The Right Stuff

I learned about pomegranates because a Russian ballerina became beloved by enthusiastic Australians.  “Hold on there, Monica, that’s quite a jump between Aussies and pomegranates, how do you figure that?”

It does sound like chaos theory, the whole “butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and a storm ravages half of Europe” thing, except both a ballerina and a pomegranate are bigger than a butterfly.  Although the ballerina was supposed to be as light on her feet as a butterfly.  Anna Pavlova was the first Russian prima ballerina to travel around the world a hundred years ago, bringing her dance to people in many countries who had never seen ballet before,
including Australia and New Zealand.  Despite her problems with high arches and gangly legs, she inspired chefs to whip up a meringue dessert that is the proud feature of many Christmas dinners down under.  One benefit is that they don’t have to cook it at a high temperature in the middle of the summer, another is that it is great with fruit, especially pomegranates.  Pavlova is to Australia and New Zealand what pancakes with maple syrup is to Canadians, served up with bacon on the side.  Alberta’s equivalent would be a barbecue with Grade A beef, beans and baked potatoes. Slavic countries would have their piroshky and halopchi, scots would have their haggis and champit tatties, and Newfoundlanders would have their Jiggs dinners.

Great food takes time and tradition to get right.  It’s hard to cook up a great pavlova in Canada, our sugar and flour is a little different than the Aussie stuff. Canadian recipes for dressing or Christmas fruitcake are handed down from generation to generation, with edits and fine tuning according to taste.  Learning how to make a Jiggs Dinner with its all-important garnish of pease pudding has been a real learning curve for us Albertans more familiar with Bannock or perogies.

We like cooking up meals for those we love and care for, but no one recipe will work with every family.  Our tastes and traditions are almost chaotic in the variety we show.  Not unlike love, in a way.  Joseph showed love by planning not to make a public example of Mary, shaming her in front of her friends and family for not showing fidelity to him throughout their engagement.  Sparing her this embarrassment was his way of loving her.  And it was solely his decision.  He was the only authority to decide her fate.  If he had been an angry, vengeful man, he could have had her executed for her infidelity.  There’s no Cousin Elizabeth in the Matthew passage for her to run to.  In fact, about the only thing Matthew and Luke agree on about the Christmas story is that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.  Matthew has no shepherds or angel choirs or censuses or inns, Luke has no wise visitors or trips to Egypt.  They both share long genealogies, Luke focusing on Mary’s lineage, and Matthew has Joseph’s family tree.

That family tree is fascinating, because with the scandal of Mary’s pregnancy, Matthew mentions several other scandalous women.  Bathsheba, whose pregnancy almost destroyed David’s rule over Israel and caused chaos in his family.  Tamar, whose pregnancy was also seen also as a betrayal of her marriage oaths and punishable by death until she revealed who the father was.  Women who were at the mercy of a man’s decision and who had no choice in what would happen to her in that rigid patriarchal system that valued women solely by the offspring they could produce for their tribe.  Joseph was fully shaped by that patriarchy, that cultural expectation of what it meant to be a man and a father in ancient Israel. 

And yet, and yet.  Just as God messed with Abraham and Sarah’s comfortable life, just as God called Moses and Miriam to challenge slavery, God threw chaos into the patriarchal system.  God sent Joseph a dream.

Joseph’s dream wasn’t just about breaking his personal expectations, it was a culture-shaking moment, a major paradigm shift in how women were to be honored and respected.  It was a dream of radical inclusion, a challenge of the status quo, and an inspiration for the future.  Love was not going to be boxed up in a one-size fits all rule for all time.  His dream was a chaotic disruption of a long-standing tradition.  Which is what Advent is all about.  Recognizing when God’s chaos shakes us out of the traditions we may be taking for granted, the traditions that may not be loving or life-giving for everyone in our culture.  The traditions of making shortbread when we’re called to invent pavlova.

One expert put it this way

"Christianity is, at root, an Advent religion. That is, our [faith puts us in a place] where promise and fulfillment don’t quite meet. Our experiences [put] us there, too, as people keenly aware that our [dreams are not our reality] …. We never stop expecting new life to break onto the scene. We have work to do, but we recognize it as God’s work done on God’s terms." - Matt Skinner

Like a Russian dancer God sometimes tiptoes into our lives and ends up helping us shape new cultures, new ideas, new passions, new loyalties.  Sometimes God whirls into our lives with pirouette after pirouette, inspiring dreams and new possibilities.  Our world needs some new recipes for love and compassion. New creations and inventions that help us dance into a paradigm shift of acceptance of diversity, like the Respect for Marriage Act in the states. New taste experiments as we try new things like pomegranates that we never experienced as children. We wait and work in hope that love will dance into even the most cynical hearts, that hope will inspire life-changing dreams, that peace will break into the world, and joy will be in every home.  God, we pray, bring love to us all.  Amen.

