Friends,
Four years ago, my wife, Anne, gave me an olive tree which I planted in the back yard of the manse, and I waited to see if any fruit would set on the branches. The first year there were no olives. I believe I harvested 28 olives in the second year. The third year my yield was maybe twelve olives. This year, however, I picked more than a quart of fruit, which means that I finally have enough olives to brine and to eat, something that hardly happens overnight.
My olives came off the tree during the first week of January and I brined them for five weeks, changing the salted water every Thursday until the fruit lost its bitterness. Then I marinaded the olives—some in olive oil, vinegar, coriander, cumin, chili de arbol and garlic, and lemon peel, and others in olive oil, garlic, oregano chili de arbol and a bay leaf—and now I’m enjoying them. The cumin/coriander ones are better, but both are really good.
They are not, however, perfect. I’m already making notes and plans for how to improve the process for next year, but I had to prune my tree fairly significantly after my harvest, so I may not get much fruit next year. I hope the 2023 harvest is abundant, but I doubt it will be. If everything goes as I expect it to, my next batch of improved olives will be ready to enjoy in February of 2024, which means that what I hope will be my first truly excellent olives will be ready to eat six years after we planted our olive tree.
Six years is a long time to wait for antipasto, but I think my quest for excellent olives has helped me to slow down a bit and to live according to the rhythms of creation, which includes the important work of acknowledging both the goodness of what I’ve done (my current olives are quite good) and all of the possibilities for improvement (I cannot wait till the next harvest!). This, I think, is what it means to live by the Holy One’s calendar.
It has been good for me to work with olives because from time to time I need to be reminded that it’s ok for some things to take a long time. This is especially important for me during this seemingly-endless COVID pandemic. As much as I am eager to relegate the coronavirus to the archives of memory, I know now that it can take longer to make a truly excellent batch of olives than it takes for society to move past a viral pandemic. Still, people have been making excellent olives for thousands of years, and we’ve been overcoming adversity for at least that long. In the fullness of Holy Time, we’ll be eating olives without needing to take our masks off first.
The other thing I want to say about my olives is that as the storm clouds of war have been gathering in Eastern Europe, it has been good for me to be so deeply connected to a fruit and a tree that are symbols of peace. I’ve been trying to pray for peace while interacting with my olives—changing the brining solution, marinading them, and now eating them. I have found olives to be an important reminder that even as humans seem unable to resist the urge to kill each other and to destroy each other’s land and livelihoods, still, the Creator has given us reminders that peace is possible and necessary. It may be quicker to wage war than to cultivate peace (or prepare olives) but still, peace is possible. It is a divine gift we can enjoy together if we are attentive to all the ways we can improve ourselves, and if we are patient as we take the time to make the improvement come to pass.
Anyway, if you like olives, be sure to get some olives and eat them knowing they are a gift from God, a delicious morsel that has taken years to get to your table. And as you enjoy your olives, please join me in praying for peace.
God’s Peace,
Ben
P.S. Here is a photo of some of my Really Very Good but Not Quite Perfect Olives.