three strands

Today, I am taking a break from longer posts and intensive narrative. These are three strands, related, and, I admit, taken from something else I am working on. These strands may seem somewhat detached to you, not connected as I see them, or you may see the links, but here they are, threads for this Tuesday, and they may tease you into weaving something of your own. I can hope.

The first strand …

I believe in the intercessory power of brown butter, toasted coconut, chocolate chip and cacao nibs cookies.

I pray in my kitchen while I bake. I find it easier to focus, to pay careful attention to the person I’m baking for, to pray for them, about them, and to listen. Listening is important.

Baking is a precise thing. There’s room to be creative, but there are fundamentals that must be observed. How much leaven, how long to kneed, how hot the oven. There are parameters for the creation, but there’s room to play.

I kneed dough; I think about the Word. The Word who was made flesh, substance, substance like the flour I had mounded up and then indented at its top to drop eggs into for the pasta; but He is more, more real than flour and eggs, embodied, infleshed, profoundly real and present. Ascended into Heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father, resurrected to a body. A corpus.

More than flour, more than eggs, abundantly real.

I think about the Word and I pray. Therein lies the intercessory power of fresh pain au chocolat. It’s in the praying, it’s in the starling belief that the Word became flesh.

The second strand …

The Bible is a beautiful work of art; true art.

Does it make it any less true for it to be art? Does it make it any less literal?

If our standard for what is true is rooted in what is believable, then the Bible is nonsense. Our faith is pointless. St. Paul wrote that if Christ is not raised from the dead, we are without hope. As Edward Hirsch mentioned once in a poem, “So the saint once believed. And I believe the saint.”

But to say that Christ was raised from the dead, to say that Christ was made man, was infleshed, was present with us, is absurd. There is nothing that makes sense about it, unless the measure for what is logical, for what is true, is a measure that does not belong to us as mortals.

Truth belongs to God, we’re privileged at times to borrow it. In the logic of God, the incarnation makes sense. In the logic of God, the infleshed Christ can exist, can die, can resurrect in triumph. In the logic of God, the Creator can be present in my kitchen, while I bake cookies, listening to prayers.

This is truth, but is not truth we own. It is His.

The Bible is true. Unbelievably, wonderfully true.

And the Bible is art. True art.

The third strand …

Mary wasn’t the only one to receive an annunciation when it came to the incarnation.

We have a tendency to forget Joseph.

Joseph was visited by an angel, too. The man who would be dishonored in front of others in his community because his betrothed was a woman who had, for all appearances, been unfaithful, obeyed the message of God and took her as his wife anyway. Moreover, St. Matthew tells us that it was Joseph himself who gave the infant Jesus His name, as the angel had instructed him.

Is Joseph’s yes any less significant than Mary’s?

I imagine that God’s infinite love is such that He cared as much about the earthly father of the Son as He did the earthly mother.

It is Mary and Joseph together, recipients of separate and yet joined annunciations, who comprised the holy family out of which came the King of Kings. Flesh, indwelt, present among us.

There are no small parts. There are no small artists.

… Blessed Tuesday.

© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.