And here's my attempt at my first pavlova, with pomegranate and kiwi fruit.  For some strange reason, it evaporated very fast even though it wasn't the most beautiful of things compared to how some folks mix it so beautifully!

Changing hearts and minds

I love pears!  I think that they are my favorite fruit.  But I hate pears, there’s nothing I turn up my nose up more, they are so disgusting.  “Wait a minute, Monica!” you may be thinking, “How can pears be both your favorite fruit and your least favorite fruit at the same time?” Easy!  Pears that are fresh and ripe and just at their peak are incredibly sweet and juicy, their skin is nice and thin, and their flesh is soft and easy to bite into.  What better fruit can there be?  You can’t take a bite out of a coconut or pineapple or watermelon without a lot of work first.  But when we were kids, fresh fruit was very seasonal.  Mandarines at this time of year, apples and pears in the fall if we were lucky, and berries in the summer.  The rest of the year, it was canned fruit.  There was nothing worse, in my humble opinion, than the dreaded can of fruit cocktail that we had for dessert far too often.  The maraschino cherries were fine, the peaches were a little slimy, the oranges were okay, the grapes often were split and mushy but the pears?  They tasted like chunks of jello that had sand sprinkled throughout.  It was like eating a mushy bit of beachfront property, and Mom always knew which bowl of fruit cocktail was mine as I would assiduously eat around every single piece of pear in the bowl.  No amount of persuasion could convince me to eat those little cubes! They were the worst fruit in the world as far as my 10-year-old self was concerned, and even today I will do anything I can to avoid canned pear.  Yuck!

I’m sure other people have similar opinions around fruit, maybe even pears, that might echo either my love for this fruit or my loathing.  Strong opinions are easy to find on a variety of topics.  In fact, to be human is to have strong opinions on a variety of topics, right?

One of the complaints I hear is about how polarized we have become.  That we have such different opinions from our neighbors that we can’t have a civil conversation any more.  Whether it’s vaccine mandates or the causes of earthquakes in Alberta, it is hard to talk about what is weighing on our hearts and minds.  We want to think in binary absolutes – either something is good or something is bad.  Just like pears, are they my favorite or are they my least favorite, make up my mind and stop sitting on the fence, Monica! Take a side, join the club, cheer on the right team!

Isaiah dreamed of a time when this kind of division ended.  The wolf will lie down with the lamb, the wild will coexist with the tame, the carnivore with the herbivore, the poisonous with the helpless.  There will be no more villains and heroes but one creation where all will coexist.  The Green Party and the Wildrose Party will find things they can agree on, and oil workers and environmentalists will be friends. The warmongers and the peacemakers will live calmly side by side in safety and security.  It’s quite the utopian vision and Isaiah sees it as a real possibility worth working towards.

Matthew’s story of John the Baptizer is a similar message.  “Change your hearts and minds,” he preached.  Start looking at the world with different eyes.  John calls us to examine how we think of the world around us, our community, our neighbors, our family and our friends.  Just as he called out the religious leaders who came to see him, he calls us to challenge our assumptions.  How do we see ourselves?  How do we see others?  Are we caught up in either or thinking, us vs them, winners and losers, bad guys and good guys?

John calls us to think in new ways: we are to have a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and strength, to stop judging based on appearances, or make decisions because of gossip and rumor. 

What is wisdom, then and how do we think in these new ways?  Some theologians say that wisdom is about changing how we think and act, whereas knowledge is solely about gathering information and data.  Data is easy.  With google, in seconds we know that the experience we had of the earth shifting under our feet wasn’t imaginary, and we can even put a number onto it, 5.8.  That’s data.  Knowledge.  Wisdom is when we stay calm and don’t buy into alarmist theories or wild speculation about why the earthquake happened.

How do we grow in wisdom?  Two things are helping me – reminding myself that an issue might be a ‘both and’ topic like pears.  I can like them and dislike them, it doesn’t have to be ‘either or’.  What if I am right and you are too?  That is helping me stay calmer in the midst of conflict, not perfectly but slowly better.  Another thing I do is a mantra many life coaches encourage their clients to use.  “I tell myself the truth and frequently ask myself what I’m pretending not to know”. I think that is the ultimate wisdom, when we ask deep and honest questions of ourselves and our own opinions.  John sensed that the religious leaders were coming for baptism because they had deep questions of themselves that they didn’t even knew they had.  By visiting John, they challenged their own thinking.  Some may have even joined the Jesus movement, like Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus who buried Jesus in the Tomb on Good Friday.  By asking questions of ourselves, looking for both and, and listening to the call of prophets to work towards God’s vision of Peace on Earth, we can follow the path of wisdom God wishes for us all.  And when that happens, fruit of the spirit come to us, especially Peace, a gift of the Creator for us all.