When I was a teen, we all participated in community service while we were preparing to receive the sacrament of confirmation. I signed up for several activities, but the one I remember the best was making soup.
My fellow teens and I would gather in the kitchen in the school at St. Mary in Govans. There was a man in charge of the soup-making operation, and I wish I could recall his name. He was a force. He was a leader and a teacher. He assigned us each a job, and he was incredibly patient with us while we learned it. But he was also our commander, keeping us focused on the task at hand.
We might have had other thoughts on our arrival, but while we were in that kitchen, we had one job – to make soup. And it was going to be good.
None of us brought much to the kitchen besides our uneducated eighth-grade selves. We had little cooking experience, and what experience we had wasn’t particularly helpful. As I look back on those times, I marvel at how that man worked with each of us to make sure we contributed to the soup-making process. It couldn’t have been easy. And he must have known we would only be there two or three times. Then he would probably never see us again.
But that didn’t matter. For that brief part of that day, we were chefs. We were part of the soup-making team. And he made clear we were living out our commitment to those who would eat our soup. I don’t remember knowing what kind of soup we were making or how the pieces came together. I just know we were each given a single task to complete with clear instructions.
One day, when I arrived, the chef pointed me toward bags of celery. It was mine to clean and cut. I set in to rinse the stalks and wash them well. Then I started cutting. When he came over to check my work, he was upbeat and direct in his feedback.
I was doing just fine, he said. But there was no need to discard the leaves.
“The leaves have so much flavor,” he said. “Don’t waste the best part!” So, I cut up everything and gave him my pile of chopped celery – leaves and all – for the pot.
Each of us worked on our part of the recipe, cutting and slicing and cleaning and dicing, doing our piece with no clear sense of the whole picture. But by the end of our time there, the huge steel pots on the stove would be simmering and filling the kitchen with a decadent aroma.
Decades later, I think of that man almost every time I chop celery. I appreciate his lesson that you can make a wondrous soup from scraps you might have thrown away. In a world where so much is disposable, there is a gift in knowing that even what we might want to cut off and throw away can add value. And there’s a beauty in remembering that each of us has a role to play. It’s all right if we can’t see the whole picture. We don’t need to know the recipe for the soup. We just need to cut the celery.
“Let us do our part, and God will then do what he wills,” St. Teresa of Avila said. “This is God’s cause, and all will end well.”
It can be easy to feel we are helpless in making a real difference in the world. But as we celebrate the feast of St. Francis of Assisi and mark the 800th anniversary of his death this October, there’s comfort in knowing that God may simply be asking us to do what we can with the gifts we’ve been given. Maybe all we can do is chop the celery. But maybe that’s enough. And God will make sure that our simple task contributes to a delicious pot of soup.
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