Zen and the Art of Cooking

I am a member of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta and I had the pleasure to write and deliver this reflection as part of our worship service this morning. Eventually there will be a podcast and audio here.

Julia Child noted in her delicious memoir My Life in France that she often encountered many a sophisticated American who was too busy to spend his or her precious time preparing food only to have the fruits of this labor devoured within moments. "How quaint," I imagine them saying to all 6'2" of her as they witnessed her sweating over the groundbreaking Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Of them Julia said, "Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, well, so is the ballet."

Julia Child knew the power of preparing a good meal by hand. When I cook, this power flows through me in waves like the spiritual energy I feel in my body during meditation. Well, not just LIKE the energy of meditation. For me, cooking is meditation. When I'm cooking, I breathe in peace and I breathe out love. It is, in a lot of ways, easier to let go of the noise in my bustling brain when I'm guiding an 8-inch-long, razor-sharp, forged piece of steel millimeters from my knuckles; when I'm carefully trying to flip a delicate fillet of fish; or when I'm watching for the exact moment when the broccoli turns that perfect shade of brilliant green. When I'm cooking, my mind, body and heart are one, like the Holy Trinity. The idea, the flesh and the spirit. I breathe, chop and season my love into even the simplest of dishes. I remember and fully experience the fact that I -- my true self -- am not just a brain-in-a-jar. (I think that this is an important reminder for UUs everywhere.)

Cooking is also teaching me two important lessons. First, releasing my ego; that is, letting go of the importance of the judgments I place on myself based on my perceptions of how others view me. Parker Palmer writes in his book Let Your Life Speak that he once heard Dorothy Day say this: "Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself...Give only if you have something you must give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward." Or to paraphrase for my purposes, "Cook only if you are someone for whom cooking is its own reward." Palmer goes on to write "When I give something that I do not possess, I give a false and dangerous gift, a gift that looks like love but is, in reality, loveless -- a gift given more from my need to prove myself than from the other's need to be cared for."

The action and all I receive from it are the rewards, not the outcome. When I cook my love into a dish, it is a gift that I need to give, not a hollow, needy cry for attention, compliments or thanks. I love to hear them, of course, and I even enjoy constructive criticism, but, you see, this is why my grandmother (and grandmothers everywhere) insisted, when I entered her home, that she make me a plate. No matter how recently I'd eaten lunch, how soon it was till dinner or the fact that her next sentence often was "Honey, you sure look like you've put on a few pounds."

"Yeah, thanks for the pie, Grandma."

The thanks aren't the point. If it were about the pay-off, cooking wouldn't be worth it because sometimes the potatoes are too salty, the yeast doesn't rise, the sauce is too spicy, or the meal takes waaaay longer to cook than I was expecting. Sometimes I intuitively know the exact instant that I put too much pepper in the soup, but that way has closed. I can't take it back. I have to accept that too much pepper is now a part of my soup and move on. Sometimes I can make it better, but whether the end result is delicious or we end up ordering take out, the response of others to my products does not dictate the quality of the way I cooked my life that day. It does not diminish what I got out of the act of mindfully preparing the food: the peace I breathed in and the love I breathed out.

This leads me to the second -- and the hardest -- lesson cooking is teaching me: I have to set aside some of that love I'm breathing out for myself. Through cooking my life, I suddenly realized not long ago why, for all these years, food prepared for me by someone else always tasted so much better than when I made it myself. In restaurants, of course, it's the butter. But in the case of my grandma's enchiladas, my dad's grilled cheese, my mom's lasagna, it's because I couldn't, wouldn't taste my own love when I replicated these dishes. This awareness shattered a kind of glass ceiling in my spirit that is slowly, slowly letting me become generous, gentle and loving with myself. Bite by bite, I'm learning to taste not just a pale shadow, a remembrance of my Great Grandmother's love when I recreate the warm blackberry cobbler she made for me as a child. I'm learning to open up my awareness to taste the vast ocean of love that generations of mothers and fathers have passed on -- the love that is now MY love. I'm working on keeping just a little, sweet, savory bit of it for myself.

The beautiful thing about cooking, too, is that you don't have to be a child-prodigy-raised-in-ballerina-boot-camp to do it. Julia Child didn't learn to cook until she was nearly 40. You also don't have to stage a full-blown production of Swan Lake to give this gift: while I advocate fresh, sustainably grown, seasonal food, you can breathe as much love into a box of macaroni and cheese as you can into your annual Thanksgiving blowout if only you feel the love flowing through your mind, body and heart, the holy trinity of your true self.