Advent, Week 2

God in the kitchen work

This is the second in a series of Advent meditations. But before I continue, as another gentle reminder, you can sign up for one of my two January Rule of Life workshops: Friday, January 10^th, 11 am – 3 pm EST OR Saturday, January 11^th, 9 am – 1 pm EST.

Here’s what Carolyn had to say about the workshop, after she attended:

“The Rule of Life workshop proved to be a rewarding exercise that helped me consider . . . how to be reshaped and reformed through prayer and responding to the quiet, still voice of God. In a world often filled with chaos and noise, this practice can become an ongoing part of life. I recommend it, along with Jen’s book, In Good Time, as an opportunity for growth as we live lives of faithful obedience to Christ by His Spirit.”

Find out more about registering for the workshops here.

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My mother has a friend who measures the creep of her age by the increasing number of days required to recover from guests. This is a woman who is tireless, who is still cooking for friends and families and neighbors into her eighties. But what might have once been a quick turnaround in her thirties, between the departure of one guest and the arrival of another, is now several days of obligatory rest. Her aging body registers the work of hospitality in bone-weariness.

If it’s any measure of my own middle-age, it took me at least a day and a half to move past the bustle and busyness of the Thanksgiving holiday. I was tired after the house was full. I love the sound of a crowded kitchen and a clamorous dining room, and there may be nothing I love more than lingering around a table with people I love. It is also true that it’s so much work to keep people fed and sleeping in clean sheets.

I wrote a whole book on the God who does women’s work, but I have needed to be reminded once again, as I enter this Advent season, that God has come as a God who serves. This is at least part of the good news of the Advent season, that God dignifies service by taking it up.

Serving, of course, always feels like a partial affront when you’re feeling entitled to celebration. For as much as I want to enjoy a crowded table and sustained conversation with all my family home, I also feel wearied by the work of that welcome. Sometimes I can be resentful that the work is less evenly distributed. Sometimes I’m just tired and need a renewed vision of why this work matters and whom I’m imitating when I serve. Yes, I want to find God in pots and pans, onions and the smell of simmering stock. I want to know he sees me and cares for my chapped hands when I have spent more than a few hours dicing and mincing and slicing and chopping.

I want to know I am not hidden here in the kitchen. I want to be seen and enfolded into a bigger story.

In Malcolm Guite’s collection of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany poetry, Waiting on the Word, there are two poems, back to back, that brought me to a meditation on God’s humble servanthood. The first is Robert Hayden’s, “Those Winter Days,” in which the narrator recalls waking to the sound of his father building a fire. The family lingers in their beds as “blueback cold” splinters and breaks; their father then summons them into the warmth of the house.

The final stanza reads like this:

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

Of love’s austere and lonely offices?

It was that last line I shared on the phone with a friend, struggling in her relationship with one of her children. “I have a phrase for you,” I said, “to describe the work of parenting. Love’s austere and lonely offices.” I wonder if it isn’t a word to describe so much of the work love engages, in secret and hidden places. Unnoticed by the left hand, distributed by the right, generosity—if it’s done right—does not draw attention to itself—though if I’m honest, sometimes I want more attention, more thanks.

One might reasonably think God has reason to want that, too—though he is not patterned after our image.

Hayden’s poem is followed by “The Ballad of the White Horse,” written by G.K. Chesterton. It’s the first stanza of this poem that shook me when I read it:

And well may God with the serving-folk

Cast in His dreadful lot;

Is not He too a servant,

And is not He forgot?

This is the affront, the ignominy of serving. It’s so often unrecognized, taken for granted, entirely eclipsed from the frame of notice. And this is exactly where God moves in his Advent, to our utter shock and surprise. He moves into the forgotten, ignored places. He counts his kind as the “serving-folk.” As Philippians 2 reminds us, Jesus came as a servant and did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped. He made himself nothing.

We serve a Servant-Savior, who has never grumbled about the work, and we can learn from him.

I was reminded of a prayer I have often prayed in this season of caring for my mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s. It is taken from the second volume of Every Moment Holy, and it expresses a desire to be formed in the image of our Lord and Servant-Savior Jesus Christ. “O Christ, Who Gave Yourself for us, let my long service to one who suffers be a reflection of your willingness to give yourself freely to the meeting of the deepest needs of your people. You do so with generosity and kindness, and without grudge or irritation, impatience or frustration.”

You and I can get the holiday work done, but it is only Christ in us, who can grant us a sustained Spirit of cheerful service.

Thanksgiving is behind, but the house will be full again in two more weeks. More onions, more chapped hands, more of love’s austere and lonely offices. But maybe these offices—meals as regular as prayer—are not as lonely as I feel them to be, given the story of our serving God who has come to be with us.

I remind myself to find him: at the table of fellowship, in the burning bush of the work.