On salads

I'm a big fan of salads. All kinds, but especially homemade ones. When I work from home, which is quite often, I usually make a salad for lunch. Same for the weekends. When my wife is around we turn it into a tag-team affair, she sprinkling on nuts and fruit and me slicing cheese and meat. We've gotten quite good at it if I may say so myself. Anything edible is fair game for these salads, with leftovers from prior dinners always finding their way into the bowl. On this particular day my salad includes romaine lettuce, swiss cheese, fresh turkey - from a whole turkey breast we had for dinner last night and which will supply us for at least a few more days, walnuts, chunks of pineapple, sun dried cranberries and olive oil and vinegar dressing. Mmmm, mmmm, good!

Have you ever really looked at a salad? Really studied one? I'm staring at mine right now. What color would you say my lettuce is? Green? Maybe at first glance, but not really. Green is the color of that Crayola crayon that says GREEN on it. My lettuce is a thousand shades of green, sometimes more white or yellow than green. And its texture, how would you describe that? Crispy? Yes, but its more complex than that, as varied as a hundred fresh leaves collected on a walk in the woods. The walnuts look like bits of brain with their folds and creases, not one like the others, and they too can't be described as just BROWN. (I don't really know what brain bits look like, but walnuts are what I imagine they would look like.) The pineapple has a distinctive grain, a tight grain, sort of like oak, and it cuts a lot easier with the grain then against. The cranberries are sort of like reddish raisins, only they don't stick together as much and you won't find any vine stubs. The turkey is mostly white-ish, the kind of white you'll find twenty different hues of at the Benjamin Moore store, the kind of white writers call bone or cloud or china. It also has a grain, not like wood but like the smooth, curvy lines a receding tide leaves in the sand. The swiss cheese looks like little post-it notes haphazardly spread around a disheveled desk. I can't make out the words scribbled on them, cause the lettering is so small, but actually because the letters are really dots of salad dressing. The dressing carries these tiny specks of seasoning all over my salad, which look like a horde of hungry ants at an abandoned picnic as the oil and vinegar slides into every nook and cranny.

But the real sight to behold is the whole salad, the whole bowl. Its how all the different ingredients, all the colors, textures, aromas, tastes, contrasting and complimenting each other, come together to become something bigger and better then themselves. And as I say my blessing... Bless us Lord and these your gifts, which we are about to receive, from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord, Amen... it hits me like a thunder clap. I am staring at thy bounty! This salad in front of me is the Lord's bounty! There it is, sitting in the bowl right in front of me. It is the amalgamation of His gifts into something bigger and better - bounty. But it is so much more than that, because this big bounty salad is screaming at me! Its shouting at me that we are supposed to stop and stare at our gifts, in ourselves and others, and take a moment to appreciate them - the hue of your lettuce, the creases of my walnuts, the grain of a friend's pineapple, the lettering on a stranger's Swiss cheese. And beyond that, we are being called to intermix these gifts, to combine them, blend them, to pool, join and commingle them, and in so doing to reveal the Lord's bounty for all to see and smell and taste. Where to start you ask? That's easy. Make yourself a big salad for lunch tomorrow. It will tell you what to do next.