the greatest of these is love

Pardon me.  Have you seen the movie "Crash"?  Very much the way it starts by flashing around to seemingly unrelated stories, I am going to start with two apparently independent vignettes.  Just like the movie, it will all come together in the end.

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A little while back, Christians worldwide celebrated their holiest holiday, the one that gives irrevocable substance to their beliefs - Easter and the holy days preceding it.  Long story short, the man bold enough to call himself the son of God breaks bread with his friends and then tells them that the next time he will eat with them will be "on the flip side."  After a night of ardent prayer in a garden in Jerusalem, one of his "friends" leads those who would arrest him to Jesus, beginning the end, so to speak.  The next 24 hours will find this supposed Messiah tried, beaten, and hung on a cross, crucified until dead.  The miracle, though, upon which Christians base their faith and find their salvation, is that after resting in a tomb from a Friday afternoon until a Sunday morning, Jesus rose, bringing veracity to all his claims and reconciling a broken relationship between humanity and a pure deity.

I have no idea who named all the holy days, but as Easter approached this year, my cousin's wife inquired if anyone knew what the word Maundy meant (as in Maundy Thursday, the night that Christians remember The Last Supper and take part in a sacrament begun on that night 2000ish years ago).  I'll admit, I referred to the expertise of the internet to help me answer her, but upon finding this article, I remembered things I learned in seminary.  "Maundy" is taken from "Mandate."  Let me explain further:

After humbling himself and washing his friends' feet in a symbolic act of what he was about to accomplish on a far larger and bloodier scale, and after instituting the sacrament of Communion by offering his friends his body/bread and blood/wine and asking them to remember him when they dined together, Jesus gave them one last mandate.  "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.  By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." (Gospel of John, 13:34-35 ESV)

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Do you know who Beth Hart is?

I've mentioned her before, but lately she's been taking up a lot of space in my brain and in my heart.  I believe I have come to decide that she is truly the greatest performer of my time for what she does.  There are two reasons for this:

1. She seems to have perfect pitch - she never misses a note!
2. She is so completely honest and raw... she pours every part of her heart into her music.  I saw an interview with her when she said that she wrote when she was sad and toured when she was not, more or less.

Having lost myself in hours of YouTube videos over the last several weeks, I've seen her live performances from all over the world, in all kinds of venues from stadiums to dive bars, and multiple versions of her more popular songs.  She is a consummate performer - she enjoys every moment of what she does (even in a bittersweet, maudlin kind of way) and recognizes at every opportunity how lucky she is that she gets to sing her heart for a living.  She is so real.

She is a storyteller and I love that.  Through her songs and the tales she uses to introduce them, I learn more about her and her life and her inspirations.  She has written the most sincere love song I've ever heard and the most painful plea for love, too.

Beth did not have the fame she deserved in the USA, so she does most of her touring overseas, throughout Europe.  She very clearly feeds off of the energy of her crowd, so she interacts with them frequently throughout the concert.  She loves it when her crowd sings along, they obviously love when she talks to them, and there is always this intense intimacy between her and those in attendance at her shows.  I hope to be so lucky one day.  

As I've been vicariously participating (via YouTube), I noticed a trend in her closing song.  It is not normally the same song, though they are almost always incredibly personal and sometimes heart-wrenchingly painful songs.  One can almost imagine Beth's fans leaving the concert in a contemplative way not unlike the worshippers at a Maundy Thursday service.    

After concluding her Wroclaw (Poland) concert with the song that made her [at least somewhat] famous, she sincerely thanks her fans for being "so nice to me."

Maybe I was in a particularly melancholy mood while watching this one night, but I thought to myself, "what kind of pain makes a person thank total strangers for being nice to her?"  It was enough to push tears into my eyes, thinking of all I knew she had been through from reading up on her and watching interviews with her.  Divorced parents, possible abuse, a heroin user by age 15, when she was 22ish her old sister, who she holds in high regard, died from AIDS, which she caught from a dirty needle.  It took Beth years to care enough about herself to clean up (and the love of a good man).  Her self-esteem is still just awful and my heart aches for her.

