I learned how to make pesto from an actor who I met my first
year in New York. I was doing an internship with a theater company, and he was
in the cast of the first play of my first season with the company. It was a man’s
man kind of play, with a cast full of big tough guys, but they were all really
nice to work with. They were tough all right, but they treated the interns like
gold, and this one actor brought in a big container of pesto and a few loaves of
fresh Italian bread one day during rehearsals and told us all to eat as much as
we wanted to. I don’t know if I’d ever had pesto before that day, but even if I
had, I’d never had it as delicious. When I asked him how he made it, he said he
made it every year around that time – it was just this time of the year – and that
he’d make a big batch of it and freeze it in smaller containers to have until
the next basil harvesting season came along. He said he took a huge bunch of
basil, and a handful of pignoli nuts, about a quarter cup each of olive oil and
parmesan cheese in a chunk. He said the secret he’d learned from his mother was
to use a combination of parmesan and romano cheese because the romano gave it an extra
kick somehow. He’d put it all in a blender and that was all there was to it.
The next fall I tried it myself, and at the time I was house sitting for
another actor, a woman and her husband this time, and when I told them I was
planning to make pesto, she told me that her secret was to add a few of the
flower heads of the plants which I do now whenever I have the chance.
Recipes are something that I collect because I love to cook
and there are so many different types of food that I love to try everything I
can, and when I can get a recipe from a person it’s much more fun than trying
to make it from a cook book. I use cook book recipes too, but I love the
personal touches that people tell you about, and I’ve found that they really do
make a difference in the flavor of the meals I make. And people’s recipes are
really personal in other ways too – we remember the way that we learned how to
make something, and we remember the person who taught us. When we share
recipes, very often it’s words like “I add a handful of pignoli nuts,” or “I
throw in a few of the flowering tops, not too many, because they’re really
strong.” What’s a handful or a few? How do we know what people are talking
about? But somehow we figure it out, and in the process we make the recipe our
own.
There really is no one way that we come to know the Lord.
There is no recipe that works exactly the same for everyone. When I describe my
testimony to people, they very often look at me in wide-eyed disbelief, because
so much of what happened and what I did on the way was so very much out of the
way of how we would think God works. At the time when I was born again, I was
living above an Irish bar. I wasn’t going to church, and I had not expressed
any interest in going to one in the least. That was the last thing on my mind
in those days. I might go into a church for some reason, but it definitely wasn’t
to talk to God, or even to see if He was interested in talking to me. God was
not on my mind at all in any way, except on the occasions when things would go
terribly wrong and then I’d find myself begging for help. He always answered,
too, and when He answered, I didn’t even have the grace to say thank you. I’d
just think how lucky I was and that I must be such a good person to have all
that luck, and go about my business doing the same old things all over again. I
was clueless – clueless about who I was and what my life was like, and clueless
about the reasons for the grace that appeared again and again and again. But
finally there came a time when I’d gotten to the end of my rope one more time,
but this time was different. This time the Lord came knocking in a way that was
impossible to ignore.
Pastor Rick Warren writes in “The Purpose Driven Life” that
sometimes God comes knocking gently at first but when we don’t listen he’ll get
louder and louder and sometimes He has to come with a jack hammer. I’m
paraphrasing, but when I read that I laughed so loud and long because that’s
exactly what had happened to me. By the time I was born again, the house around
me was literally being close to bulldozed. There was a huge construction site
next door and there were jackhammers all day long. Windows were being broken
and walls bashed in all around me. I was lucky to get out alive.
At the time that all of that was happening, I found out that
someone was doing Santeria against me, so everything in my life was being
destroyed. When I finally recognized that the Lord was calling to me through
this mess and that His was the only door I could safely walk through, I got out
of that house and into a temporary apartment in Brooklyn. At that point I’d
lived in Manhattan for more than 20 years, so I didn’t know anything else. I
started walking around Bed Stuy in a daze, trying to figure out where exactly
Dorothy had ended up after the cyclone had finally let her down. One of the
places I walked past one day was a Botanica, a place where you could meet with
a Santero and do Santeria. I didn’t know a thing at that time about God’s
commands against witchcraft – all I knew was that someone was doing Santeria
against me and I needed help and it seemed to me that was the best place to go.
