There are as many ways to make spaghetti sauce as there are families. Some recipes are simple. Some are complex. Some don't even use tomatoes! (Imagine that!) It doesn't matter how you make your spaghetti sauce as long as you know what you like. And for the most part, we "learn what we like" from our ancestors.
Pasta-and-sauce is a family meal. Most learn to make it with what's on hand, what's plentiful, or what needs to be used up soon. It can be made with meat, seafood, poultry, vegetables, eggs, even tofu! As long is your recipe tastes good over slippery, slurpy pasta (or eggplant, or fried chicken, or sausage sammies) you'll be the kitchen hero.
I just made pasta sauce (with sausage) for dinner and because I forgot to buy celery, I used some aging cabbage. I've never used cabbage in pasta sauce before, but I keep it in the fridge because we don't often use onions in our cooking and cabbage adds a good background flavor. Tasting the results I have to call it a success, though I think my family will figure it out. "Cabbage has a cabbage smell." Now (even though I've been sneaking tastes) I'll have to wait for supper to enjoy it with the rest.
Does faith have a flavor? Or is it a whole dish made of many ingredients? Can we mix and blend to see what happens? Is the recipe rigorous and invariable or open for experimenting...? I think, when we start adding people, we're into pasta-sauce country. You use what you have, and play with the blend.
In our Catholic Church if you go from parish to parish you'll find a lot of variety--many expressions of faith--even in close neighborhoods. Taken together, we do have a recipe which is followed religiously and makes our community distinctive. We are not, after all, making barbecue. We share a common recipe called "The Creed" which lists all the basic ingredients. Without one or another, it just doesn't taste like home.
But we also add a lot of personalities, a lot of preferences, a lot of local expressions, cultural language and symbolism--even varieties of music. Most parishes attract people of similar tastes and backgrounds, but what we do is what has been passed down from Christ. For most of us, that's what tastes so good. That's why we come home for dinner.
Think about what you like most when you share The Mass. Is it the music? The decorations? Do you love (or avoid) incense? Does it matter what language your community uses when it prays together? Do you visit different parishes on different Sundays, relishing a buffet of flavors?
Do you prefer the Mass to be reliable and unchanging? Do you crave variety and surprises? Is it even allowed to have preferences...?
Franciscan prayer begins with the following premise: "Every person has the right to his or her own spiritual path." Which means that even in a close-knit community, there is room for variety, multiplicity, and experience. To try to create a one-size-fits-all community actually harms the life of the Spirit in that community. Maybe this is why I found a home among Franciscans. Certainly it's one of the things that challenges me, when I don't agree with someone about how, when or why we do things. It's been good for me, though, to taste other people's favorite recipes, or even their experiments. I know what I like best, but pasta is pasta, cabbage has a cabbage smell, and faith is meant to be shared.
Dove saremmo senza la famiglia?
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