Cooking Up Some Clarity

In mid October, my mother came to stay with me to await the birth of my niece.  My mom is an excellent cook, but this is not a trait that has traveled down the family line to me.  Somehow, some folks are able to make tossing a meal together look like the easiest, simplest thing in the world.  I always get frazzled while cooking, unable to multi-task in that particular forum, and by the end of it the kitchen looks like a warzone and everything is slightly overdone.

So on the day my mother arrived, she offered to cook dinner, and I gratefully accepted.  She was making something relatively simple, and she handily improvised every time she needed a piece of basic kitchen equipment that I didn’t own.  All of this was humming along smoothly, until she asked me for the salt.  I pointed to the pinch bowl on my counter.  Empty.  I went to the cabinet where I thought I remembered storing a box of kosher when I moved in.  Nothing.  My mother looked at me somewhat mournfully.  “You don’t even have salt?”

I tried to explain that cooking was complicated and took up a lot of time and I was really very busy running around between two congregations so most of the time I’d just pick something up on the way home because there was always something else to do.  It all sounded like a good excuse in my head, but my mom pointed out to me just how unhealthy these habits are.  She also pointed out that I wasn’t going to be any good to anyone at either of my congregations if I got sick because I eat poorly or was overly stressed because I was broke.  She was trying to give me a lesson in putting first things first.

It’s similar to what Nouwen says about placing the urgent before the important, echoing what a mentor of mine refers to as “the tyranny of the urgent.”  How often do we wake up in the morning and think, “ah, today I have to get X important thing accomplished,” and then we find ourself going to bed at night thinking, “Somehow I didn’t have time for that, where did my day go?”  We run around doing a million different things, and we overlook basic but critical tasks like taking good care of ourselves.

Our minds get all cluttered up, and then it becomes hard to see the most important thing in the closet through all the crud we’ve stashed in there.  Somehow we need to be able to get rid of the clutter, to clean things up, to purify our minds so that we can see the important rather than get distracted by the urgent.  The talk of purification in the Bible can sometimes seem so heavy and even judgmental, but I think “purification” is really just about clarity of purpose.  Clarity of priorities.  Getting rid of the clutter to focus on taking care of ourselves and others, “so that you have genuine mutual love, loving one another deeply from the heart.”  

So I encourage you to get rid of some of your clutter today.  Me?  I’m going to release feeling compelled to watch the obsessive news tonight.  And then I’m going to ignore Nouwen’s suggestion to skip the salt, and bust out that pinch bowl of kosher to cook a healthy dinner instead. Any recipe suggestions?