I didn’t know what I know now, that we don’t even need that kind of help when
we have Jesus. All the Santeria in the world doesn’t have a chance against Him.
The woman who had told me about the Santeria being done against me was a
psychic healer I talked to, and she said that there was something protecting me
that the people doing it couldn’t figure out what it was. She didn’t even know
herself, she just knew it was something more powerful than anything or anyone
else. It amazes me that He protects us even when we’re not even aware of Him at
all. It amazes me that He went to the cross for us before we ever knew Him or
what that sacrifice meant. It amazes me that He helps us when we are completely
clueless and hopeless and are asking everyone for help except for Him. Amazing grace.
So I walked into the Botanica and met with the Santero. He
did a reading for me and said basically the same things that had been told to
me by the other woman I had talked to. He invited me to a party they were
having and I went – it was an experience I’ll never forget, and though I know
now that I never should have been there, I’m glad I experienced it because it’s
important to know that those things are real. I hear people every day talking
about the different rituals they’re doing, and I see the Botanicas flourishing
in all kinds of neighborhoods. Every day there are people just as clueless as I
was thinking they need that kind of help, not knowing that there is real danger
there and the help that is on offer comes at a huge price and really isn’t help
at all. At some point that evening some man who was prophesying from some very
dark spirit told me that I needed to be washed and made clean. He was right,
but I didn’t need the help of the Santero to do that. All I needed was the
blood of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit, but I didn’t know that at the
time, so I signed up for a cleansing bath because it seemed like a good idea.
It’s so easy to get caught up in something like that – for all their dark
energy, these people seemed like they were really trying to help me – they seemed
like they were my friends. All I can say again is thank God for Jesus, because
if He hadn’t been sitting at the right hand of God interceding for me, I’d be
toast by now.
The cleansing took place in three parts. The first two were
simple washings with my clothes on and water poured over my head that had some
kind of herbs and leaves in it. Santeria is based in Christianity, so there are
things they do that echo things like baptism, but it is very dark and full of
negative energy – when I was baptized a year later the experience was so completely
different that there isn’t even any comparison. The third bath included being
rubbed all over with a live pigeon. It took a while for me to get to that third
bath because the Santero was having a hard time finding a white pigeon and it
had to be white without spots – again, an echo of Old Testament sacrifices and
the coming of the Holy Spirit as a white dove from heaven when Jesus was baptized.
I remember asking the Santero if he was going to kill the pigeon – I told him if
he was I didn’t want to go through with it. I even told him I’d pay for
everything, but I didn’t want him killing any pigeons for me. He told me he let
the pigeon go free afterward, so I went ahead and we finished it when he
finally got the right kind of pigeon.
In some papers that I found when I was cleaning in my
apartment the other night I found these notes from that time for a story that I was starting to write, “Something has to
change in your life when you’re rubbed all over by a Cuban witch doctor with a live
pigeon.” “In order to find God you have to meet the devil.” And then I found
this one – someone had described the Santero as a used car salesman, and I
wrote, “And maybe that’s all he was. But I’m a used car, right? I needed to be
sold to myself.”
There is no one recipe for coming back home to God. I didn't need to be sold to anyone because the
price was paid on the cross at Calvary, and the blood of Jesus is there for our
salvation and healing any time we want to receive it. I was His all along - He'd already paid the price - but all those days when I was
looking for healing from any place except for Him, He patiently waited,
knocking softly sometimes, bringing the jackhammer at others, walking with me
into the Botanica to let me find out for myself just what a waste of time and
money it was, letting me start to feel how dark it was too, so that I could
know the difference when I finally started to receive His light.
There is no right way to come to know the Lord – for each of
us it is different and unique as we are each different and unique. For each of
us, we can know with certainty that no matter what mistaken roads we take, we will get
there because that is His will for us. And when we get there, whatever has been
in our past is past, and no matter what anyone else thinks, it is what God says
that matters. “Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died –
more than that, who was raised to life – is at the right hand of God and is
also interceding for us.” He cared enough to go to the cross, and He cares
enough to walk with us into every wrong door we go through until we finally open
our eyes and see the door that He’s holding open and walk through it with Him.
Blessings,
Jannie Susan
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