In her adult years, she reconciled the broken relationship she had with her father, who left when she was still young.  When she wrote one of her more recent albums, 37 Days, she asked him what his favorite song was.  He told her he didn't know why, but it was this one:

She told him she knew why - Because he is an addict, just like her.  Clean or not, it is a continuing struggle, laid bare in this song.  "God knows I can't change me; I've tried and tried... it's been a long time at the bottom.  Spent a lot of time way down there.  It's been a long time at the bottom - I don't know how I made it here."

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So how do the two parts of this post "crash"?  Really, it's quite simple.

You don't know what another person is going through or has lived through.  You don't know their joys or the pain they carry unspoken.

Be kind.  Love one another.

delicious surprise

Longer ago than I want to admit, in what feels like a different lifetime, I was hopelessly addicted to Star Search.  Does anyone remember that?  Every weekend, I would park myself in front of the TV to watch America's youth compete against one another to see who was the best - kind of like American Idol, but without all the drama and caustic wit.  I won't deny that as I watched Ed McMahon introduce the acts and congratulate the winners, I harbored a secret hope that one day, I would appear on that show and take home top honors.

When I was 14, my love affair with Star Search ended.  That may have been the year it went off the air, but it was definitely the year I lost interest in watching it - you might call it the beginning of becoming jaded.  My family went to the shore for a week, and although we programmed the VCR (with a VHS tape and everything!) to record my favorite show, something went awry and when I popped in the video, full of anticipation after a week at the shore, all I saw was TV snow.  This was disappointing beyond the feeble reach of language and I'll tell you why.  For about 13 weeks, I had watched with something akin to pride as this funky late teen named Beth Hart swept, week after week.  You couldn't touch her; she had Star written all over her - she had a great look and the confidence of a rockstar, strutting around the stage, interacting with the audience.  Better still, she knew it - at the end of every song she performed, you could tell she knew she nailed it.

The weekend I missed was the weekend she won.  I never got to see her winning performance or celebrate for the girl I had tuned in specifically to see for 13 weeks straight.  I turned on the TV the week after and she was nowhere.  I stopped watching.

So, that was kind of a bummer way to start, huh?  The point is I stole my post title from one of her songs - one more flashback and I promise I'll stop.  God only knows how many years after all this, possibly during college, I heard this amazing song on the radio and then the announcer said a name I hadn't heard since the beginning of my adolescence - apparently, Beth Hart went on to make it pretty big.  I went out and immediately bought Screaming For My Supper, which had a song called "Delicious Surprise," with spicy lyrics like "If I won me the lottery, I'd dance naked in the streets with a top hat full of money.  You'd wanna get to know me, if I won me the lottery."

I had two delicious surprises tonight.  The first was dinner (appropriately): we had Quinoa Bulgur, Kale, and White Bean Stew from Appetite for Reduction.

The title could lead a person to believe it would be a thin, anemic soup, which is probably where Mister's lack of enthusiasm came from.  A person would be wrong, though - want to know what's propping up all that glorious kale?  Cups and cups of diced potatoes, parsnips, carrots, and leeks.  This stew was so flavorful, it didn't even matter I was one clove of garlic short.  It starts with a generous herb blend: marjoram, thyme, and the mystery spice, the thing that makes you go "hmmm?"  Crushed Fennel Seed.  It's so subtle, you don't even notice it until you pause for a sip of water and you think to yourself, "what is that sweet, anise-y taste, lingering along the sidelines of my mouth?"  It enhances the overall flavor of the stew without ever drawing attention to itself.  That's something I really like about Isa's soup - I have probably 100 soup/stew recipes, but hers are always amazing and I think the reason is because she always incorporates a little something that throws your tastebuds for a loop and makes your brain shake itself off for a second look.  Tarragon in lentil stew, fennel seed with kale and potatoes, the mellow warmth of roasted garlic.

I'm going to go enjoy my second delicious surprise while I craft the new menu.  My Beaujolais-Villages is already poured and "breathing" and I found a dessert-sized chunk of Vivani dark chocolate in my cupboard.  Bon appetit!