When I was a kid, my grandmother advised me to stay away from three topics in conversations. One was politics, the second was religion, and the third subject she advised me to stay clear of was her recipe for Jell-O salad, which was passed down from generations of Patterson women who prepared their Jell-O concoction in a jello mold ordered from an 1888 Sears catalog.
Grandma, if you can hear me, I won’t touch your Jell-o recipe today, but I’m going to broach those other two topics – politics and religion. This is risky business for a podcast that touts itself as scrumptious and easy to swallow. However, I find it difficult to wade into the world without occasionally taking the deeper plunge – in this case that would mean weighing into the gelatinous mixture of our upcoming election. In a few weeks it’ll all be over though, and our emotional investment will jiggle its way back down a degree or two. Still, whether your candidate wins or loses, we both will still have one thing that didn’t change at all and that is my grandmother’s Jell-O recipe and the metal goldish-colored mold it went into.
Grandma Patterson’s recipe survived many spirited presidential elections throughout the twentieth century. Her father was a staunch Democrat and union president for Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, back when that company’s union stance was a kind of gold standard for Democrats. This was first made evident to me when a carpenter, and also a Republican, was hired to work on my grandmother’s apartment and gave her a generous sampling of his homemade Jell-O salad. He had worked as a cook in the military and claimed, as he handed her his homemade Jell-O fruit salad, that the best cooks in the world were men. He would have been smarter to say, “there’s always room for Jell-O, a popular commercial jingle during the 1960’s, but my grandmother, always gracious, was perfectly calm and demure as she thanked him for his gift. However, later that day after the carpenter’s work was finished, my grandmother calmly removed his salad from her refrigerator and dumped the entire dish into her trashcan. “The best cooks may be men,” she said as his Jell-O salad wriggled down to the bottom of the trash, “but in the Patterson home, we eat Jell-O from the golden mold.”
It has never been clear to me how much the carpenter’s affiliation with the Republican party played a role in her decision to throw away his salad dish. She was probably well versed in his views on politics as he worked on her cabinetry and engaged her in conversation. Nevertheless, she was ever the picture of politeness as she accepted his homemade cooking, even when his political views and opinions on male cooks did not line up with hers. They were standards that had served her well during her lifetime, and it was clear she prioritized civility and good manners over petty bickering and political hair splitting. It was an old-fashioned and stable mold for living, but offered the assurance of an outcome that would turn out well regardless of how she felt politically. She simply wasn’t going to let how she felt about her one vote influence how she treated those who came into her kitchen.
Do you know what your gold standard is? Hyper-bowl-ies aside, have you been caught up in the frenzy of news which has left you counting down the days until you can pull the lever, or is there some other mold you were cut from that is more tangible than an outcome of an election?
Here’s is a favorite parable of mine that may help us to answer that question.
There was a farmer who had two sons that helped him tend to his crops each day. In the evening when their work was finished, the sons came in to sit down at the table with their father for dinner. To the first son he gave a large, tender portion of meat, as was tradition in the land. To his second son, the father gave a smaller helping.
One evening, after toiling in the hot sun all day with their father, the sons came in as usual to eat their dinner. As the father placed the meat on their plates, he gave the larger portion to his first son as he always had. This time however he was overcome with curiosity and asked, “Why is it that you never complain when I give you the smaller portion?”
“Well,” the second son began, “My brother takes pride in having the larger portion, even though I labor in the fields as he does. But his food is soon gone and he is left with only an empty plate. I find my joy, not in what portion I get, but in the work I do for my father which lasts all day.”
I like this parable because of the value placed on the company we keep and the work we are doing “in the field.” Those are solid virtues that are keep us from asking for more and more. They are stable and constant. While it is important in this country to take advantage of our right to vote, we can quickly become convinced that our greater goal is to embroil ourselves in what we are going to receive, the bigger piece of meat we get at the end of the day. We may realize, too late, that while we have satisfied our appetite, we mistakenly put our emotional weight behind something that only adds up to a few minutes of satisfaction. Our plate is empty again. Our day has gone again. We have little to show for our time, and worse, we disregarded the human “candidate” standing right next to us. We missed the mother of three who was just diagnosed with cancer. We neglected the donation box at church that still sits empty. We ignored the stranger at a bus stop who would have been filled with renewed hope as you handed him the extra sweet Lipton iced tea you just purchased for yourself at CVS.
So yes, we are all aware how important it is to enjoy this journey we are on, to savor our special moments of life because we know they are fleeting. However, for those who depend on the larger portion of life, it seems to me that life will always move along with an undercurrent of disappointment and that at the end of the day the journey will whittle down to who had the most wins and the best steak dinners. Those victories will be a poor substitute for the father, who is sitting nearby, who offers us a fair portion and quite enough work for us tomorrow.
Are you trying to figure out which candidate to vote for, which one has the strongest principles, best track record, biggest piece of the blue or the red states? Are you convinced that things will be fairer when your favorite candidate wins? Is it possible that you may be, like the son with the larger piece of meat, left wanting more as you begin your next day in the fields? Now that you have listened to the news rhythms and done your research and made your case to your friends, picked the right hat and the right sign for your yard, could you get home and find that the portion on your plate will not be the porterhouse you thought you were working for?
From his humble beginnings in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, renowned preacher Vance Havner once said that what man needs is “not a boost from below but a birth from above.” My grandmother was far from perfect, but she would have agreed with that statement. Politics and religion never entered her conversations, never dominated her work, never determined her civility, and certainly never made a dent in her Jell-O mold. She toiled in the field every day, she received her ample portion at night, and was grateful for the company she kept at dinner. That was her solid gold recipe, and she never worried about how it would turn out in the end.
