A few months ago, as a friend was trying to help me navigate through the choppy waters of final year, they observed that food seems to have played a significant role in my life decisions thus far. How did I choose my Cambridge College, Christ’s? I’m afraid it wasn’t its unique circular front lawn, or even its #1 academic ranking (I promise I didn’t know!), but the biscuits they provided at Open Day; the logic of my teenage self was that if they could keep me fed and watered on a sweltering July afternoon, they could probably do it for the next four years of my life.
And how about my Year Abroad destination? Well, Kaffee und Kuchen. Schnitzel. Sachertorte. Vienna, obviously. And you’d only need to have dropped by one evening at my student home last year, the smell of banana bread wafting up the stairwell and my flatmates expending more effort preparing for Sunday brunch than for their university seminars, to know that the way to my heart is clearly through my stomach.
Around the time of this conversation, two things happened: the liturgical season of Lent got underway, and doughnuts started appearing. I’m not going to go into the details of this past Lent, which would make for a pretty turbulent ride of a blog post, and conveniently focus on the latter instead. I’d had doughnuts on my mind since noticing that one of my favourite books as a child was Alexander McCall Smith’s ‘The Doughnut Ring’, in which a boy named Jim writes a letter to three friends asking them for doughnuts, and asking them to do the same, until Jim has doughnuts of all sizes and shapes arriving from all over the world, so many that he eventually has to set up shop.
In the very niche way I think through big ideas, I’d realised that this in fact was the perfectly analogy for what is termed ‘spiritual multiplication’; the idea that if one person intentionally invested in a handful of friends, and they all did the same, after the cycles within one lifetime they could effectively reach more people than a super-evangeliser, like Pope Francis.
But more on him later.
Back to the doughnuts, which, for the record, I hadn’t had all year until a friend turned up with a box for breakfast. And then when another friend turned up with another box for study snacks. Sainsbury’s bakery section, but doughnuts, nevertheless. Then Fr Matthew, the wonderful American Priest-in-residence in Cambridge, ventured further afield to Krispy Kreme, where he was given two boxes for free after explaining they were for hungry students helping out with a charitable endeavour at the Chaplaincy. Probably helps if you’re dressed in a Carmelite habit too. At this point I had eaten more doughnuts in a week than I had all year, and began to joke to my friends that God was sending me hints about my future through doughnuts.
I'm not making this up...
The thing about the doughnuts was that they were always free, thoughtfully provided for me, and in abundance; in a very profound sense, I felt that in the midst of a very Lenten Lent, through the doughnuts and the friends who brought them, God was surprising me and reminding me of His personal love for me. It reminded me of an American Catholic YouTube video (not Fr Mike Schmitz) I’d come across last year and so decided to watch again – amusingly, the first thing that popped up on my feed as I tried to pull up the video was a Tab article promoting the free doughnuts Crosstown Cambridge were giving out the following morning.
The video is the effervescent Beth Davis from the Catholic women’s apostolate Blessed is She talking about the Lent where she felt God was asking her to an eat an orange each day, and how for all of that Lent, without fail, an orange would turn up – carefully placed in her letterbox, a box in the neighbour’s yard. She speaks of her struggle with trusting that God would provide and follow through with the oranges, and how she began to be expectant. And so, the next day, I woke up with expectant hope. And a desire for doughnuts.
That evening we went to Five Guys – I admit, walking straight into an American fast-food chain was probably not fair conditions for a controlled experiment - and my friend Clara and I decided to share a milkshake. She asked for a spare empty cup, but the guy behind the counter just smiled and made another milkshake, which she brought back to the table, and grinning, handed over to me. At this point of the blog you probably think I have finally and fully lost the plot, but if not, maybe you’ll try and see what I saw. Through the milkshake, I saw that God not only cared for me but took delight in me, He had not forgotten about silly little me struggling through my essays in Cambridge, and that His love for me was not simply a portion of what He gives, halved between Clara and I, but was a full cup for each of us. No doughnuts, but as is often the case, something greater and more generous, more unexpected than we could have ever envisioned.
At this point I was making jokes about ‘discernment through doughnuts’ and didn’t really know how we could top the milkshake story. God however clearly had a better idea. Cue the family holiday to Malta where Pope Francis turned up. As the shopfront in the back of the photo says, ‘EPIC’ indeed.
It is therefore with great joy and excitement that I can say that my next adventure will, like the doughnuts, be a hol(e)y American treat, and feature working for Papa Francesco and the Church. And just for the record, before you think doughnuts are entirely responsible for this, I did have to go through an application process. So if all goes to plan, I’ll be hopping over the pond and taking a bite from the Big Apple. I’ll be interning for the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations in New York, which is even more of a mouthful than those doughnuts. If you'd like to know more about this and how you might support me in this adventure, do shoot me a message!
It's time to put the Postcards from Vienna aside, leave behind the brief interlude Writing Essays in Cambridge, and head for the concrete jungle, where dreams, and hopefully doughnuts, are made (of).
Life with Christ is a wonderful adventure, do-nut be afraid.
See y’all soon!
Anna
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