How is it even possible that I have purchased another cookbook? I do not know. But it is here at home with me.

Ok. Actually, I do know. It was $5 at a Goodwill and was in perfect condition. And I cannot say 'no' to a cookbook that I can afford and which will definitely be used. In the last year, I have taken to reading cookbooks cover-to-cover, literally reading every page with a scrupulousness I definitely did not apply to college. I must have scoured over 3,000 pages in the last year.

And so, they are all bookmarked with sticky-notes for recipes that I found inspiring and helpful. They all sit waiting eagerly on the shelf. The more informative ones I refer to by their author. I will be talking to Tyler and say something like, "Deborah has a salad dressing that I think you would like" or "Nigel cooks chard in a way that makes it actually look tasty."

In my long unemployment, there is a huge chunk of time that I must fill in the early mornings when prospective employers do not want to talk to the unemployed for a few more hours (if at all), friends are at work, and Tyler is in class. This is a dangerous time because it can easily lead to laziness or food depression or all manner of other evil. This is the time I spend with the likes of Deborah and Nigel. They are good teachers who love food for its own sake, for the textures, colors, flavors, aromas, and a thousand other subtleties whose discernment is born from obsession and lots of practice. I have learned a lot from them and I have benefitted from their passion.

So I have come home with another book by another author. It is the William-Sanoma book on "Entertaining". Tyler wanted it because he loves the details of hosting. I am all messy kitchen, hoping my guests don't mind that I licked the spoon, and just barely on time. Tyler is all folded napkins and garnish. (I am sure that someday we will achieve hospitality in a truly unique way.) This book is as much for him as it is for me.

And so, I feel at the same time compelled to open it and read it through...and to go back to my old friends and pick a new thing that I have meant to try but haven't gotten around to. Either way, food and cookbooks are the only constant in my day to day life these days.

I think there is a part of me that reads cookbooks by authors who do a lot of explanation and teaching with their recipes because it is this giant reminder that life is still happening. I feel so much like I have been put into this holding position until God gets around to giving me clearance to land. I sit up in the sky making circles in my airplane and trying not to watch the fuel gauge because, you know, faith and stuff.

Mondays are paralyzing. Other people wake up on Monday and think, "I have a whole week of my life that has been planned for me to get through until I can do what I want." I wake up on Monday with the weight of feeling that last week did not have any word from God or his prophets and now I have a whole blank week ahead of me in which I hope to be able to muster something that looks like confidence (which I have none of) so I can organize my time, convince somebody that I have skills worth paying money for, and try to spend as little money as possible. And all of this I feel pressure to do well enough to ward off the nagging feeling that I am doing everything wrong. Try as I might, I have swallowed just enough of that American value that says that you are master of your destiny and, if you don't like your circumstances, you have only yourself to blame.

But I remember how I got here. With much prayer and tears and hope and trust. With much trying my absolute best and hardest. All of that climaxed first in getting fired. The prayers I offered Tuesday night at small group for direction and help with my job were still on their way to heaven the Wednesday I got fired. Thursday, I woke up with so much relief. And then the sweatshop. And seeking more direction and stepping out in more faith to leave that and walk into the longest free fall. Being raised a good moderately good pentecostal, I grew up with the idea that you can't live on yesterday's word from God or yesterday's promises. But this is what I have been doing because God has offered no further word.

I am just a woman, infinitely small. Who am I to counsel God? Who am I to tell him to speak?

I know a host of people who would tell me to pray more, to read more Bible, to be better at going to church every week. It is not that I do not do any of those. Rather, those take on different appearances as I get older and find myself in stranger seasons of life. (Except for going to church more often. That has just been the terrible failing of trying to travel, spend time with family, remember when daylight daving is etc.) Food is my spiritual dischipline. Reading cookbooks is my prayer that I can someday be a skilled individual with a meaningful life. Eating and cooking is my demonstration of faith that it is worthwhile to keep myself healthy, that I will wait this out with the expecation that something will change eventually. It is a conversation with God. It is thanksgiving and petition. It is all the faith I can manage.

Today, it does not quite feel like enough.

Jessie J Pie and Tracy Chapman Chocolate Mousse.

I made blackberry pie and listened to this song. Then I made chocolate mousse while I listened to this song. My food always tastes how I feel and how I feel is directly connected to what I'm listening to. Also, I am reading Unclean by Richard Beck because Tyler left in my room thinking I would like it. Take the time to read the introduction on Amazon. I find it fascinating.

Home, revisited.

From a letter I received upon returning to Portland,

"Is home just an idea? Is it just a feeling? Is it an actual thing that can be tangibly felt? Or is it tangible at all? I once thought that I was satisfied just believing that home would only come when heaven did but that's not satisfying at all. Another time I convinced myself that home is where there are friends and food. But that leaves the impression that home can never be stable."

 They were perfect words to go to sleep to because they gave names and faces to many of my emotions having just left one home to return to another.

In reading Radical Hospitality, I am beginning to wonder if home is not much more easily defined as space. Space to breathe and be. Specifically addressed in the book are the areas of people, of ourselves, even of God that remain mysteries. Homan writes,

"There is a gentle hospitality with the self that most of us fail to practice. You know that moment you look in the mirror and see a stranger staring out those eyes? We don't accept the stranger within. We dread the regions of ourselves we don't understand. By learning to value the otherliness of the actual stranger, we honor the mystery within us, too. ...Not only is there a stranger in your skin, there are several in your home too. The essence of hospitality is receiving the stranger while letting them remain a stranger."

He continues on talking about the importance of making room for who people actually are instead of who we want them to be, elaborating on God in the stranger and our inability to ever understand God... how He is always a bit of a stranger. Already, however, I have copied enough words to keep me occupied the rest of my life. I could spend the rest of my life just trying to "receive the stranger while letting them remain a stranger"; and I am sure that it will take months if not years of trying before I begin getting it right often enough to see any progress in myself. While this is profoundly overwhelming, I digress in my pursuit of words to address home.

I do not think home in the truest sense is possible without great endeavors toward hospitality. Home is that space where you can be greeted for the similarities you have and the sense you do make, but your mysteries and tangles are welcome to come inside and rest too. A space where it is safe to grow because no one and nothing are trying to force it.

I will not fully understand myself at the end of my life and life is so much easier to handle if I am not expected to. If I am free to take in hand one mystery at a time and let them rest in a safe place, I may yet learn and grow. I can hardly do that if I must hide the irrational and non sequitur from view, much less the bent and broken.

Real Quick:

...a reading from Radical Hospitality: Benedict's Way of Love by Father Daniel Homan and Lonni Gollins Pratt. I found this in a book I randomly picked up while I was babysitting a sleeping child.

"When we speak of hospitality we are always addressing issues of inclusion and exclusion. Each of us makes choices about who will and who will not be included in our lives...Issues of inclusion and exclusion, while personal, are not just personal. Our entire culture excludes many people. If you are in a wheelchair, for example, you are excluded because there are places you can't go. If you are very young, if you are very old, you are excluded... Hospitality has an inescapable moral dimension to it... It is an issue involving what it means to be human. All of our talk about hospitable openness doesn't mean anything as long as some people continue to be tossed aside...

"But calling hospitality a moral issue does not tell us the whole truth about hospitality either. A moral issue can become bogged down in legalisms, and hospitality is no legalistic ethical issue. It is instead a spiritual practice, a way of becoming more human, a way of understanding yourself. Hospitality is both the answer to modern alienation and injustice and a path to a deeper spirituality."