On the Common 199
Salted caramel and rejection.
Good morning,
We’ve packed up a significant portion of our home library recently, to make way for some new bookshelves. If there is one thing that can send me into a dream state, it’s planning how I will arrange the books when they reemerge. We’ve done every arrangement you can think of—except for by color, because neither of us can understand that trend. Marital harmony over how the books are arranged is important and underrated.
The Part Where There’s an Essay: Abundance
Every Easter Sunday, once most people are eating, I pull a glass mason jar from the fridge and bring it to the dessert table. I remove the lid, tip it over, and dump the contents all over a cake. Since I do this every year, by now, sometimes there is a small audience when this happens. We stand back and watch salted caramel drip down the sides of the London Fog cake I spent hours on the day before.
Although there are more things I could be doing on Easter weekend in preparation for the gathering we usually host, I love digging in and spending a reckless amount of time on a lavish dessert for no good reason other than that it’s fun to give good gifts of delicious food to my friends. I am always terrified that I am going to burn the caramel sauce, and I have burned it a time or two.
Have you ever made homemade caramel? It requires very few ingredients, but a large measure of attention. You stand and stare at the pot for ten minutes or more, waiting for the precise moment when the sugar browns enough but does not burn. The difference between properly browned and burned is less than a minute, and if you miss the window, you need to throw it out and start over. There’s no redeeming burned caramel.
I’m not sure how this tiny tradition started, but there’s a friend whom I notify every Holy Saturday—she gets a text once the caramel is off the heat, properly salted, and in its jar, cooling. She is also a baker, and she knows the victory of having properly prepared homemade caramel.
When I consider the works of God, there are many places where there’s more than necessary: abundance, lavishness, and, if I may, a lack of economy, win the day. Nature shows us the cup overflowing; any walk outside in the first bloom of spring or the last gasps of fall shows us the same. There is more than necessary; there is not just function, but beauty.
It is in the same spirit of lavishness that I make my Easter Sunday dessert. It is more than necessary.
Fifteen years ago the King James Bible marked its four hundredth anniversary. In celebration, Crossway commissioned artist Makoto Fujimura to create an illuminated manuscript of the four gospels. The finished book is oversized, high-quality, and sits in a slipcase for safekeeping. Fujimura’s artwork splashes across the pages—especially striking on the pages with the crucifixion, where blood red ink drips dramatically. The end of John has an illustration of a tree, verdant and symmetrical, with a branch clearly grafted in.
Though we could look at this book in confusion, wondering why the money was spent in such a way, it fills the same role of lavishness and beauty. It was seen as an act of worship to create a piece of art that attempts to pay tribute to the great book in which it is housed.
There is a time for economy to be sure, but there is also a time for abundance.
[The] dinner party is a true proclamation of the abundance of being -- a rebuke to the thrifty little idolatries by which we lose sight of the lavish hand that made us. It is precisely because no one needs soup fish, meat, salad, cheese, and dessert at one meal that we so badly need to sit down to them from time to time. It was largesse that made us all; we were not created to fast forever. The unnecessary is the taproot of our being and the last key to the door of delight.
Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb
For the Anglophiles
This is a rerun if you follow me on Instagram, but I just love it. Watch how this man lights up because of this chance meeting.
Reads & Listens of the Week
My friend Carrie and my friend (and colleague) Sam had a conversation on the Banderpod podcast. This conversation gives you a good picture of why I enjoy both of these people. I thought he really nailed the BBQ restaurant question.
I was reminded of this article from a long time ago. It is far superior to the “I have a gun” approach: Notes to a Young Man Interested in my Daughter. “…if you find that what it turns out you were creating all along was not just a garden, but a castle and grounds where the rest of your lives and the lives of your children and your grandchildren and all of your friendships and your service to God will be lived out, well then, all the more reason to have built well, with care and with tenderness and with unselfishness, from the beginning.”
How to Be Rejected: On Creative Risk, Audacity, and Faithfulness in Failure. “There are many inducements to hide your creative light under the proverbial bushel. Rejection is one of those inducements. It hurts when your heart’s deep work gets stiff-armed.”
This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve read in a long time: Judson’s Last Ride. “Rationally, I know this is where almost all of us end up sooner or later, but for some reason, it just hits harder thinking about him: a gentle, loving soul who never gossiped, never insulted anyone, never lied, and who for some reason never got a chance to even try to write his name in the history books.”
The aim of an artist is not to resolve a question irrefutably, but to compel one to love life in all its manifestations, and these are inexhaustible. -Tolstoy