Joined in chocolate

For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them. (Matthew 18:20)

Last Thursday night, a sacred assembly gathered people of at least four generations from several states, and most of them were not even in the same room.

No, Zoom wasn’t involved. The means of communication was a cookbook compiled by a group of women in the fellowship hall of a country church on the Great Plaines of Nebraska more than 40 years ago. More on that in a moment.

The blessed assembly started with a hungry phone call from a college freshman in Madison, Wisconsin. That call vibrated in a stage manager’s pocket at Lyric Opera of Chicago.  “Mom, I need the brownie recipe.” Not just any brownie recipe, mind you, but the brownie recipe. Everyone in our family knows what that means.

Quickly, came our daughter’s reply, “Call your brother; I’m in the middle of a rehearsal,” and moments later another phone jingled in a suburb 20 miles away. The recipe delivered; brownies were baked in a dormitory kitchen just in time to save a group of students from the delirium of chocolate withdrawal.

But about that recipe. It lives in a cookbook, a three-ring binder with a blue cover adorned with a white, pencil sketch of that country church, located a few miles north of Superior, Nebraska. The recipe lists seven ingredients and a few simple directions, with the contributor’s name neatly typed below: “Carol Warneking,” who lived then and now on a farm a few miles southwest of Salem Lutheran where the cookbook was edited and assembled.

When she submitted it, I’m sure Carol had no thought that her recipe might become famous in Madison, Wisconsin. I wonder if she would even take credit for it. The recipe might have traveled through several generations before her.

Nor have I any idea how many generations of how many families have used that recipe on the faded page of that well-worn cookbook, ready-to-hand in my wife, Dixie’s, bookcase. She made brownies and taught it to our son and daughter, making brownies, too, and teaching our three grandsons, Zach, Ben and Ethan, who apparently are keeping this noble tradition alive.

All of us, multiple generations, joined in chocolate, which makes me think of Jesus because Jesus and chocolate have been linked in my mind since the church dinners of my childhood.

Each one was a sacred assembly, not just because of chocolate but because of the connectedness of all of life and most certainly our connections with each other, sacraments that they are.

The connections that feed our hearts, awaken gratitude and keep us human, the connections that bind us together in communities of care are expressions of divine presence, physical manifestations, incarnations, if you will allow me, of the Infinite Love who seeks to capture our hearts in small and large ways, like in a pan of brownies shared across generations unknown.

Where two or three gather in my name, I am there, Jesus says. You would be right to object that those waiting for chocolate from that dormitory kitchen had not gathered in Jesus’ name. Or did they?

With all my heart, I confess that Jesus is the face of the Great Mystery, the Infinite Love, the Immortal Mercy who labors, most often unknown and unrecognized, in the secret depths of matter and our every experience, hungry to gather us into one great love. Wherever love and care touch our flesh to delight our senses and move us to share, the gracious beauty present in Jesus is surely present with us … and especially when chocolate is involved.

A final thought: If this should find its way to any of those who ate Carol’s brownies in that Madison dormitory, ask Ben about guacamole.