Rolling Out the Red Carpet

We had company over for dinner Saturday night. I spent half the day bustling around, tidying and cleaning, placing candles and choosing music. I burned a cooking CD (Music to Cook By, Vol. 1), and prepared to cook what our daughter, Rosemary, has dubbed my Red Carpet Sauce. “It’s Red Carpet,” she explained, “because it’s red and because you fix it on special occasions!” It is by far my favorite recipe and I can’t imagine growing tired of cooking or eating it. And, yes, I’m going to share it with you.

I love to cook. In another life I might have been a cook, scrubbing pots with salt or plucking fowl in some blueblood’s kitchen, wiping the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand. I would be portly and red-faced from drinking too much on the sly, probably. And I would have had five strapping sons and one daughter to boss around, and a spry little husband who played the fiddle but was crushed under an ox cart in a tragic accident.

In this life I am not a cook in a blueblood’s kitchen. I am the blueblood, but I don’t act like one due to a costume malfunction with my persona, which has been tattered from too much abuse over the years. So when I cook in this life, I am happy, because I don’t need a costume and I have two well-used aprons from Williams Sonoma, and can decide whether I feel all pink and girly, or all paisley-green-and-blue.

I went paisley-green-and-blue and listened to music from the 1960s all the way up to last week’s music. I dance when I cook, and I also sing loudly. This is how people know I’m happy: I’m in the kitchen. I’m singing. I’m dancing. And I smell like garlic and onion.

This Red Carpet Sauce takes hours to make and simmer. It fills the house with its aroma, and we’re all as happy to eat it each time we do as we were the first time we fell in love with it, when I cooked it from a recipe in my favorite Italian cookbook, which my daughter Fern gave me for Christmas one year. Give me a book as a gift, or a cookbook or a pen or notecards and I am a happy woman. I will settle for beautiful, astounding jewelry, though.

Sage and Rosemary wanted to help this time, and so they did, learning to use sharp knives and cutting onion, stirring the garlic, chattering and sometimes singing out loud too. Part of the sauce preparation involves removing Italian sausage from its casing, which is messy work. I lay the sausages out on a board and get a small, sharp knife, and slit the casings open, exposing the sausage. Then I have to pull the sausage out and drop it by bits and pieces into the already simmering garlic and onion and olive oil.

We got to the uncase-the-sausage part, the messiest part of cooking this sauce. Most of my daughters don’t like doing this part, for the ones who live nearby or at home and are likely to help are Virgoesque little prima donnas who can’t stand to get their hands or any other part of themselves messy. I always do the sausage myself, for I have no problem with Messy. But this time, 11-year-old Rosemary begged to uncase the sausage.

“Please, Mom! I want to do it!” she implored.

“Honey, it’s very messy. Look, see how it gets all over my hands? Not only do you have to pull it out of the casing and touch the casing, but it sticks to your hands sometimes, too!” As if assisting me for illustrative purposes, a casing was now stuck to my hand, being flung about like a long drool of snot by my hand gestures. “And then, after all that, you have to break it into little pieces and drop it into the oil. It’s messy, I’m telling you.”

Undaunted, Rosemary was still eagerly nodding.

“You still want to do this?” I asked, one last time.

“Mom,” she said, confidence all over. “Mom, I work with mud. I can handle this.”

From mud pies to company dinner. My girl is growing up.

I couldn’t stop laughing for awhile.

I work with mud.

 

Eve’s Red Carpet Sauce

Makes 6 servings. Cooking time: 2-5 hours.

INGREDIENTS
3 Tbsp. olive oil
1 onion, minced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 red chili pepper, minced (or 1 tsp. red chili flakes)
3 cans chopped tomato, or 3 c. fresh chopped tomato
2 small cans tomato paste
1/2 bottle red wine
1-2 tsp. sugar
3 Tbsp. minced parsley
1 lb. Italian sausage in casing
1 lb. ground beef
1 lb. Italian salami, diced

Directions: Heat oil in dutch oven, and add minced onion, garlic, and chili and cook for about 10 minutes. Add the chopped Italian salami and saute another minute or so, and then add the crumbled Italian sausage and ground beef. Cook until brown. Add tomatoes, tomato paste, wine, sugar, salt, and pepper and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer for about 20 minutes, letting the red wine cook down. Add a bit of water or more wine if the sauce becomes too thick. Simmer on low for at least an hour.  Add your favorite pasta, and serve with tossed salad and Italian bread.

