Image
Yesterday I remembered an episode that happened over 30 years ago related to peanut brittle in the backseat of a car. It came to mind late in the afternoon when I was getting a bit hungry and perhaps hearing about peanut brittle gets your stomach rumbling as well. I wish I had some to give you, but I don’t, so I’ll just give you the story instead.
The episode took place the year that I spent as an exchange student in West Africa. Maybe you have heard the rumor that Africans share everything. It is by and large true. In the women’s dorm at Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, one person’s laundry soap was everyone’s laundry soap. Your pocketknife, everyone’s pocketknife. Even my toothbrush was once challenged as communal property. No real problem with this…except, you see, I am fundamentally not someone who is great about sharing. I live in consistent fear that I will not have enough. That something bad is about to happen and I will come up short. Indeed, I will suddenly need that twenty-year old raincoat that I just gave away to Goodwill and I will catch pneumonia.
What drove me bonkers in Africa was that those around me who had far more reason than I to be concerned a rainy day was coming did not do so. Instead, those who had less were continually giving to me. I was constantly knocked off kilter by what I perceived as excessive displays of generosity in my host country. A man who had not received his paycheck from the government in months would insist on paying for my bus ticket. A woman who had barely enough to feed her family would give me a sack of sweet potatoes for my journey. I couldn’t figure out what to do with this. And then one day, it all came to a head in the back of a taxicab that I was stuffed into with my traveling companions Alex and Diane and six strangers. We were all on the way from Bamako to Mopti through the hot interior of Mali. (I was going to say “steamy,” but Mali is not steamy. The sensation is more one of being slowly baked in the sun until you shrivel like a raisin.)
Since our dawn departure, we’d all been silent and I hoped it would stay that way. I didn’t want to have to talk to anyone. I was hungry and tired. Being friendly takes energy and I just wanted to get to Mopti as soon as possible. The car, however, pulled over to the side of the road for a street vendor. Alex and I pooled our spare change with Diane’s as she handed the coins over in return for peanut brittle. Six pieces. Enough for two a piece, I thought. Diane thought otherwise. She gave Alex and I each a piece and took a portion for herself. Then she began to pass the rest around the car to the six strangers. I was irritated. Did I already mention I was hungry? I needed that peanut brittle to tide me over. It wouldn’t have filled me up, but at least it would have helped, and now she had shared it with everyone else. Urgh.
But then suddenly from the backseat, an orange appeared, carefully divided into sections for each passenger in the car. At the next stop, two well-dressed women in the front seat bought an entire bag of muffins. They broke off pieces for themselves and then passed them back to the rest of us. Food started appearing from everywhere. A verifiable feast. Even I discovered some peanuts in my backpack. People began to smile at each other and then to laugh. The others in the car began to talk with one another in Bambara and Tuareg. And by the time we reached Mopti, we all had eaten our fill—enjoying not only good food but friendship.
This story came to mind because yesterday afternoon I was thinking a bit about the multiplication of the loaves—that rare miracle that appears in all four of the Gospels in which Jesus feeds the vast crowd gathered to hear him preach about the Reign of God. The last time I wrote, I mentioned how the miracles of the Gospels can often be best grasped as signs of that same Reign of God—a way of giving us a momentary picture of what God dreams for human history when words themselves just won’t be enough. Just how the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves happened remains a mystery to me. Maybe it was God bending the laws of nature. Maybe it was Jesus’s generous, fearless sense of “enoughness” evoking within the crowd a new capacity to trust that they, too, had enough and that they, too, could share. I don’t know and I’m not sure it matters tremendously. Either way it was a sign of what the Reign of God will look like—a generous feast among those who once upon a time called themselves strangers… who once upon a time thought they should hold close to what they owned… and then found out there was something far more rewarding, filled with far more joy.
This story also came to mind yesterday afternoon because the tension is one I personally still live with. Alas. I’ve written about it at least twice (Here is one and here is another) and maybe there are other times I’ve forgotten.
I’ve read the Gospels. I’ve travelled to Africa. I would like to say that between meeting Jesus and the car ride to Mopti my life I’ve been cured. That I have stopped being so neurotic about saving my spare change. That I have stopped hiding my toothbrush. But it is only in fairy tales and hagiography of the saints that we overcome our faults in one dramatic conversion. And maybe, I am learning, they aren’t even faults so much as familial or cultural conditions. My family still remembers the Great Depression of the 1920’s. We still turn our glasses upside down in the cupboard with the sense that the Oklahoma Dust Bowl might still suddenly blow through and leave everything covered in a thin layer of dirt. It is not just the desert of Mali. There are things that have happened in past generations baked inside our genes that seem destined to turn us into raisins.
But then again Jesus shows up breaking the bread. Diane shows up breaking the peanut brittle. So many of you show up in life generous beyond my any expectation, and I am reminded yet again, Oh!, there is another way of being in the world and I would really like to try that out. Last time I wrote, I wrote about a healing miracle I feel I have been living. I suppose that this week, I am doing this same with a miracle I am still hoping to experience. A doorway to the Parousia that teaches me about the Reign of God from another angle. This week may we continue to strive to practice the Reign of God into being by the way that we share what little we feel like we have with one another, even if it is a thirty-year-old story rather than delicious peanut brittle! And trust that whatever we offer can multiply.
+++++++
Health Update: Still feeling fine, but blood counts have remained low so my fourth round of chemo treatment was delayed several weeks and lowered in dosage. As I sit here eating kale chips—my favorite iron-rich food—could you please say a prayer that my system is able to handle this new round and is able to bounce back quickly. I have some travel planned for next month and am exceedingly attached to that being able to happen.
Picture Description: This is me, Alex, Diane, and Diane's friend Heidi in Mali in 1990. We did eventually make it to Mopti!