Power in Weakness

My husband, bless his heart, knows me entirely too well. Despite all his protestations to the contrary, I remain convinced that he occasionally exploits that understanding for his own wicked amusement. Take basketball, for instance. I like to watch basketball occasionally, love the grace and strength, the dazzle of a well-played game. And yes, for all of you fellow Celtics fans, Rajon Rondo is a beautiful man.

I do not, however, play basketball. If I have any grace and strength, those qualities flee when I take a basketball in my hands. Team sports and I never quite connected in a meaningful way. After nearly two decades of marriage, my husband should know this. And yet...a few weeks ago, I opened my email to find the unwelcome announcement from my son's basketball coach that he had scheduled a mother/son basketball game. Did I neglect to mention that my husband coaches my son's team?

For two weeks, I dreaded that game. I pouted, whined and tried to weasel out, but the night of the big game found me glowering in the car on the way to the gym. Far outside my comfort zone, smack in my weak spot, this game held little promise of the great fun my husband gleefully anticipated.

To my credit, I left my pouting courtside and threw myself into the game. I even made a couple of baskets, although I avoided dribbling at all costs. We had a grand time, and I was laughing too hard to slap the smug grin off my husband's face. Drat that man!

In the days leading up the game, I contemplated my aversion to my own weaknesses. I love feeling strong, physically and emotionally. I love to succeed, to work my way to the top of the mountain and breathe in the view. And yet, that annoying voice inside me, the voice that sounds rather like my husband, reminded me of the power of weakness.

Paul, the little apostle of immense courage who stood boldly before kings, proclaimed, "When I am weak, then am I strong." He recognized that the strength of the Lord was made perfect in the weakness of his servants. This same God wrapped His greatest treasure, His most potent force, in the body of a tiny baby and sent that baby to the home of a lowly carpenter. This same God, Paul wrote to the Corinthians, "hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty."

I have not yet reached the point where I readily, like Paul, glory in my weaknesses. But I confess to a fascination with the concept of weakness as power. Ether, the Book of Mormon prophet, quotes the Lord in what is, to me, one of the most hopeful verses in all of scripture: "And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them."

The strength that I admire, the strength of Paul and Peter and all the truly great men and women, comes only when we acknowledge our weaknesses in humility and exercise the faith necessary to allow the Lord to transform them. God is, after all, the master alchemist. Who am I to let a little fear of failure stand in the way of the treasure God could make of my life? Let's play ball!

Warm Bread, Stolen Cookies, and Other Life Essentials

I have come to the conclusion that there must be a link between the stomach and the pen. Christopher Kimball, editor of Cooks Illustrated magazine, quickly rose to the top of my list of favorite essayists last year. Now, I find myself reading, quite by chance, a memoir of Ruth Reichl, the editor-in-chief of Gourmet Magazine up until its unexpected demise in 2009. Just a few chapters in, I am captivated by Ruth's rich stories (which she readily admits to embellishing, according to the time-honored tradition of her rather eccentric family). Ostensibly about her process of maturing into a full-blown foodie, the memoir reveals a rich understanding of the complexities and humor of human nature. Incidentally, it also includes a host of delicious recipes.

I suppose it makes sense, really, that foodies should have the ability to reach right to the heart of things. After all, isn't food the way to a man's heart? Don't we eat "soul food" and "comfort food"? Food provides a nostalgic link to our past and a hopeful path to our future, as in the cases of dieting or preparing a special meal for someone we desire to impress. We reward and punish with food. We eat or refuse to eat as a form of signalling confederacy or protest. Food figures prominently in our rituals and ceremonies, in our ethnic identity and our social gatherings. What, how, when, and with whom we eat offers a glimpse into our socio-economic status. And, in the end, we simply cannot survive without food.

My daughter had a birthday recently, her fifth. When I asked her for her birthday dinner menu, she responded with "bread and water for everyone...oh, and cake with ice cream." We did, indeed have bread for her birthday dinner: Portuguese sweet bread, fresh out of the oven and slathered with butter and either creamed honey or strawberry freezer jam. The sheer, glorious decadence of the thick slices of fragrant homemade bread differed rather sharply from the crust of bread and water we associate with prison food or even the unleavened bread the Savior portioned to his apostles at the Last Supper (although my daughter does regularly break her bread into small "sacrament" pieces). Isn't it odd how one simple menu can show such vastly different faces?

Though not quite as austere as a bread and water diet, I celebrated my move to Vermont some years ago by going vegetarian for a time. With its love of all things hippie and with a host of animal-friendly options, Vermont makes vegetarianism easy. For me, eating vegetables symbolized embracing my new life and complemented the process of healing after a long period of intense stress. Even the process of chopping copious quantities of squash and carrots for my favorite vegetarian chili grounded me, and the spicy scent of dinner simmering on the stove turned my small apartment into a home.

