Living with Lentils

credit:  FelixLeupold

As a family and at A Rocha we try to eat real food from a bit lower on the food chain. It’s our meager stand of solidarity with our brothers and sisters in the two-thirds world for whom a locally grown, mostly vegetarian diet is the norm. Most long-term guests take our food agenda in stride, or at least they try to. In the beginning lentils are novel, and they feel noble eating like the rest of the two-thirds world. But after a week or two this wears off and there is a clamoring for meat—big chunks of it. In this regard I’m reminded of one of our first A Rocha interns, Martin Lings. I was in charge of the food during the early days of our Environmental Centre, and while I’m not a terrible cook, I was run a bit off my feet and my culinary craftings suffered as a result. I recall one particular day when I had morphed leftover lentils into their third incarnation. This simple little act of efficiency caused Martin, normally the height of English civility, to positively lose it. The scene went something like this:

 Me: Sauntering to the table with a child on my hip and casserole dish in hand—the very picture of female domesticity. “Dinner’s served!”

     Martin: Staring hungrily from the table. “Smells good, what’s for tea (read: supper)?”

     Me: Coyly. “Oh, just a little lentil thing I refashioned.”

     Martin: Face falling, eyeing the casserole dish suspiciously. “Huh?”

     Me: Smiling a bit too brightly. No comment as I lift the casserole lid.

     Martin: Wailing. “Nooooooo, not Lentil Goo again!”

Indeed, it was Lentil Goo again! But in the years since, I have perfected Lentil Goo into Lentil Dahl, which, if I do say so myself, is rather tasty. For a couple of years it became a weekly standard at the A Rocha table and was almost always appreciated even by the more carnivorous in the crowd. I offer you now, a rough sketch of that dish in case you want to try it in your own kitchen:

credit: mode

Leah’s Dahl


1. Sauté two onions in plenty of olive oil    

2. Add spices, salt and sugar: 
    4 T. curry powder
    4 T. cumin
    3 T. coriander
    2 T. garam marsala
    1 t. cardamom
    2 T. salt
    2 heaping T. brown sugar

3. Add water (aprox. 10 cups) and red lentils (aprox. 5 cups) – add more water if needed as it cooks.

4. Bring to a boil and then turn down to simmer for one hour -- stir every once and a while.

5. Taste and spice as needed (sometimes I end up more than doubling the spices and salt because I’ve just “eyeballed” it to start with).

Serve on rice with plain yogurt and chutney.

Serves 8

Practicing Gratitude

credit:  Brooke McAllister

The hallmark of a truly “simple” life is gratitude. “Gratitude is the heart of faith,” writes Mary Jo Leddy, author of Radical Gratitude. In this vein, she relates a lovely prayer of gratitude the Jewish people pray every Passover as they celebrate the deliverance of the Hebrew people from Egypt. The prayer centres around the Hebrew word Dayenu, which in English means, It would have been enough.

– If you had only led us to the edge of the Red Sea but not taken us through the waters, it would have been enough.

– If you had only taken us through the Red Sea but not led us through the desert, it would have been enough.

– If you had only led us through the desert but not taken us to Sinai, it would have been enough. 

Leddy suggests using this template as a helpful spiritual exercise in reflecting on one’s own life. For example: If I had only been born but not had a twin sister, it would have been enough. If I had only had a twin sister but hadn’t visited Orcas Island, it would have been enough. If I had only seen the sun set off Otter’s Point, but hadn’t experienced a snowfall in the Rockies, it would have been enough.

When we are satisfied with our lives as being enough, we are able to resist the whispers of consumerism that tell us we don’t have enough or we are not enough. When our sense of satisfaction is rooted in an amazement at the givenness of every gift—from friends to home to our very own lives—then we are grounded in the firm grace of abundance.

Gratitude’s starting point is wonder. I love what the Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel says about true spiritual living: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement.” He encouraged his students to take nothing for granted. “Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” The amazement comes as we realise everything we have and every gift we experience is pure grace. To be born would have been enough, but then I’m given a loving family. Wow! To be raised in a loving family would have been enough, but then I am surrounded by caring mentors. Amazing! We are invited not only to consider the big gifts, but the little gifts as well—the light slanting through the fir trees on a fall afternoon or the caress of a small child’s hand on our arm. It’s all grace. It’s all amazing. It all warrants our gratitude.

The Easter Pattern

I am an identical twin. Like many twins, my sister and I have lived strangely parallel lives. We both married men with odd names (Marrku and Bernd respectively). We both worked in campus ministry in the Pacific Northwest and in the former Soviet Union. And we both are now employed in vocational fields from which others occasionally recoil. My sister is a hospital chaplain. When she tells people what she does – that she sits with the dying -- a good percent of her conversation partners take a literal step backwards, as if she is a carrier of the condition of her clients, as if cancer were communicable. I work in the environmental field. Because I live in Canada where “the environment” is hip, few people are physically repulsed by my vocational admission, but I have had those who stare at me as if I have something green hanging out of my nose or who change the subject so abruptly that you can hear the tires of their mind screeching.

The offensiveness of our vocations lies in their affront to status quo. The environment is just so gritty and inconvenient. Spend too much time in it and you’ll likely get dirt on your pants and sweat on your brow. Death is so messy and just plain sad. It always comes at such a bad time.

But life is born out of the messiness off death. This is the pattern of creation. The log rots, nourishing the soil, and the sapling thrives. The salmon spawns, flopping exhausted on the river’s edge, and the eagle feasts. It’s the pattern of life -- a pattern played out in creation’s never ending integration of the shadows of life and death.

credit: mrjorgen

This integration is like a Japanese art form. The rot, the darkness, the suffering, and the life that brings a good death get folded in and over and around and become an integrated whole. It’s the pattern of Easter over and over, folded into a life that hangs like a delicate origami crane, weightless and wonderful for all the world to see.

Easter Hope

credit:  Brooke McAllister

              For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Jesus], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

    Colossians 1:18-20

This is a passage that roots us in Easter hope—a hope that someday, somehow, someway, redemption is possible for all things. Redemption, as understood by Paul and other biblical writers, has more to do with re-creation than a whisking away of souls to heaven. Through Christ all things were created; he sustains (or holds together) all things and then through his resurrection he reconciles all things. Where might all things stop, do you think? Does it stop with people? That is how I used to read it. But the radical point this passage seems to be making is that creation itself participates in redemption. It is our anthropocentric view of the world that causes us to read all things as all people.

This widening of the scope of redemption has serious implications for our motivation to “save the planet." We do not try to save the world: rather, we join in the saving work God has already begun. We cooperate with the Spirit in making all things new. We work from a place a hope—a hope centred on God’s ultimate care for what God has made that allows us to “be joyful though we have considered all the facts,” as Wendell Berry says. Because hope, if it is true, runs deep with taproots nourished by a subterranean grace that flows strong and swift despite outer circumstances.