On Mornings with Oatmeal
For many years I ate a fried egg on an English muffin or on toasted sourdough bread until the day came when my digestion didn’t approve. I am a creature of habit when it comes to things like breakfast and lunch; I want to eat repetitively so that I don’t have as many decisions to make. Dinner is another story. That’s the meal where I love variety, newness, adventure.
After realizing that the egg and bread wasn’t “working” any longer, I wasn’t sure what to eat. My sensitive stomach has to be treated delicately most mornings, saving heavier foods like bacon, hashbrowns, or orange rolls/biscuits for the weekend. I finally decided to try McCann’s Steel Cut Irish Oatmeal and my gut was instantly pleased. I don’t add toppings to it all so I feel a bit like a peasant from the Middle Ages with a bowl of gruel, only eating to be filled.
In order to make it a more attractive experience, I pour my oatmeal in an English bowl made by J. & G. Meakin that I found for 98 cents at Goodwill. I slowly eat it alongside my hot cup of Yorkshire tea. There is something about making even the smallest of things, like oatmeal, lovely that begins our day with a sense of gentleness and kindness to ourselves. It doesn’t take a lot of money or time to take the commonplace elements of our days, like bowls of oatmeal and cups of tea, and elevate them to a beauty that feeds us not only bodily but in our souls. Sometimes these small acts of using pretty vessels usher us into a greater stillness, receptivity, and peace. Beauty calms and heals.
I recently finished reading Joel Clarkson’s new book Sensing God: Experiencing the Divine in Nature, Food, Music & Beauty. His book echoed many of the thoughts and ideas I have been ruminating on for many years on sensory experiences as a door to worship. If you have grown up in faith traditions that mainly focus on the mind, you might feel a bit malnourished when it comes to regularly feasting on beauty. Spending five years in a liturgical church deeply moved me and fundamentally changed me. I encountered Christ in hundreds of new ways through passing of the peace, the imposition of ashes, darkened Good Friday services with nails and crosses and thunder, kneeling to pray at an altar, seasonal art installations, flowering the cross, and on and on. No longer was I scribbling notes and building up knowledge as my primary means of worship, but I was moved out of my mind and into my body, relating to Jesus through my senses. I became spiritually softened and simultaneously strengthened.
Every morning when I eat my oatmeal in a floral bowl and drink my tea in my Blue Willow Spode teacup, it causes me to pause and slow and savor. It is an invitation to rest in Jesus, to delight in His beauty, and to remember His goodness. My senses recall me to Him. All beauty in this world is an arrow pointing to the heart of God. It illuminates His love, care, and grace. These small, daily graces have a spiritual quality if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
“Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,But only he who sees takes off his shoes”
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning
May beauty surround you today,
Aimee
P.S. I am not sure if Monday’s essay entitled “A Comfortable Bed” made it to your inbox or not. It didn’t come to mine, but it is available on the Homely substack page. If you didn’t get a chance to read it, please do by visiting.