Nativity Catholic Church
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Watching an "Angry Pot" Boil Over
A "FIRESTARTER" Spiritual Essay by Rev.
Dr. Benjamin
Berinti, C.Pp.S. It never fails. Every time I cook a patch of pasta on the stove, the pot boils over, covering the ceramic cook top with a nasty film that requires a good bit of elbow grease to clean up later. At the beginning of my next cook-fest, I always promise myself that I will keep a closer watch on the pasta pot in order to avoid my usual calamity. But alas, much like my promises to not let the garlic bread get charred under the broiler (yet again!), I am unable to fulfill that promise, usually being distracted by a thousand other things I’m attending to for the meal preparation. The science is simple here. A tight lid, with boiling, churning water inside, and the temperature set at a constant “high” will inevitably lead to the same results each time—the angry pot will boil over. I’ve been thinking a lot about that pasta pot in the past couple of weeks, since I’ve had occasion to see many other angry “pots” boiling over. These “pots,” however, haven’t been perched on any one’s cook top, but rather sitting or standing in front of me—in my office, in the confessional, along a sidewalk, or viewed from the distance in a checkout line at the store or in the parking lot of the mall. It seems that we human “pots” are subject to the same science as the angry pot boiling over on the stove. We can only keep the lid so tight for so long, while the stuff inside our hearts and souls is churning away under intense heat, fueled by our resentments, anger, bitterness, disappointments, frustrations, and jealousies. Sooner or later, our pots will boil over—and sometimes, just like that inevitable spill on the stove after the pasta pot eruption—there’s usually a mess to deal with. And sometimes, that mess has to sit awhile before we can even begin to clean it up. The founder of the L’Arche communities for severely disabled people, Jean Vanier, in a wonderful new book he’s written entitled Befriending the Stranger, offers some potent and rather “earthy” words about our “pots”—and what to do with all that boiling water:
We do not need to live our
entire life angry
It is more like manure spread on the ground. We do not have to look far from home (especially the home of our own hearts) to find anger and bitterness boiling over. So many people carry within them so much resentment and defeat—and very little hope. Although we are one of the few cultures on the face of the earth who find it necessary to not only fill our garages with everything but an automobile, but also who need to construct “storage facilities” to house all the stuff we aren’t even using, but insist on keeping—there is still a great deal of “stuff” we haven’t been able to unload or put out to pasture. No, each of us is still carrying a lot of damaged goods inside us—and unless we find ways to let go of these things, to turn them over to Jesus Christ, who as Vanier says, “welcomes everything that is broken,” and, in the words of spiritual writer Henri Nouwen, to “step over” our many wounds—we will continue to be the angry pot boiling over at the most inopportune times—and leaving a mess all over the place (and usually a mess other people end up having to clean). In his deeply moving and brutally honest reflection, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Homecoming (an extended meditation based upon Rembrandt’s stunning painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son), Henri Nouwen reminds us that resentment (and the anger associated with it) is the absence of gratitude. Resentment and gratitude are incompatible. When we are able to re-vision our own and other’s troubling situations through the eyes of gratitude rather than resentment, we are free to live and love with greater joy. Perhaps Nouwen might say, using our metaphor, the more gratitude, the less boiling over! Crazy thing about the angry pot boiling over on the stove is that, with only a few conscious adjustments, I’d be able to avoid the problem—a little more room under the lid, not overloading the pot, turning the heat down a bit, and remembering to keep a closer eye on the stove. And the crazy thing about our pots boiling over is that, with only the same few conscious adjustments, we’d be able to live more joyful and hopeful lives. Loosen the stress under our lids a bit more; dump out some of the junk we keep accumulating and stuffing inside our pots; back off the intensity of the heat we apply to our lives; remember to be more attentive to our inner life (listening to what our bodies and souls are trying to tell us); and keep a closer eye on our surroundings than we normally do. Funny how it’s so hard to remember—the pasta is going to cook anyway—it just might take a little longer—and wouldn’t a slower pace be a much needed medicine?
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