They lay fresh-washed on my blue kitchen counter, most beautiful: a big eggplant (aubergine to you Brits) shining darkly purple; three red and two green sweet peppers; a small mound of mushrooms, nicely cleaned and creamy; and one big onion, the size of a medium grapefruit. No fresh tomatoes, alas; this is January, and “fresh” tomatoes are pretty pointless at the moment. Fortunately, canned tomatoes make very good pasta sauce.

And it was pasta sauce I had in mind. For my own emotional/spiritual purposes, as much as to feed my family, I needed to put together a big pot of rich tomato sauce for spaghetti and lasagna. Cooking soothes my soul, especially when it’s making a big pot of something complicated and earthily messy: playing mud-pies, with the virtuous knowledge that the results will be Nutritionally Correct as well as easy on the tongue.

So I split the eggplant top to bottom, my big knife slipping sweetly through the greenish flesh, and I cored, split, and cleaned the peppers. These all went under the broiler to get soft and black-skinned, because roasted veggies make a wonderful pasta sauce. Then I trimmed and sliced the mushrooms, working with growing contentment, slipping into the rhythm.

This is work I love doing, work wherein “my avocation and my vocation ... make one in sight”. I know what I’m doing in the kitchen, well enough that I don’t have to follow recipes or think very much about what I’m up to. I’ve got the techniques and the specialized knowledge cooks need to fool around without creating disasters; I can trust my instincts. And therefore I could let my hands float in the old, familiar work while my mind wandered, open to visions and dreams, seeing the pattern in the carpet of my life unfolding in new ways, giving space to those stray thoughts that pull a person down new paths toward the Light.

Making stuff in the kitchen is, for me, a perfect occasion for Martha-prayer, the sort of relatedness-to-God a person can reach when the hands are busy at some loved and happy occupation, and the mind is free to wander. Driving has much the same effect for me. I gather gardening does this for some people. I could see a person reaching this state while fooling around with carpentry, or taking an outboard engine apart, or flensing a seal, or weaving, or cutting out and basting a garment – or, for that matter, putting together a jigsaw puzzle or playing Freecell. Whatever works for you.

So often we judge ourselves or others for “mind-wandering” when maybe that’s the most spiritually productive thing a person can do. Why is it that we hold ceremonial activities or formal religious stuff as being spiritually Excellent and ordinary activities as being spiritually Unworthy? Not that I’ve got anything against a good solid liturgy with all attendant beauties and graces, but sometimes I get more (spiritually speaking) out of making a good solid soup. I don’t know about seal-flensing; it hasn’t come my way.

Anyway, mind-wandering or not, I had warm olive oil waiting for that onion, so I picked the thing up and set it on my cutting board – and picked it up again, and held it cupped in the palm of my hand for a moment, enjoying it: round, solid, heavy, faintly cool to the touch, with beautiful papery tawny skin. A really big sound onion is, I think, one of the most satisfying things a person can handle. I took my time choosing this one, earlier in the day, not because I was being persnickety, but simply for the pleasure of handling big onions.

Onions are something I share with the Christ; this is a vegetable he would have known and eaten in his time among us, unlike peppers and tomatoes and eggplant. The very ordinariness of the thing, the humbleness of it, its earthiness, goes with the style of his preaching. He talked of such ordinary things, after all, of grapes and figs, sweeping rooms, planting and pulling weeds. Onions are blessedly plebeian; all through their range – and they must be one of the most universal of foodstuffs – they are part of the food of the poor, always have been. They are warm and humble, savory and inelegant, and closely associated with tears.

But my onion does nothing if I stand there adoring the thing instead of putting it to use; in fact, if I adore it long enough, it will rot. Onions are meant for use; they are poor gods. So after a minute’s self-indulgence, I stripped my onion of its skin (which will go toward colouring the next bouillon or stew I make) and reduced the white and pungent flesh to dice, blowing my nose obbligato. I tossed the dice into the oil to soften; the start of putting together my sauce. The smell reaches back into the past: Mary and Martha would have tossed chopped onions into olive oil to soften. And into the future: onions cooking in oil are a beginning. Where from here?

We start our journeys in such humble places: or if we start in greater privilege, God will fetch us out into the desert to learn the value of an honest onion, if we’ll allow God to do that. (And so often we won’t, thinking that onions are ignoble and God deserves better than God has chosen, silly us.) Better to plant your feet firmly in the soil where you belong--humus and human being, after all, close cognates--and embrace this earthiness as right and God-given. For our Lord ate fish and plain bread, ordinary oil and wine, and very ordinary onions, and that’s the way we are to follow.

Now, where's the garlic....?