The one who needs to be nourished and the one who feeds

Or, Despair is not our only option

Jan 13, 2025

Wipe your tears. Blow your nose. Dab the watery mascara under your eyes. Put down your phone. Big breath now, let it out even if it’s still shaky. Another breath.

Stand up and go to the kitchen.

Pull out the big cast iron pot, the one that your husband bought you for Christmas at your request and put it on the stove. Start with olive oil and diced onions in the pot, letting them cook on low heat until they are soft and golden. What a good smell. What a good homey smell. Some knot in your neck will begin to loosen, promise.

Add a big tin of whole tomatoes and with your old wooden spoon gently break their soft globes into the onions, flooding the pan with juice and seeds and ruby red colour. Add some water, maybe a cube of stock - should probably be veggie but all you have is chicken, so in it goes. Rinse the lentils and gently slide them into the boiling broth with tomatoes and onions, scrape the sieve and give it a stir.

white casserole with gray spoon on black surface — Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash

Look at that, you can pray again. It took onions and olive oil to get you going again but as always, this does the trick. Do not turn on the television. Do not retrieve your phone. Hum under your breath, sing to yourself, try to hit that part of Defying Gravity that defies everyone but Cynthia Erivo so give up and retreat to an old hymn.

Double check the recipe you’re attempting from memory (Iron Soup from Ella Risbridger’s The Year of Miracles) and make a few adjustments accordingly - somehow you forgot the sriracha. Double whatever it calls for - that’s just a good rule for sriracha and garlic, let’s be honest. Stir the simmering contents of the pot once in a while but don’t be precious about it. Tear kale from the stems, big bunches and handfuls to stuff into the pot to wilt near the end, when the lentils have bloomed.

Keep working. Keep your hands steady but moving, so that you are able to pray, able to think, able to place the words and rage and the fear and the groaning and bone-deep exhaustion that overwhelmed you just an hour earlier into their proper place with the right measurements and companions.

Sometimes you need good, ordinary work to find the crack of light at the horizon on a dark night.

Yes, you need your anger. Yes, you need your tears. Yes, you are allowed to be scared. Yes, it’s all happening and every historian looks panicky.

But don’t forget to add the rest of the truth: the wisdom of elders who somehow remembered to laugh and mourn in equal measure, the underlined passages in your Bible, your deep love of Jesus. Remember art and rainy days. You will remember good people, your friends, the ones who keep despair at bay. You remember how to breathe and pray, how to believe in new possibilities and repentance. You remember how to pray for your enemies, even perhaps how to forgive.

You remember that by its very nature light will disrupt the darkness and so every small flickering bit of light matters, even the one in your own soul. Double that.

You cried so hard on that Monday afternoon that you went to the kitchen to make soup from scratch. Sometimes the only thing to do when you don’t know what to do is just to feed someone but maybe you need to feed yourself now and then, too. You feed your family every night of your life, every day of your life, and also you open the doors to your home to friends and family and possible new friends and you smoke briskets and bake birthday cakes and stretch pizza dough and roast vegetables for everyone else. Maybe this one day, this one Monday when you are wobbling a bit, you can let yourself be the main event. Let yourself be the one who needs to be nourished but also the one who feeds. (You get to be both.)

Fry an egg in butter, but just barely. Keep that yolk sunshine yellow and soft. Ladle the soup into a bowl, slide the egg and butter on top. Break the yolk, watch it run into the kale and the tomatoes and the lentils.

Carry your bowl to the kitchen table, the one you bought second-hand. No one else is home, the house is quiet, so you sit in the sunshine coming through the kitchen windows and you eat. Watch the steam curl up from the bowl for a moment.

Bow your head for just a moment, breathe it out: “thank you.”

Eat every single bite.

Slowly come back to yourself. Remember that you have a body. Remember that you know how to do this, the deepest and most knowing part of you wants to hold on to hope. Take a few deep breaths. Eat. You need to eat.

There is sunshine on the snow and a fat magpie perched in the branches of the now-sleeping aspen. Remember that despair is not our only option. There is the promise of renewal and restoration, even after a long winter sleep. There is Emmanuel, God with us, and there is a friend to text, too. There are onions and olive oil, lentils and kale. There is hope that endures. There are letters to write and food banks that need diapers so you make plans to stop at the Co-op after school pick-ups. There are poems to read and love to make and laundry to fold and truth to proclaim.

You will get up from this table and you will get back to work, you know you will, just as you know there are thousands of people getting up from thousands of tables with resolve and stubborn love, even if there are still trails of mascara on their cheeks.

You are not sure what you believe about spiritual warfare anymore but if the powers and principalities of this world - and you don’t know what other language to use for the current realities - benefit from you giving up, giving in, well, even if you don’t feel like it, you will keep at it.

Look at that, you can breathe again. You found the pilot light of your soul still flickering somewhere underneath all the bad news and broken hearts and worries and disappointments.

Tip up the bowl and drink the last of it, the salty spicy goodness of it. Sit for a moment. Open a window, even though it’s cold, even if it’s just for a moment. Take a breath. Unclench your hands.

Then wash the dishes, but don’t be in a rush about it, for heaven’s sake. Plunge your hands into hot soapy water to bring order to chaos, once again, always, over and over. Long ago, when you were young, someone told you that Dorothy Day once quipped that everyone wants a revolution, but nobody wants to do the dishes. It’s true, boy, is it true. Now you know that part of the revolution will always include doing the dishes, not just because everyone needs to eat but because you need to eat too. You need a tidy kitchen that still smells like onions frying in olive oil. Revolution will include the soup making and the bread baking, the toilet scrubbing and the phone calling. It will include remembering to laugh and holding onto prayer, it will look like comforting children and showing up to church and protests and unlikely choices. It will look like a million things you never expected to save a life but here you are, saving at least one person, even if it is your own self, today.

This is you, choosing hope again. Put away the dishes. You are done in the kitchen for now. It’s time to get back to work.

Love S.

Sarah Bessey's Field Notes

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