GOOD/GODLY STEW

I like stew, good, thick, hearty stew; stew with lots of meat and vegetables. You can keep the soupy stuff. When it comes to choosing between the two, for me there is no contest no matter what the soup. When I eat some soups, I almost have to look at the label to see what's in it. Not so with stew. The carrots, the celery, the beef chunks, the potatoes and all the rest are there for the eyes to behold and the stomach to savor each in its own way with its own taste. And that is as it should be.

Good, hearty stew is a good metaphor of what this country we live in is like. When my grandparents arrived here from Italy at the turn of the century, the metaphor was that of a melting pot. That melting pot was to look like soup and not stew. Immigrants were to melt into that pot so that potatoes and beef and carrots could not be distinguished one from another.

When my grandparents first arrived, they gathered in little enclaves as did most of the newcomers. There were Little Italys and Little Polands and Little Irelands in most every community. That was for security, especially if you spoke a language other than English. But the goal was to melt into one. Traditions were handed down, language usually was not. It was all right to love pasta but you spoke American.

But we are who we are. Our heritage is important. Maybe it is important that we can all speak the same language in this country. Yet if we meld everything into a generic soup, we lose so much of who we are and what we are about.

If we think about it, God created us to be stew and not soup. We're all different. We are not to lose our identity even within our own families. No two people are exactly the same nor can we ever become the same nor should we want to be. We will always be stew no matter how much we think we should be soup.

It's easier to be soup. When we are stew, the temptation is to mash the potatoes and the carrots and the celery into mush and almost make it soup, to break up the beef to make it easier to eat. That same temptation arises in society when we want to break down the differences that are ours simply because we are who we are. We don't want anyone or any group, ethnic or otherwise, to stand out. When someone or some group does, we tend to become fearful that he or they will take over. So we mash them down and try to make soup or we say we don't want them in our stew.

Our church, our land, our world is really a great big stew, a good stew, a Godly stew. All the ingredients are necessary. No ingredient is more important or more valuable than another. The carrots are just as important as the potatoes as the beef as the onions as the celery. So often in these days it seems that we are forgetting that truth. We forget how important we are one to another, how our differences actually make us better as a person and as a people. Even more importantly, and truthfully, when we want to get rid of or mash down, maybe we need to remember who made the stew. God is the chef. God chose the ingredients. We just need to relish in the bowl of stew.