July 16, 2001
DOWN HOME:
How many lids does it take to top a butterbowl?
___Here's a domestic problem to ponder after you've solved global warming, figured out how to free the whales, determined whether Ford or Firestone is at fault and you still can't get to sleep at 1:43 a.m.: How come the average kitchen-junk cabinet will have approximately 2.376 butterbowl lids for every single butterbowl?
___The problem of American butterbowl-lid abundance occurred to me the other evening as I sat in our kitchen floor, sorting and matching lids to our not-yet-recycled butterbowls,Tupperware and other plastic thingamajigs.
MARV KNOX
Editor
___Once upon a time, this would not have been an issue.
___When our girls were toddlers, we never knew how many butterbowls and Tupperware items we owned. Toddlers love playing in cabinets, and the butterbowl/Tupperware cabinet was the only one without a child-safety lock, since all these plastic objects were neither a harm to nor harmable by our young daughters. And so they stayed scattered all over the house.
___Need a bowl to store tonight's leftover baked beans? Look in the den behind the couch. The bowl is full of Legos, which are not perishable and can be removed in favor of beans.
___Now, however, the girls don't care about butterbowls, and the bowls all stay right there in the cabinet. Except the lids last longer than the bowls.
___The other night, I needed a butterbowl for the corn casserole. No problem; we had five butterbowls. But we had 11.895 (5 x 2.376) lids of sundry sizes. So I sorted until we had exactly five lids to fit five bowls. And I threw the rest in the recycling.
___But I guarantee you, within the week, the butterbowl-lid trolls had imported extra lids, none of which fit a butterbowl when you need it.
___As I sorted butterbowl lids, the thought did occur to me, "Man, you need to get a life." Twenty-five years ago, I couldn't imagine parking in the kitchen floor to sort bowls and lids.
___But since sorting butterbowl lids isn't very mentally stimulating, I also realized this, too, is part of life. Like pulling weeds in the flower beds, changing the oil in the car, cleaning the shower, getting a haircut.
___It's like spiritual disciplines--prayer and Bible reading, confession and repentance. You never get "caught up," because if you did life would be over.
___I take heart from the comment of a monk who was asked how the brothers dealt with the problem of sin in the monastery.
___The problem is never "solved" but only handled, he said, explaining: "We fall down, we get up. We fall down, we get up."
___And like sorting butterbowls or pulling weeds, our spiritual tasks never are done. Thank God, when we fall down, he's there to lift us up.
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