Packages big and small

Big Package

Today I received a slip in my pigeonhole saying there was a big box waiting for me at the plodge. It was a big brown box, with WASABI CRACKERS printed on the side of it. I carried it back to my house and cut through the brown tape on the top, sifted through the packaging and extricated some sundried tomatoes, some almonds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, walnuts, and a mere nine kilograms of oats.

(I know.)

I did what any sensible person would do and made granola. As I stirred together the ingredients on the kitchen counter, I spoke to Carla and Natalia and read bits of Sarah Beckwith's brilliant book Christ's Body. (At one point I got so distracted by the book that after I took the granola out of the oven and gave it a stir, I returned it to the oven with my spoon still on the tray)

I wafted over to College Group with the smell of chocolate still in my hair.

Small Package

'I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic” existence.' - 10 resolutions for mental health

That reminded me of what I read in Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love (an ongoing read):

God 'showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, 'What may this be?' And it was answered generally thus, 'It is all that is made.' I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.

In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.'

That the love of God, higher than the mountains and deeper than the seas, can be kept under the brown skin of a hazelnut is, I think, one of the greatest mysteries of the universe. I suppose it is only a little less wonderful than the realisation that the entire person of God, who spoke the mountains into being and parted the seas, could be born in the skin of a human being, Jesus Christ. 

Big Package

I poured the granola after it had cooled into 2 biscuit tins and a glass jar (there was quite a lot of it - was? I mean is. Although perhaps that was my subconscious speaking because I have already snacked on quite a bit of it in the course of watching 42nd Street for a lecture tomorrow.) I smiled when I thought of giving some to J, to refill his jar from the Bridgemas Granola  I made him (which to be fair was better than this batch, but granola is granola...) Some time back I would ask myself, when I saw him, why (/how) he could love me. It's a question that does sometimes still come into my mind. But it's better when I heed the words of Clyde Kilby and stop asking why, instead being glad that he does.