Divine Soup: Homemaking as Kingdom Work

I'm having an HGTV night, happily exhausted after a day at the beach with the kids, and watching Dear Genevieve.  I love her contemporary traditional design style and her Anthropologie fashion.  She wears tall brown boots over her jeans like I do and I just decided after watching her that I need a linen vest to go over my white button downs too.  But, what I just had to blog about was that in the middle of a busy bathroom redesign on a rainy day, Genevieve just brought a huge copper pot of squash soup to her craftspeople and said, "When you treat people well, they create more beautiful things."  

The role of a homemaker is under appreciated until confident men and women just start loving people through their gifts, food and otherwise.  When we undervalue our gifts, other people often do too.  It is the difference between a present nicely wrapped and one brought out of a Walmart bag.  Hospitality is more than a science, it is an art. 

I was bookless in a Barnes and Noble on my day off (an oxymoron, right?).  They didn't have a copy of the book that I've been slowly working through on Tuesdays.  I grabbed a copy of the Shack off the rack and opened up to a random page.  I was sucked in immediately.  Papa was cooking dinner and baking a pie.  I sighed with joy.  God prepares a table before us.  (Psalm 23:5a)  Wow.  God cooks for us.  Sets the table and brings a hot steaming bowl of something to share between us.  He invites us to sit down to nourishment and be fed with love. 

I've always interpreted the last verse of the Psalm: "and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever" as sleeping on a pew and sneaking food out of the church refridgerator.  Somehow that seems a bit sterile...love at arms length.  This is one of the huge problems of the modern church.  Everything seems depersonalized.  We're lucky to know the name of the person who shares our pew let alone have eaten in their home.  We're too focused on consumerism and quantity instead of quality in our discipleship and relationships let alone our resurrection.  Hospitality is one of the missing gifts of the church.  How will "they know we are Christians by our love" if we do not open our homes and hearts?   Real life gets fantastically messy.

Everything tastes better when made by someone who cares.  The chefs in Italy came out to meet us as we walked into their restaurant.  We found La Gargotta high on a hill looking over the Duomo after being told that the chef cooked only Tuscan-style food, the locals favorite trattoria.  He regaled us with seasonal delights (Tortolloni with nettle flower) and family favorites like rosemary infused beef and we carried on a conversation with the chef through their waiter, who beamed with the compliments.  We are not at Olive Garden anymore.

In a poem by Denise Levertov, The Acolyte, the main character makes "bread that is more than bread" by baking blessings right into the dough. That's what true homemaking is all about.  Food should connect us to communion with eachother and with God.   

I visited an Eastern Orthodox couple in their urban Indianapolis around Easter one year and found that their kitchen table was tucked underneath a shelf that had a large icon of Rublev's Trinity.  They were including themselves at the divine table, aware that a meal could become not just food, but a participation in More.