Cornie's Kitchen

05/08/2025

In The House Of The Lord
By Henri Nouwen

Be with Jesus. Be quiet. Listen to the one who invites you to his home. Gradually, we will notice that we are in his house not only for that half hour, but also throughout the day. We will discover that we are in the house of the Lord wherever we are and whatever we do. By dwelling with the Lord in prayer, we can live in a hostile, violent, competitive world and be at home.

Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” —Matthew 26: 38

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot: Wheat Field in the Morvan Region, Oil on canvas, 1842, 38,6 x 74,4 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, LYON, France.

02/08/2025

Almond flour Cookies with a little crunch and a bit of chocolate both 😋.
I’ve been seeing all the “Christmas in July” recipes and advertisements lately due to being confined to the air conditioning because of heat stress. I hope to return to the land of the living by mid September—if the thermometer cooperates!🌡️

29/07/2025

A Greater Love Than We Can Contain
By Henri Nouwen

Love, as Jesus reveals it to us, is a relationship between persons. The word “person” is a wonderful word. It comes from the Latin words per, which means “through” and sonare, which means “to sound.” A person is someone who is sounding through.

What are we sounding through? We are sounding through a greater love than we ourselves can contain. When we say to somebody, “I love you,” that really means, “You are a window through which I can get a glimpse of the infinite love of God.”

“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”
—Matthew 5: 14 - 16

Edward Steichen: Sunday Papers, West 86th Street, photograph, c. 1922, Gelatin silver print, printed 1961, 13 5/8 × 10 5/8" (34.6 × 27 cm), Museum of Modern Art, New York City, New York.

22/07/2025

Responding To The Needs Of The Poor
By Henri Nouwen

To serve means to minister, to love and care for others, and to recognize in them the heart of God. A true disciple of Jesus will always go to where people are feeling weak, broken, sick, in pain, poor, lonely, forgotten, anxious, and lost. It is often hard to go to places of weakness and rejection to offer consolation and comfort. It is possible only when we discover the presence of Jesus among the poor and weak and realize the many gifts they have to offer. Therefore, spiritual formation always includes responding from the heart to the needs of the poor in a spirit of true compassion.

“'When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and for the foreigner residing among you. I am the Lord your God.'” —Leviticus 22: 23

William Vandivert: Farm children gleaning field after a wheat harvest in Switzerland, B/W PRINT, 1941, TimeLife_image_562864, LIFE Photo Collection, New York City.

16/07/2025

FOOD INSECURITY INCREASES AFTER TEXAS FLOODS

After a disaster, people need many types of help. Food is one of the disaster related SNAP benefits any flood survivor can receive. Unfortunately, recents cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has impacted area food banks in their time of increased need.

https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/texas-food-banks-flood-survivors-trump-funding-cuts/

The July 4th flooding has become the first major disaster to expose the grave effects of Trump’s new food and hunger policies.

16/07/2025

SCORCHING SUNSHINE BRINGS THE HEAT
It’s officially summer in the US and temperatures are heating up fast. About 170 million people will suffer through highs in the triple digits this week and the rest of summer won’t be much better .

Heat indices – or how hot it feels outside – hit early records creating the first significant heat wave of the year, according to the US National Weather Service. State health departments from New York to Michigan published warnings and tips for how to stay cool for the summer and avoid heat related illnesses.

Extreme heat can cause your body temperature to spike rapidly, with no way for your body to cool itself, leading to potential heatstroke or heat exhaustion. It’s one of the biggest weather-related killers and some cases result in permanent disability, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. As climate change worsens and temperatures continue to climb, heat-related deaths have doubled in recent decades, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. NOA and the CDC have different ways of calculating deaths, so the first attributes more deaths to heat, while the latter assigns more to cold temperatures.

So how can you tell if you’re overheating?

Symptoms include excessive sweating, nausea and confusion, according to the CDC. But sometimes the signs aren’t so obvious, says Selwena Brewster, chief quality officer and interim chief medical officer at NYC Health and Hospital’s South Brooklyn Health. For example, a muscle cramp while walking outside could actually be a sign of heat exhaustion.

Call 911 immediately if you start noticing symptoms in yourself or someone around you. If you are assisting someone with a heat-related illness, give them a slow stream of cool water while waiting for help, says Brewster.

“Heatstroke is an emergency and we have to act fast,” she says.

The best way to avoid a heat-related illness is to STAY COOL – an easy mnemonic device Brewster gives her patients:

Stay hydrated by drinking 11 to 15 glasses of water a day — more than the typical recommended amount.
Take breaks when you need to.
Avoid strenuous activity, alcohol and caffeine.
“Yes” to wearing light clothing.
Cover up with sunscreen and hats.
Open windows.
Opt for cool showers.
Limit your exposure to the sun with shade and stay indoors.
And if you have pets at home, make sure they’re hydrated and stay in the shade.

And Cornie’s Kitchen would add, go to an air conditioned space if your home isn’t so cooled: walk in the shopping mall, read in the public library, go to a community center, or visit the local cooling shelter. As one who taught in a non air conditioned classroom in the Deep South in late August, I can vouch for heat exhaustion as a bad outcome. Once your body gets this trauma, it will never handle heat well again. Please be safe.

15/07/2025

A Story of Transformation
By Richard Rohr

In the CAC’s Living School: Essentials of Engaged Contemplation, Father Richard shares how the story of Jonah became so important to him and his framework of transformation:

Soon after I moved to New Mexico in the late 1980s, I began my studies for what would become the men’s rites of passage. I read everything I could on why every ancient culture deemed it necessary in to initiate the male. It seemed that no culture assumed that men would grow up naturally, because nothing in the male wants to descend. He wants to ascend; he wants to be number one. It’s the competitive nature of masculinity, which has totally informed our culture, no matter who we are. Something has to break through that level of consciousness.