Notes:I usually use a Shiraz wine for this, because I like the peppery Shiraz best for this sauce, but have also used Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinots. I like an Australian Shiraz, Yellow Tail. Also, though the recipe calls for a cooking time of an hour or less, I cook this sauce for about 4 hours and have found it makes the sauce heavenly. My preferred pasta is penne, and I serve this meal with a tossed salad, Italian bread or breadsticks, and a good wine.

Masks

Once the ego has emerged in early childhood, we begin to decide what parts of ourselves—what traits—we’ll let people see and what parts we’ll conceal or withhold. We tend to cover up reactions others don’t like and choose actions to please them and bring us the rewards we want. A small child, for example, learns to use his instinctive crying to get what he wants, or learns to control his crying if he is punished for it. We begin to form a mask to express or to hide who we are inside.

Jung called this mask the Persona. If our parents communicated love, support, and acceptance for us, we probably originally formed our persona to please them. We might also have formed it to please them if we feared them and were afraid of displeasing them. If we didn’t feel acceptance from them, we may have reversed the persona and perversely tried to displease them, getting rid of those qualities that might have pleased them. In any case, we kept some of our natural qualities and shut away others. The Persona is the necessary adaptation that allows human beings to live together. A raw, unmediated personality would be more than we or others could bear.

As we in our wisdom grow, we can use the Persona to bring whatever parts of us are appropriate to a given situation. The Persona is only a problem when it hides too much or too little. Giving our selves free reign to do or say or react however we want in a situation is just as destructive as keeping it all locked up.

The process of civilizing a human being leads to a compromise between oneself and society as to how one should be and appear. The Persona is a mask of sorts that shows the role a person is playing. It is necessary to develop and display a Persona in order to succeed at a role. A businessman must appear forceful and energetic, an academic intelligent, a civil servant correct, a professional woman must be intelligent and well-dressed; a wife is a hostess, a partner, a mother, or whatever her role demands.

As we consider the different roles we play and expect others to play, we can see that the Persona is a collective phenomenon, a facet of the personality that might also equally belong to somebody else. It is often mistaken for individuality, though. The actor or artist with long hair and casual clothes appears to be an individual, but is merely wearing the style of all his other peers playing the actor or artist role. To some extent, people do choose the roles to which they feel best fitted, and to this degree the persona may express some individuality. But it is never the whole man or woman.

Human nature is not consistent, yet in filling a role it must appear so, and the Persona is therefore inevitably falsified. The Persona, however, is a necessity. Through it we relate to our world. It simplifies our contacts by communicating what we may expect from others and what they can expect from us. People who neglect the development of a Persona tend to be gauche, to offend others, and to have difficulty in establishing themselves in the world or in a family. They are often hard to get along with and can be prone to various kinds of outbursts or behaviors that confuse or offend others.

There is always the danger, however, of identifying oneself with the role one fills, a danger that is not obvious when the role one fills is a good one and fits the person well. Yet we often say with some concern, “He plays a part,” or “She is not really like that at all,” when others are not being true to their own natures. Another danger is that too rigid a Persona means too complete a denial of the rest of the personality in all those aspects which relate to the personal or belong to the collective unconscious. If we choose to stay in touch with those qualities not incorporated into the Persona, if we know they are ours but feel they are not appropriate in the outer world, then our persona is apt to be a healthy one. It expresses our reality in what we deem to be in proper measure. But it does not hide us from ourselves.

But if we push this reality of ourselves away from us, then our Persona becomes a mask which obscures our reality from ourselves and others. Most of us do both of these things.  As we become adults, our health depends on rediscovering those lost qualities which belong to us.

Come Forth!

As I wrote some weeks back, I’ve had several pressing matters on my mind that needed to be gotten out in list form so that I could see what psychic matter I’ve needed to deal with. Sometimes I find that my inner life resembles a hall closet that catches this and that until it’s a jumble of stuff that isn’t where it belongs. I begin to feel the jumble and have to get it out onto a list or into written form so I can map my journey or face the consequence of jumble: chaotic confusion and loss of the Way.

One of the things on my list was the issue of launching or separating, because I have some adult children who are doing that in various stages and ways. Some do this gracefully, and some not so much. Some pretend to be individuating gracefully and graciously, but the nature of their pushing–which is away-from—is not the same as the individuating that begins with a bona fide call to adventure and a serious taking-up of a journey. Pushing against something is not the same as kissing it good-bye and walking away with a knapsack over one’s shoulder.

