on soup, prayer and hard days...

There was a half inch of ice coating everything earlier this morning - and now it is pouring rain. The prediction is that this storm will later morph into snow so at some point today I'm going out in foul weather gear to shovel slush off the drive way. Life could be much, much worse so I rejoice in today's challenge: it will be freezing cold and taxing, but I can return to a hot shower and a warm house. It is on days like this that I really want to count my blessings.

Soon I am going to make chicken soup. It is my maiden voyage. Back in the day when I was a hardcore vegetarian, I made a wonderful split pea soup. Some reasonably tasty dahl, too. But those times have come and gone and I haven't tried my hand at soup making in over 25 years! Pádraig Ó Tuama writes in the wee book of prayers for the Corrymeela Community that praying is much like making soup. In the section entitled, "How to use this book," he says:

I have always wanted to write a book of recipes. Soups, probably; something to warm the heart. My recipes are vague about amounts but come with poetry suggestions. When cooking stew, for instance, it is best to read Patrick Kavanagh's In Memory of My Mother... when making roast pear, chicken and garlic soup (topped with blue cheese)it is always wise to read Marie Howe's Magdalene - the Seven Devils... My friend Devin phoned me from California once wanting to know whether a recipe I'd written required one clove of garlic or two. He was asking the wrong person, but he was a man in need of detail and he believed that I loved him enough to give him detail even if I didn't have detail to give... Use your imagination, I said, but he wanted to use mine. I love him dearly, so I made an answer up. It worked, I think, but I forget how many cloves...

Most of us are in a dialogue when we read a book. I know I am. That's the point, I think; to listen to the writer, to listen to yourself and to listen to the space between where things said by neither are nonetheless said. The things we take away are the things were already looking for: "what you seek is seeking you," said Rumi. And while this is a frightening concept, it can a consoling one be if we listen to the desires that will feed us, not destroy us. Rumi asks to trust that wisdom waits - and might be found in unlikely corners... All of that goes to say: you'll need to make your own damned soup, because only you can make it. You know your own needs. Or you will.  Take bones and flesh and blood and fruits of the dark earth, put in water, put in salt and put a fire to it. Let it boil, let it cool a little. Season with what your season needs. Eat it, drink it, survive and look around. Be a little bit glorious. Be warm and open. Share. Keep some for tomorrow and give plenty away. Amen.

This approach to soup and prayer makes sense to me. I think I'll need to make a batch of Irish soda bread, too. In so many ways, these are days for comfort food. Or, at the very least, soup and bread for the journey. So many of us feel battered. Abused. Used hard and hung up wet to dry as they say in Tucson. As I listen to the evening news summary on PBS (all I can muster) I am beyond tears. With each new assault from the regime I can only make the sign of the Cross and say: Lord, have mercy. It goes from bad to worse. Who could have predicted three years ago the new lows we would experience, right? And still they come. Relentlessly. Unashamedly. With vulgarity and venom. Historian Heather Cox Richardson listed just a partial posting of the retribution the regime initiated after the Senate's traitorous voite:

Republican Senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chair Ron Johnson (R-WI) began an investigation into Hunter Biden... the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security suspended the ability for residents of New York to enroll or renew their status in the Global Entry or Trusted Traveler programs, (in retaliation for the fact that New York has refused to turn DMV records over to ICE) which will hobble New Yorkers who often travel internationally. Attorney General William Barr gave the Trump campaign cover for 2020. He issued an order that the FBI cannot investigate any political candidate or that candidate’s senior advisors before the 2020 election without him signing off on it. So, if Trump does receive help from a foreign country as he did in 2016 and tried to do in 2020, the FBI cannot investigate it unless Barr says it’s okay. Barr, you will remember, is deeply implicated in the Ukraine Scandal.

Today I rejoice that Ambassador Marie Yovonavitch once again stepped into the fray and put it like this in her Washington Post op-ed essay:

I have seen dictatorships around the world, where blind obedience is the norm and truth-tellers are threatened with punishment or death. We must not allow the United States to become a country where standing up to our government is a dangerous act... It has been shocking to experience the storm of criticism, lies and malicious conspiracies that have preceded and followed my public testimony, but I have no regrets. I did — we did — what our conscience called us to do. We did what the gift of U.S. citizenship requires us to do. These are turbulent times, perhaps the most challenging that I have witnessed. But... like my parents before me, I remain optimistic about our future. The events of the past year, while deeply disturbing, show that even though our institutions and our fellow citizens are being challenged in ways that few of us ever expected, we will endure, we will persist and we will prevail.

To her witness, let me add Ó Tuama's prayer for courage: more than anything else, we need courage and a trust in God's steadfast love that endures forever to meet the blistering challenges of this season. Courage - and probably lots of soup.

Courage comes from the heart and we are always welcomed by God, the heart of all being. Today we bear witness to our faith, knowing that we are called to live lives of courage, love and reconciliation in the ordinary and extraordinary moments of each day. We bear witness, too, to our failures and our complicity n the fractures of our world. May we be courageous today. May we learn today. May we love today. Amen and amen.

credits
+ https://www.ambitiouskitchen.com/the-best-chicken-soup-recipe/
+ https://angelusnews.com/arts-culture/the-prayers-that-god-cant
+ https://www.zatista.com/product/details/65005/Soup-Cooking