Not remembering that we are always receiving sacraments is an isolation the leaves do not have to endure: they receive and give, and they are green. – Andre Dubus, “Sacraments”
Dinner was a haphazard thing of the frozen variety: two orders of Chicken Tikka Masala boxed and waiting in the deepest recesses of the grocery store’s icy freezer. “But you’ll eat it?” I asked, again—just to confirm—and my girls said yes, adamantly, of course we will, we wouldn’t lie to you about dinner, wouldn’t dream of it, we eat everything you put in front of us, no questions asked, no tears shed. And so, I tossed those sad stand-ins for Indian food on top of our burgeoning pile of cereals and vegetables and bags of chips. “And we have frozen samosas at home,” I added happily. “It’ll fit the theme.” And the girls shrugged because they’d never been listening in the first place.
And would you know, Chicken Tikka Masala was not what they wanted for dinner, not in a million years, not the little one, at least. And in her defense, she had been asleep moments before I’d put that frozen food question to her, so I have no one to blame but myself. Not even the samosas—not that I’d blame them, but they usually caught her attention, being fried and all, dippable. The works.
No, she wouldn’t eat one. But she did hold it up, offered it to her older sister, all solemn eyes and pursed lips. And then the two giggled because we’d gone to Mass earlier that day and clearly something had stuck. “Jesus,” one of them muttered, laughing. “God.”
And I—in all my piety—nodded enthusiastically, taking the triangular food from my youngest daughter and imagining myself a modern-day Patrick. “Three points,” I said. “Father, Son, Holy Ghost—but one Samosa.” And then, quickly: “I mean, God. Yeah?”
The little one had already lost interest, having never wanted samosas or Chicken Tikka Masala or theology in the first place. The older one humored me—she still had the lingering promise of ice cream or a cookie and if a holy samosa was her cross to bear, she’d bear it with humility.
In the end, I ate that samosa: the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. It was no more than a snack after all, no great imparter of lessons or spirituality or insight. I gave my eldest daughter dessert and cleaned up the plates and put the leftovers in the fridge and the girls in their beds.
But at the bus stop the next day, something happened. “Tell them,” my eldest whispered. “Tell them about the samosa.” And I smiled, shook my head: impromptu Trinitarian monologues are even less welcome at the bus stop than over Indian food, as I understand it.
But all the same: Something had stuck. Perhaps not my haphazard theologizing over unevenly fried food. But a shared moment, a moment of grace, a moment when a simple object lifted our gaze up and over and into something more, something beyond frozen food and silly games and half-baked memory.
The samosa and the Spirit and the ever-shrinking, nonexistent space between them.
Love love love