Neil Sedaka recorded a great song called “Breaking Up is Hard to Do,” which illustrates some of the pain of separating:

Don’t take your love away from me
Don’t you leave my heart in misery
If you go then I’ll be blue
‘Cause breaking up his hard to do

Remember when you held me tight
And you kissed me all through the night
Think of all that we’ve been through
Breaking up is hard to do

They say that breaking up is hard to do
Now I know, I know that it’s true
Don’t say that this is the end
Instead of breaking up I wish that we were making up again

I beg of you, don’t say goodbye
Can’t we give our love another try
Come on baby, let’s start anew
‘Cause breaking up is hard to do

“Don’t say that this is the end, instead of breaking up I wish that we were making up again.” Sad. But the truth of the matter is that individuation is (look at the word) an individual, solitary process. We are born into the collective, and we are raised among collectives, and pressed into service (sometimes) by collectives, but eventually we have to stand on our own two feet, hear the call and heed it, and go off on our own.  The funny thing about this process is that a person can appear to have done just that—gone off on his own—and still be tied just as strongly as ever to Mum’s apron strings. Reacting-against-Mum is to be enslaved to Mum. Reacting-toward-Mum is to be enslaved to Mum and the Collective of Mum. Objects are not as they appear in the mirror, if the mirror we’re holding is self-made. And so we go out into the world and I’ll be darned if we don’t often spend the first decade after moving out doing exactly what we would have done had we stayed at home: fight Mum and Dad, the image of Mum and Dad, the collective metaphors of Mum and Dad in all their various forms we encounter in collectives. We blame them, we blame God, we blame the church, we blame school, but the whole time the only person to blame is ourselves, for having failed to heed the call and for having recoiled out of fear and for burying our treasure in the ground, as Christ said some would.

We’re that ungrown, unused seed that Heni commented about.

So I’m going to try to write about this, using the personal and the theoretical and trying to express how people get saved. For no collective is ever saved. Only individual human beings are saved and called and presented in their wholeness before a throne of grace, divinely begotten, called, and ultimately consumed. And then, after all that, returned to a collective where they demonstrate for others what it means to be a human being who answered the call and is himself or herself, whole and entire.

finding the spiritual center

When Jesus met the whore at the well as recounted in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John, she told him, “I have no husband.” His answer was, “You speak the truth, for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.” Jesus is showing this woman how you can have many husbands and none, for he is indicating through the metaphor of her own life just how lonely her collectives have been, just now not-loved she is, and just how unmarried and alone she is, in the midst of all her sexual dalliances and collectives. Living in the midst of that community and drawing water at a common well, this woman is alone.

As they talk, she persists in her collectives, moving from not-married to not-belonging. “You Jews,” she begins, “You Jews worship at Jerusalem, and say it is the center of the world for worship of God (I have no center, no God, no world place I can call my own, she means, but if I were a Jew like you, maybe I would know myself as you seem to know yourself, and then maybe after that I would find a center place of worship, and maybe after that I could find God, and finally belong and become beloved). But Jesus, always true to the call of his own true self and his own intimate oneness with the Father, Jesus does not take the racial cultural collective better-than-thou bait. No, Jesus says, “Ah, but….”.

But the day is coming, he says. When? Why, whenever you consider that Jersualem is not the place, any more than all the other places were the place, not Jerusalem or Mecca or Rome or the spot where the Buddha sat. The place is here, right here, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” The word is nigh you, in your mouth and in your heart. You have no need of anyone to teach you. All of that, right there in the Bible. But it’s everywhere else, too, everywhere you look. Because God didn’t leave us without a witness, he didn’t leave us as orphans, he said “I will come to you.”

Individuals are lost, and individuals are found, and the truth comes to individuals for appropriation. We are born into and raised in collectives, and we come out of them. Eventually we are called back into the collective, but not to live with the group mind. We are called to return and to give the only gift we have to give, which is ourselves.

Yet the journey is one we make on our own, alone, and we are always and ever alone until we look around and see that we have, and always have had, a traveling companion. We have our true selves from the moment we are conscious. We  also have the divine, creative, loving, intelligent being whom we call God or the Divine or by some other name, the One Who Calls. And if we do not believe in that One Who Calls because we have our fingers in our ears, having confused the Caller with the despised Collective that can never give us life, well… God help us, for we’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water and it should come as  no surprise that all we have left, having done that, is the collective worship of economics and politics, along with our distractions and entertainments, to make us feel alive when, in fact, we are dead still.

But even as we die and lie in the tomb, a voice calls come forth!

And it’s the coming forth that is the beginning of individuation.