![]() ![]() It may not win any beauty contests, but I promise it will win you over. The meat is tangy, with a hint of pickling spice, while the gingersnaps add just the right sweetness and spice to the rich gravy. ![]() It may sound a little odd – marinating meat in so much vinegar and using cookies in the gravy, but it works perfectly and will make total sense when you first taste it. But my father once requested that I make it, so I tinkered and learned until, after a couple of tries, I got it just the way he wanted it. I’ll admit, I don’t know much about German food. Sauerbraten is a classic German dish, or so I am told. And perfect for an Oktoberfest celebrations! It’s a warming and comforting Sunday night supper, or marinate during the week for a wonderful weekend feast. Spiced, seasoned and slow cooked, it will make you house smell like autumn and it is a great weekend cooking project. The first signs of fall are just beginning to show, so my mind turns to hearty, meaty meals with bold flavors, and this recipe fits the bill perfectly. Over the summer we’ll consider other reparations issues and locales.Building community is hard work, but it might be the fulcrum that lets us balance looking back and moving forward. Treating people well comes with thinking of them that way.Having achieved this, the entire community experiences abundance, “like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.” It earns the name “repairer of the breach” and can “build the old waste places.”If today’s debate over reparations builds community, that sounds like progress to me, whatever decision is reached.Today’s issue, dedicated to reparations, looks at slavery, forced assimilation, and territorial dispossession – in the United States, Barbados, and Canada. And behind those good actions, Isaiah indicates, are good attitudes – compassion and humility. People feed the hungry, free the oppressed, undo heavy burdens. ![]() We have to move forward, somehow. To try to understand what might promote that, I turned to the world’s most-read book, the Bible. This phrase in Isaiah 58 piqued my interest: “repairer of the breach.”Here, the repairer isn’t a carpenter or mason but a caring community. That’s what researchers working with Saint Louis University are doing to learn about those enslaved by Jesuits at the school.Yet no amount of looking back can recompense historical harms. We can’t go back and undo the horrors of the middle passage or the sundering of families at slave auctions.What restoration is possible centuries later?A first step can be looking back and taking an honest accounting of the past. That’s where the hard work happens to restore, renew, make whole. But the shorter word it comes from – repair – strikes me as even bigger.As a noun, reparations suggests that a decision has been reached about concrete actions to redress past wrongs. As a verb, repair is a process. ![]()
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