Heard a great Terry Gross interview with Mary Gauthier, singer, songwriter, formerly chef and restaurateur, born and raised in Louisiana.
Gauthier describes her experience after being arrested for drunk driving the opening night of her restaurant in Boston as one of grace:
“…on the floor of the jail cell, I left my body for probably a millisecond and looked down on myself and saw something pitiful. And it was that moment where the grace of God could enter. Grace, that unmerited gift, I received it. I saw my condition as hopeless, and in that moment of surrender, I became willing to ask for help. And it changed everything. It means more to me 24 years later than it did at the time. I look back on it now with reverence. What it showed me was that if I get out of the way and humble myself and ask for help, help will arrive.”
Grace, that unmerited gift. Grace, the gift that in order to receive you have to be at rock bottom, humbled and hopeless and willing to get the hell out of the way. This ain’t no Christmas morning present fest.
When Gross asks about her Cajun restaurant in Boston, whether it satified her need to take care of people, Gauthier describes the overlap she experiences between music and cooking.
“Playing music and cooking for people are two very tangible ways of showing love. And so you can tell the difference when you go to a restaurant, if there’s love in the kitchen, the food comes out better.”
Simple.
When my son was a baby, my sister and her then boyfriend came to visit. It must have been autumn; I remember the baby napping as they watched me roll out dough and heap sliced apples in for a pie. Their attention was really focused, and I joked about it being no big deal, it was just a pie. “Made with love,” was Jane’s reply, like a qualifier.
As baby-addled as I was it struck me, this rejoinder. That the energy of our love (or other emotion) could of course pass through our fingers into our cooking, our children, our gardens. We are all energy-bearing circuits, giving and receiving.
Something made with love will taste better, and maybe even be better for you, than something made in anger or bitter haste or whatever. Not rocket science but may be a revelation for many. Love, the great conqueror, the great cure all. Remember the great pie-making scenes and pie names in that parable of a film Waitress?
I think love, especially in the act of everyday mundane tasks, carries its own special grace.