For me, there is no story—other than the Jesus story itself—which has made that quite as clear as Jonah’s story. Here we have a man who is running from God, running from his own vocation, and God sends a fish to swallow him and take him where he would rather not go. That’s perfect! That’s initiation! We have to be swallowed by something bigger than ourselves. The phrase used by many, including Thomas Merton, was that we have to go into the “belly of the beast”—a place where we are not in control, where we can’t fix it, explain it, understand it, or even like it. Our lack of control, our lack of preference isn’t important. We just have to learn from it.

I’ve always made a great deal of the passage where Jesus says, “This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign will be given except the sign of Jonah” (Luke 11:29). He is saying that his message is simple and clear: You’ve got to die before you die. In rites of initiation we teach people that they have to go down before they can possibly go up. In modern psychological language, we call it the death of the ego or the separate self. What has to die is our sense of separateness, because what goes with separateness is superiority. Once we define ourselves according to our nationality, culture, religion, or identity, then we feel we have to defend each one of those. What a waste of energy! We sink to scolding and blaming; not just are we “number one,” but everybody else is a second-class citizen.

That’s how dualistic our thoughts become. When the private ego didn’t die, Christianity even made salvation into a victory trip, thinking we knew who “won.” To undergo the sign of Jonah feels like losing, and by worldly standards, it looks like it, too. The sign of Jonah is a symbol of surrender, of letting go, of giving up. Most of us wouldn’t describe those as the stages of the journey of enlightenment, but they’re much closer to the real truth and the real journey.

Excellent article on the art and iconography of the Jonah story:
Resurrecting The Body and Saving The City – Orthodox Arts Journal
https://orthodoxartsjournal.org/jonah/

Unknown Artisan: Jonah And The Sea Monster, mosaic, Early 4th century AD, Aquileia, Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta.

08/07/2025

Our Lady of the Flood
By Alison Pelegrin

Lady, is that you, with a citronella halo,
ghosting the mud-milk waters
with a laundry basket of kittens in one arm?
You are no mythic Saint Medard, sheltered
from rain beneath an eagle’s wing,
but a hands-on angel of the earthly kind—
sweaty, with a burden of buckets and bleach,
surefooted through labyrinths of debris.
You take meals in church parking lots,
thankful for whatever is served.
Some saints are untouchable behind glass,
but you ride in open boats
with mildew on the hem of your gown,
a calm commander of the Cajun Navy’s fleet.
Your devotees worship outside
in a circle of ruined pews,
no incense but bug spray, their voices
a capella because the music of the drowned piano
is too sad to sing to. They remain faithful
because you are the one constant,
honored in front gardens and kitchen shrines.
You with your shrimp boots and rubber gloves—
without flinching you lead and they follow,
walking on water to the safety of each other.

Alison Pelegrin was born and raised in New Orleans. She received an MFA from the University of Arkansas. (Louisiana, August 2016)

Camp Mystic was built in 1926, before the National Flood Insurance Act (NFIA) of 1968 regulations went into effect. It was “grandfathered” as a preexisting structure. The suddenness of the disaster at Camp Mystic is starkly illustrated by data from a gauge on the Guadalupe River near Kerrville. The gauge surged from less than two feet to more than 34 feet in just over an hour on July 4.

Between August 11 and August 15, 2016 more than 3 times the amount of rainfall from Hurricane Katrina fell in a massive rainstorm, mostly over Southern Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico
Why was the Louisiana Flood of August 2016 so severe? – LSU Law Center: Climate Change Law and Policy Project

FEMA – The 100 Year Flood Myth
https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/blog/AGENCY-The-100-Year-Flood-Myth.pdf

“We are reaching communities that are almost impossible to reach by car — the destruction of roads and bridges make it very difficult to reach,” Chef José told Anderson Cooper in an interview not long after Hurricane Helene made landfall in North Carolina. Image: World Central Kitchen

04/07/2025

🇺🇸 HAPPY 🇺🇸 FOURTH OF JULY 🇺🇸
It’s our nation’s birthday, and we are almost 250 years old. That’s a grand milestone for a democracy, so let’s keep our project safe from the forces within and without which would derail this great train that’s brought us on this journey together to this place. There’s room for everyone, and a chicken in every pit, as the politicians of old used to promise! I wish all of you a chilled potato salad and all your fingers still on your hands after playing with the fireworks 🧨! God bless America and all who serve her cause of freedom!🇺🇸❤️

01/07/2025

God's Hidden Language
By Henri Nouwen

Our difficult and now urgent task is to realize that nature is not a possession to be conquered but a gift to be received with respect and gratitude. Only when we make a deep bow to the rivers, oceans, hills, and mountains that offer us a home—only then can they become transparent and reveal to us their real meaning. All of nature conceals great secrets that cannot be revealed if we do not listen carefully and patiently to God's hidden language.

“For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bo***ge to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.”

—Romans 8: 19-21

South African Tourism: Johannesburg, South Africa; Drakensberg Mountains, Drakensberg Mountains, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The uKhahlamba-Drakensberg mountain range is the highest in South Africa and offers incredible natural beauty and a wealth of recreational activities. Because of its range of plant life and the richest collection of San rock paintings in Africa, it has been declared a World Heritage Site. In Zulu the range is known as uKhahlamba, meaning 'barrier of spears', which does justice to its dramatic basalt buttresses. Early settlers called it the Drakensberge, because they believed it resembled a dragon's back.

25/06/2025

Cold Salad for Hot Weather
I’m staying cool and inside with tuna salad on baby spinach and a cold Brussels sprouts and tomato appetizer topping. Veggies are hydrating! Plus they are pretty!