt the balcony, I really hope you remember that she’s probably just trying to get you to like her, and refrain from ripping her up. Just go get the pan, for goodness sake, and smile.
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