Maggie’s Kitchen – September 05
FROM MAGGIE’S KITCHEN . . .
I’ve never much liked being away in the summer. Without my harvest of designer veggies, I’m doomed to a winter of blah supermarket offerings. Picking, pickling, canning, freezing, weeding I enjoy it all. Ripening blackberries beckon from the woods, chanterelles from behind the house. But who can say no to plane tickets to Vancouver, especially when they come from a seldom-seen and beloved son and daughter-in-law? Besides, the trip this time includes the Dormition festival in Victoria. As I plod my way through my long to-do list, I allow plenty of time for item number 6, this article, though not much for the weeds. So what else? When I get to 6, the fan on the computer stops spinning and the screen turns black.
So here I am, somewhere between the great T-O and the Pacific, trying to remember how to write without a backspace key.The subject for this month was to be (appropriately enough for September) Sunday school materials specifically, our ACCC need for suitable ones thereof as a long-procrastinated first step in keeping a promise I’d made to Barbara de Catanzaro to begin the actual construction of the same. Our ACCC congregations, more often than not, are small, with scattered congregants and only a light sprinkling of children. This, admittedly, isn’t peculiar to us, and some more-recently-published SS curricula are designed to be age-and-class-size flexible. But these aren’t at the same time designed to turn out reasonably knowledgeable Catholic Christians, so they’re of little use to us.
Actually, I didn’t get moving on this at all until a lively conversation after Evensong this past Sunday with a vacationing Lutheran pastor friend, an otherwise quiet and cheerful man who in an instant becomes a fireball advocate for the plain teaching of Holy Writ as taught and practiced by traditional Lutherans. We had been discussing the icon for which our chapel is named, Our Lady of the Sign, and ecclesiastical art in general. “But church publications for children!” He was animated, to say the least. “Cartoons! And not even good cartoons! The secular press does better!”
Out on the walkway, he virtually exploded at the mere thought of concurrent worship service and Sunday school. “Never! Never! Never! I don’t permit it! How can they learn what they need if they aren’t in church?” This unfortunate state of affairs, he went on, is directly attributable to the “adult children” in the pews, who were themselves cheated of a solid Christian education by a liberalizing Church, and so don’t know what their own children need to “know and believe to their soul’s health” (as our own Prayer Book prescribes).
How indeed can Jesus be presented as Lord when He is depicted as a virtual clown? when His command to worship is overridden by another agenda? when that other agenda (their otherwise Christian education) is left to watered-down materials, presented by teachers who themselves are absent from the Church’s worship? when Christian formation is left by-and-large to parents who are themselves in dire need of Christian formation? I made a mental list of some of what’s lacking in current SS curricula. Any sense in art and language of the holiness of God. Any real acknowledgement that worship of Him is His due, and our first duty, taking precedence over our own inclinations and social duties and even our need for Christian education. Any understanding of what it means that the Church is the Body of Christ, and thus that it, not individual experience, is — by His own design — the locus of salvation. Add to this the need to instruct parents, the goal of Biblical literacy, the necessity of age-appropriate instruction in ALL aspects of the Christian life, the demographic reality, and the task takes on truly super-human proportions.
So, where to begin? My proposal is graded sets of comprehensive but do-able take-home lessons, to be worked through with parents, returned to the supervising teacher for marking and follow-up, and added to the child’s own Duo-Tang, to be kept by the teacher until the unit is completed. The system assumes that the child is regularly in church. In fact, that’s the only way to get the next lesson. I know there’s a need for materials for other children, but that’s another subject. Meanwhile, can YOU help with this project in any way, including artwork, suggestions for lesson-related activities you name it?
Very few of our children will attain the level of a Hildegard of Bingen (September 17 on the old Roman calendar), the 12th-century abbess who was not only a mystic frequented visited by visions from God (all duly referred to her confessor, and through him to his abbot, the archbishop, and even the pope, to be scrutinized for error) but a keen observer of scientific phenomena and the author of remarkable volumes on medicine and natural history. We may not even WANT our children to have her reputation for plain-spoken rebuking of prince and pauper, though the Lord knows the world in our day needs plenty of this!. But I trust we do want them to have the same well-grounded passion for the truth of Christ, and the same desire to live out the consequences of His truth as He sees fit. (Forget her present-day popularity with ill-informed new-agers, who never can get it right anyway.)
From St. Hildegard’s own cookbook (she was skilled in domestic arts as well), her recipe for the Feast of St. Margaret of Antioch, July 20
MARGARITEN LEBKUCHEN
Pre-heat your oven to 375 degrees. Grease and flour a 10-inch round cake pan (springform?). Fill it with batter mixed as follows Whisk until foamy ¾ cup each of sour cream, yogurt, and sugar, and a pinch of salt. Add 1½ tsp each ground coriander and cinnamon, and ½ tsp each ground cardamom, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice. Mix and add 2 tsp baking soda and 3 Tbsp milk. Mix 1 cup whole-meal spelt flour and 2 ¼ cups spelt flour (if unavailable, you may use all whole-wheat flour); stir in until well-blended.
Place the filled pan in the bottom half of the oven, and bake 35-45 minutes. Cool before cutting.