Getting the big things right

For Catholics, eternal salvation is the kitchen table of our lives, as James Preece explains

If you know me personally, you may have heard me mention that I am working on my kitchen at home; then perhaps a few months later I would have mentioned working on my kitchen again. It’s been more than two years now and I think some of my friends suspect that I live in a mansion and have multiple kitchens because nobody could possibly work on a single kitchen for so long.

The story of my kitchen begins with a naive plan to remove some old wooden box cupboard things and replace them with new ones, paint the walls - job done in a week or three. However, sometimes a kitchen is not just a kitchen. Sometimes it’s new windows and doors, boarding out a new ceiling, insulating walls, digging out rubble from the crawl space, replacing lead pipes and so on. When you peel back the layers on an old house, things are not always what you expect.

One of the challenges with our kitchen is the size. It’s not a huge space and so a previous owner had gone for a “galley” layout with long worktops down both walls and a narrow space down the middle for one cook to pace up and down. Lots of storage, but lacking something… a kitchen table!

Oh, how I have yearned for a kitchen table. Visiting friend’s houses and sitting around theirs, there is something just plain wholesome about a kitchen table. Somewhere to let the toddlers go wild with icing sugar and rolling pins, but also a place where we can shut the door and have a quiet cup of tea and a chat. I really wanted that kitchen table - and so it was that I planned every aspect of our kitchen around the table.

If that meant moving the door a foot to the left, so be it. Moving the sink, washing machine and all of the plumbing that goes with it. No bother. An awkward gap where it’s hard for two people to pass at the same time and we’re always bumping into each other. Well, we did want to be close as a family.

You may have heard about the rocks in the jar. If you half fill a jar with sand, it’s impossible to force larger stones to fit - but if you put the big stones in first then the sand will trickle in and fill the spaces. Every now and then my wife will say to me “rocks and jars” and I know exactly what she means. Rocks in jars, kitchen tables. It’s a metaphor for life. If you fill your life with little things, you may find there is no space for the big things.

In our case the “big things” include making the time every Sunday to travel over to York for the Latin Mass. As a result, our Sunday doesn’t look anything like a “traditional” Sunday with roast dinner and maybe taking the kids to the park. No, our “day of rest” is all about finding lost shoes, arguing over who sits in the middle, making sure toddlers don’t go too long between loo breaks and so on. I am exceedingly grateful to the wonderful, excellent, phenomenal people of York who week after week provide soup, bread and cakes to my weary children. It makes an enormous difference.

Another reason my kitchen has been two years in the making is that kitchens, you may be surprised to learn, are not a priority. Children are. Saturdays come and Saturdays go and I could easily spend them all doing DIY until one day I look around and my toddler is doing her GCSEs. Once you have enough of a kitchen to feed your family, it’s really not important to paint that last bit of wall behind the sink. It can wait. Play with your kids.

I think this is perhaps the kind of lesson Our Lord had in mind when He said, “if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out”. It is better to enter into eternal life with an unfinished kitchen than have a finished kitchen and be thrown into the fires of hell. The point is: Get your priorities straight.

Ultimately, when it comes to rocks in jars - getting yourself and your family to heaven is the big one. For Catholics, eternal salvation is the kitchen table of our lives and everything else should be squished in around it. Don’t worry - if Jesus goes in first, you can be assured He will make room in your life for anything else worth having.