“YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO!”
Me: Hey Nonna! Could you tell me how to make fried dough for Christmas Eve?
Nonna (in her thick Italian accent): You know how to make a bread?
Me: Uhh, I guess.
Nonna: It’s-a-just-a-like-a bread! Just make the dough more watery.
Me: So you add more water?
Nonna: NO!
Me: ...
Nonna: You add less flour!
Me: Do you add salt too?
Nonna: Do you know how to make-a-bread or what?!
Me: I’ve just never made bread with you…
Nonna: You know what to do!
There are 3000 miles between me and Nonna this year, so I decided to recreate my grandmother’s famous Christmas Eve dinner myself. As I hung up the phone with her, I was discouraged, disoriented even. This is my first year away from her cooking, our traditions, my home. All I had left were incomplete recipes and Nonna’s insistence that I knew what I was doing. Neither comforted my perfectionist self.
Discouraged, disoriented, and incomplete is also how I find myself entering this new year. I am far from the home-like comforts of friends, family, work, and Church. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t have a recipe.
Today’s Gospel is the beginning of the book of John. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Immensely different from the start of the other Gospels, I keep rereading it, trying to find meaning. It’s confusing. What are you talking about, John? Why didn’t you follow the regular structure? Where’s the manger? The shepherds? The angel? Where is Nonna’s fried dough?
As I kneaded the “more watery” dough on Christmas Eve morning, I didn’t know how it would turn out. I craved structure, but all I had was the lingering taste from the past 29 years. In the same way, “the Word” feels jumbled and incomplete. I know where God has been, but where is God leading me now? Maybe, in my confusion, I can remember that Mary and Joseph and Abraham and Sarah and Moses and David and...and...didn’t have a recipe either. They simply had a taste of what God promised for their lives. Maybe that’s enough.
My Nonna told me “I knew what to do.” When I took that first bite into my fried dough, it wasn’t hers, but it was still very good. I rolled my eyes and smiled. She was right.
What do you want 2021 to “taste” like? Can you accept God’s encouragement that “you know what to do” even if you don’t have a recipe?
Teresa Nygard
Photo credit: Unsplash