Cooking up A Covenant

Every Saturday morning our house was enveloped in a carnival of smells. It was sauce day. This is the day my mother cooked the "gravy" for our big Sunday dinner.

On the top of the stove stood a big pot of gurgling tomatoes, garlic, basil, onions and other wonderful scents. All day long this sauce cooked. It had to be just right for Sunday's meal.

And again early Sunday morning it churned a little more. My mother knew the secret of a good sauce: a slow boil and the mixing of various spices over a long period of time. In the end, we had a wonderful spaghetti dinner with deliciously prepared sauce made with time, patience, and love.

As the seasons mingle together to make a year, they mix hot and humid days with the cool and the cloudy. They inter- mingle flower laden branches with the naked and bare. They take both long nights and short days to give variety and fullness. While the seasons gurgle and blend, so do we as we pass through them on our journey.

With each season of life, we are slowly blending to complete our covenant with God. We take our various gifts, hopes, dreams, sins, doubts and successes and mix them with the important spices of God's love and mercy. And we become a sauce called a covenant.

However, it is our faithfulness which churns our covenant in good times or bad, in hope-filled time or sad and in the joyous and tear-filled moments. God is always there mixing His love with our fidelity, main ingredients of a well-made covenant. Our life, like that pot of sauce, takes stirring, patience, time and love; all these ingredients can produce for the believer a wonderful and eternal ending.

St. Francis de Sales doesn't talk about preparing sauce, but he has the same idea when he encourages us: 'We must set our hearts firmly in God and never withdraw them, because God alone is our peace, our consolation and our glory!"

This is the principal ingredient to make a wonderful, holy life.

A Reading from Psalm 139:14

Everything you do is marvelous! Of this I have no doubt. 

A Welcoming Pope

The Dreamcatchers