The Story Behind the Dish:

The problem with me is that the quickest emotional shortcut to “feeling better,” which is never more amorphous than when I am upset, is the one-two punch of food and permission. Lent, coming as it does immediately after deep winter, usually finds me several steps down from my best self, sad and anxious, craving desperately not only something rich and soothing to eat, but also the relief of letting myself have it when, for some reason, I shouldn’t. When I was a relatively strict vegan, this was best accomplished by purchasing macaroni and real-cheese or several people’s worth of Indian food when my bank account was already very low: a reprieve from the mental energy of both ethics and fiscal responsibility, plus the undefeated combinations of dairy and refined carbohydrates. As a rule I entered Lent broke and out of sorts, fundamentally undernourished.

The point of this soup is to be good enough to soothe, worth the time it takes to make it (but that time better not be too long), and made up of mostly pantry staples. It’s vegan unless you use heavy cream, which I have never done and don’t really think would be better than coconut milk, but what people keep on hand varies. It comes together quickly. Lentils are good for you. It’s a rich, bright color and tastes like a lot of things but not like a compromise. It is the kind of soup that, once you get over the kicking and screaming because what you really want is to fire up your delivery service of choice and order palakh paneer and chana masala and baingan bharta and naan and also a huge platter of macaroni and cheese and never pay rent again, is a warm and gentle touch to the hurt and mad part of you that thinks blowing things up is what you really want, but is wrong. 

The point of Lent, I think, is in some way to make the absolute unsustainability of getting-what-you-want-as-succor painfully clear. Our needs—for a sense of agency and meaning, for nourishment of body and spirit—are real, but our desires are disordered, and the satisfaction we get from fulfilling desires over needs is simply licking chapped lips. The discipline of saying no to ourselves is not, ideally, self-flagellation. It is pulling the plug on familiar noise in order to hear a much deeper and more lasting yes: the yes that is the most bedrock way that God relates to us, the yes of sins forgiven, needs met, weakness held, spirits really and truly fed. The rush, as it were, of living water which, having drunk it, we will never be thirsty again.

Human beings live, by and large, in deserts of our own making, individually and collectively. To take forty-odd days to sojourn in Almighty God’s desert seems from the outside to be an unacceptable addition of hardship. But it is there that we are actually fed.

Also, the soup is good.