For many of us, in fact, food and home are practically synonymous. We taste a meatloaf just like Mom used to make or enjoy the liberty of refusing carrot and raisin salad even while fondly envisioning that very salad in its penguin bowl on our childhood dinner table. Like many families, my family builds traditions around special foods: Christmas lobster followed by steak with Bearnaise sauce (Dad makes the lobster and Mom makes the Bearnaise sauce), Irma's Kahlua cake for most birthdays, Devin's coffeecake for a Saturday morning treat, oatmeal bread dripping with swirled cinnamon for our friend Pat, pork fried rice in honor of Grandpa Larsen.

Another family tradition hearkens back to my college summer at a fishing resort on Alaska's Lake Iliamna. The lodge chef kept dozens of special recipe chocolate chip cookies in the walk in freezer. The cookies made up part of the sack lunches for our guests to eat creekside, and employees were strictly forbidden to partake. Of course, we had strict orders against any number of temptations, and we felt unduly persecuted. Consequently, most of us gained a substantial number of pounds on stolen chocolate chip cookies. A laughing chef sent us home with the secret recipe at the end of the summer, and I have made the cookies for the past 20 years.

About the time I began and ended my life of cookie crime, Jeff Henderson decided to spend a portion of his prison sentence working in the kitchen. Incarcerated for drug dealing, he found a passion for cooking that carried him to executive chef positions in Las Vegas, a best-selling memoir, and a chance to give back. I find his story fascinating enough to recommend it (try this NPR interview and this ABC News story for starters). And I echo his philosophy that "food is a celebration of life, . . .that every recipe, every dish has a story behind it." I look forward to finding those stories, one spoonful at a time.

And the Not So Blissful Moments...

I remember the exact point at which I stopped watching the movie Schindler's List. By all accounts, the movie is a masterpiece and the story gripping, but I could not watch it. I have a vague memory, perhaps faulty, of a scene of soldiers moving through the ghetto, spreading violence and fear in their path. Desperate for her child's life, a mother tosses her baby out a window. . .to a waiting soldier who impales the infant on the point of his bayonet. Whenever I need to feel my insides curl into a tight little ball, I remember that scene.

Some time ago, I wrote about bliss moments, scenes etched in my memory because they evoke warm and cozy feelings. I hold quite a store of bliss moments. In another corner of my brain, etched just as powerfully, I have a store of anti-bliss moments, memories of times that stopped a smile dead in its tracks. This set of memories occupies a much smaller and less accessible portion of my psyche, and yet I hold on to these ragged images, feeling somehow that they, too, have something to offer me.

Oddly, outside of movies or novels, scenes of death and classic tragedy rarely figure on my anti-bliss list. Instead, my unhappy moments often tend toward the much more prosaic--flashing lights in my rear view mirror, for instance. In fact, just last week I had to dig into the bottom of my purse and smooth out a badly crumpled traffic ticket before sending it to the court clerk. I confess that I behaved rather badly when the conscientious police officer delivered the ticket, and I let loose a torrent of tears and objectionable vocabulary once he had moved on to his next victim. For days, I could not even talk about the ticket, responding in stony silence to my family's teasing.

Even now, my calm restored, I cannot quite articulate why a simple traffic stop sparked such an intense response. I think perhaps my overactive need for perfection balks at such a blatant reminder of my too human nature.

A rather prominent shelf in my anti-bliss storage closet holds memories of interpersonal conflict, not because I court contention but because those moments bother me more than almost anything else. On the simple end are moments such as the time I unwittingly cut off another driver headed for the same parking spot. Furious, the other driver flashed the international sign of contempt and yelled something rather unintelligible. In my surprise and hurt (I was 20, mind you, and rather naive) I attempted to respond in like manner, but I was shaking too badly to figure out which finger should point to the blue skies above. The incident bothered me for hours, which strikes me now as quite silly. Years later, I discovered that responding with a smile and a wave has the advantage of both disarming my opponent and reducing my own blood pressure quite handily. Beautiful discovery, that.

Less humorous and more striking are those times when discord settles on my doorstep, when misunderstandings wedge their way between me and one of those I love most dearly. When contention comes home, when I perceive a threat to bonds I hold eternal and lack the power or knowledge required to sew up the wound, those are the times I long to inflict on myself some sort of pain to distract me from hurt I cannot either understand or control. Fortunately, those moments occur rarely, and I have learned better how to cope when they do slide under the door.

Happily, I can bring forward few memories that travel beyond the mundane and almost no lingering angst from feeling offended. Whether I lead a charmed life, or whether my naivete simply leaves me blind to offenses, I couldn't say. I do find it intriguing that I seem to fear conflict, embarrassment, and loss of control above just about anything else.

I hope I never have the opportunity to feel the desperation of the Jewish mother in Schindler's List. I hope that I have taught my children to learn from their struggles and to store up blissful moments to give them strength in the darkness. And I hope that my own memory of pain will help me to grow in beautiful ways.