Day 31 Gathering What’s Important; or, The Best Things in Life Aren’t Things

The first time I remember eating sourdough bread I was seventeen, sitting in a restaurant in San Francisco. There for eye surgery of which I was completely terrified, that fascinating, comforting taste can take me right back to Fisherman’s Wharf even now, some more than forty years later.

Did you know there is a sourdough library? writes Frank Lidz in this morning’s Times. It lives eighty-seven miles southeast of Brussels, Belgium, and it’s run by Karl De Smedt.

“[T]he library houses the world’s most extensive collection of sourdough starters, those bubbling beige globs of bacteria and wild yeast—known as “mothers”—that bakers mix into dough to produce flavorful loaves with interestingly shaped holes. If a mother isn’t regularly divided and kneaded and fed with flour and water, she will eventually go dormant or die.”

Mr. De Smedt has been “fermenting at home. ... He has not seen his beloved starters since March 24, and does not plan to return to nourish them again until April 27. If stopped by police for violating curfew, what will he say? ‘It’s not that easy to explain that I have a sourdough library to take care of,’ Mr. De Smedt allowed. ‘I guess I could claim it’s an emergency: 125 mothers require my attention.’”

It’s Passover as I write this. It’s Easter weekend as I write this. Both occasions are traditionally opportunities to gather. We are not gathering; I don’t have to tell you why.

As a minister, I’ve done a lot of thinking about Easter and Passover over the years. There are a lot of stories told about both gatherings. Meals are proscribed, traditional. “We always have—fill in the blank—for fill in the blank. I know you’ve heard the same sentences yourself.

At Passover, the bread is unleavened. At Easter, it’s often leavened.

None of the scriptural texts, though, talk about what it takes to get those meals on the table. Nor do they speak of who is doing the getting.

It’s the women, often mothers, in the stories, or, really, not in the stories. They’re the ones who get those meals on the table.

Mr. De Smedt says, “No two sourdoughs taste exactly alike.” Nor are any two mothers alike.

In “Covid-19 and the Big Government Problem,” columnist Bret Stephens tells the story of “Katie Wilson, a deputy under secretary at the Department of Agriculture in the Obama administration, [who] is the executive director of the Urban School Food Alliance, a nonprofit that works with the country’s largest school districts to improve the quality of student nutrition. Her topmost concern is with the millions of poorer children and their families for whom school meals are essential to diets and budgets alike.

“In this pandemic, she has a message for government bureaucrats in Washington and every state capital: Stop getting in the way.”

I don’t know if Katie Wilson is a mother or not, but she is acting like one. Katie Wilson is taking care of mothers, and one of their primary concerns, their children.

Mr. Stephens spoke with Mx. Wilson directly. He writes, “Adaptability, responsiveness, improvisation and foresight are of the essence.”

Aren’t those the qualities of a good mother? And a good cook? They are not the qualities of government—good or bad.

In the Christian story, Martha, the busier of the two sisters, scolds her younger sister, Mary, for getting in the way of her preparations to feed an overflowing houseful of the Nazarene Rabbi and his disciples.

David Sax writing in “The Coronavirus Is Showing Us Which Entrepreneurs Matter” says, “The thing that we tend to forget when we study entrepreneurs only as engines of job creation, profits or other quantifiable markers of economic growth is that every entrepreneur is a person, with hopes, dreams and feelings. Their businesses are intricately tied into the fabric of their communities in a way that numbers simply can’t capture.”

Many of the entrepreneurs in our world are mothers. Their motherhood is one of the main reasons they cite for becoming entrepreneurs. They want to prioritize their children right up there with their livelihoods. They do for their children exactly what they do for their businesses.

Mothers are the center of a child’s solar system just as the sourdough mothers, some started as early as 37 B.C.E. (I kid you not!) are the center of a delicious loaf of bread. Entrepreneurs will be the center of local communities returning to life as usual in exactly the same way.

You see it in the crisis all around us. Why wouldn’t it be the same in the recovery? “You see this same sense of community emerging in the entrepreneurs’ response to the pandemic. Fashion designers are sewing desperately needed face masks, craft distilleries are churning out hand sanitizer, restaurants are now donating meals to the homeless and isolated senior citizens. Entrepreneurs see where they can help their communities, and they step up.”

Consider the story of salon owner Tanya Blunt-Haynes. “In New Orleans, women in the Gentilly neighborhood now face losing a place like Friends, a hair salon that cuts and styles the hair of middle-age, professional African-American women, including the city’s mayor, LaToya Cantrell. Its owner, a soft-spoken woman named Tanya Blunt-Haynes, described Friends not as an investment or a source of income, but as a community center.

“Several years back, when her son Jared was murdered, Ms. Haynes returned to Friends, and was held by every single person who walked in the doors as she cried in their arms.”

Maybe not biological mothers, but definitely women behaving in nurturing, caring, mothering ways.

Article after article is espousing the need for self-care these days. Take the time, make the time, find the time they say to care for yourself. Most of us don’t even know what self-care looks like. We’re only now slowing down enough to begin to ask the question.

This week The Times Editorial Board wrote, “The defining trend in American public policy has been to diminish government’s role as a guarantor of personal liberty.”

I’ll gladly grant The Times that that’s true of policy, but when it comes to practice? Hell to the no. Consider Kate Wilson again.

“But, says Wilson, ‘Every waiver has layers and layers and layers on it. To get a waiver each district has to apply to the state,’ she notes. ‘The state has to decide whether to accept it. If they agree, then they have to apply to the U.S.D.A. If the U.S.D.A. says yes, the state can get the waiver, the district can get the waiver, but then the state has to interpret how you do it.’”

Is anybody else seeing what I’m seeing? Here’s a perfect example of taking no responsibility. There are myriads more.

The SBA loans that aren’t getting to small businesses because of the lack of a structure to get the money out. The individual stimulus checks that probably won’t even start to go out till the end of April because the Narcissist-in-Chief wants to make sure they have his signature. The immigration detention centers that will not release detainees who are in dire danger of not only contracting the coronavirus but spreading it—because of bureaucratic red tape, no systems, and a total unwillingness to take responsibility.

Then there’s the mothering/entrepreneurial model. Flat, sleek, and always ready to do what needs doing. Leavening. Unleavening. Discipline. Care and feeding. Meals. Sleep. Clean clothes.

We are all on the hunt for good news these days, no matter how small that news may be so I was glad to see a headline that claimed centenarians were bucking the odds and recovering from the coronavirus.

One of the doctors caring for one of these centenarians said, “She accepts everything that happens to her.” This startling sentence was written to describe a woman of 103.

And there may be the The Golden Key, to borrow from metaphysician Emmet Fox, that we need to resolve this entire mess. We must, like mothers, like entrepreneurs, accept what is happening.

Acceptance, Beloved, doesn’t mean we have to like it, but without acceptance, we will not be able to gather what’s most important, ourselves, those we love, and the pieces of our lives that we wish to bring forward into this new world that will be after the pandemic is said and done.

Here’s a radical idea. Let’s put the mothers and the entrepreneurs in charge of the economic recovery.

Remember those valuable qualities? “Adaptability, responsiveness, improvisation and foresight are of the essence.”

Huh. It’s true, then. The best things in life really aren’t things.

Oh, and there’s always this. We may also, if we so choose, remember that there is a Cosmic Librarian guarding all the mothers and all their children, biological or businesses, and we may call upon It at will. It’s called prayer.

Dr. Susan Corso is a metaphysician and medical intuitive with a private counseling practice for more than 35 years. She has written too many books to list here. Her website is www.susancorso.com

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