Take and Eat

Goodness, Grounded: Day 6

Photos from Tuck In, Y'all - a business venture I loved for a season of my life and still often wonder if I could begin again.

I can cook.

I’m not a professionally trained chef or even a home chef. I don’t embody a lifetime of standing over the stove alongside my mom or my grandmothers, learning the history of our family’s recipes. I have no muscle memory of making GrandTom’s curry dip or GrandDot’s giblet gravy. I have no recollection of how to make Grandmama’s layered caramel cake or even her chocolate peanut clusters. I don’t know the exact ratios of seasonings in my mom’s beef stew or the magical way she smokes pork butt.

Thad will tell you he knew I was the one for him because I offered him a blueberry Lender’s bagel the first time he made a professional Baptist Student Union visit to my dorm room. And before you ask, he was a perfect gentleman; he sat on the edge of my only chair, still wearing his backpack, and held that bagel in his free hand. But I won his heart with a crappy Lender’s bagel wrapped in a paper napkin.

I am unsure of the moment that I internalized the idea that true hospitality included some offering of food and drink. But as I look back over my life’s work, this is likely the truest thing about me. The table is the center of my life. It is the place from which all of the goodness of God flows out of me. It is the sacred, intimate meeting space to know and be known. It is an altar, a cairn, a set aside place to take and eat and remember.

Preparing a meal for others is the delight of my life. But for all the things I can cook, I cannot bake bread. I own a stack of books on the art of baking bread. I read books about bread. I watch baking shows. I own a fancy mixer, a high-dollar Dutch oven, a little thing that perfectly scores the loaf, locally milled flour, good yeast, the brown parchment paper, the pretty towel and proofing bowl to ensure that magical rise. I have it all but for the life of me, I have never, ever baked a pretty loaf that tasted as good as it smelled.

For the last few months, as I’ve entered a new season with God, my image of God has expanded to hold a more expansive view of our Creator. I am going to pull back the veil of my interior world and tell you something I trust you will receive with tenderness and an openness to bear witness to my journey without judgment.

In this season of life, God has been revealing God’s nature to me in the image of an older woman in an apron, standing in the kitchen, baking bread. This woman is not white, thin, or perfect in appearance, but she is radiant, warm, and there is something about her countenance that enraptures me. She is love and I am welcome at her table. In the eyes of my soul, God is always throwing flour onto the butcher block, kneading bread when I come in through the screened door, letting it slap against the frame behind me. She looks up, her face awash in delight, and wipes her hands on her apron.

“Well look who it is! I’ve been hoping you’d come to see me. Do you have time for a glass of wine? I’ve got a fresh loaf coming out in a bit.” God says.

I want God to call me Shug. I don’t yet know why, but I keep listening for that name. I pull out a barstool where God stands working the bread and I drink slow from the glass. There are dregs of sediment in the wine, small crystalized bits that are bitter on my tongue. God looks at me, expectant, and I just gaze back. The oven timer goes off and God turns to pull the bread from the oven.

I know I’ll be given butter with the bread. I am known here.

I watch God working, the steam rising from the loaf now resting on her face. She catches me looking and grins.

“You know I love you, don’t you?” God asks me as I am passed a plate of bread and a smear of butter. I am poured another glass of wine. I am known here.

And again, in the eyes of my soul, I am at the table, staring at God who is meeting me in the soft body of a woman so He can mother me.

I take the Bread and I eat of it until I am satisfied.

For some of you, the image of God coming to me as a woman in order to mother me will be shocking. For others of you, it may feel like a coming home. To me it feels like a tender invitation from God, given to me in the presence of a prayerful companion, to let God love me in the language I use to express love.

When I came up with the prompt Take and Eat, I had planned to go a different direction in my writing. My image of God as mother in the kitchen was not something I had ever planned to share publicly. It feels deeply personal to me. But it is what came out and I could not not share it. May my intimate experience of God in this season of life give you permission to invite God into your knowledge of God and stretch it to hold just a little more. And may you be surprised, once again, that our finite minds cannot fathom the expansiveness of our Creator who calls life into being with just a word.

If you are new to Locusts and Honey, I am writing in community with other writers who are grounding the goodness of God in words throughout the month of November using the prompts you can find here. Today is day six. We are using the hashtag #goodnessgrounded .