The good thing about making an apple pie is that it provides time to think.  Today I am baking for our yearly parish gathering.  In fact, five hundred volunteers are busy doing whatever they must do to make this huge family homecoming a success.  That is why I am standing here, in the kitchen at 6 a.m. rolling out crust for apple pies.  Yesterday afternoon the grocery clerk looked at the bags of apples on the checkout counter and said, “You must really like apples.”  When I told her they were for pies she wanted to know “How many?”  “Nine,” I replied.  “How long will that take?”  She asked and I began to get the feeling that making one apple pie might be outside her realm of experience.  “Not too long,” I said.  It’s easy if you assemble the ingredients in batches.  Make all the crust the night before.  Store it in small batches in the refrigerator.  The next morning, make a batch of filling large enough for three pies.  While those bake, make the filling for the next three.  Three triple batches of filling will give you nine pies.   

There are plenty of recipes for pie, and none of them tell you the things you really need to know.  Pie has to be made slowly, carefully, allowing time and space to think about other things.  The recipe always says to make the crust with cold water.  They don’t tell you to put ice cubes in a large glass of water and let it get cold enough to almost frost the measuring spoon.  Crust recipes seldom say to handle the dough as little as possible, nor do they tell you to put some muscle behind the rolling pin to make a crust so thin you can hold it up and see daylight on the other side.  No recipe tells you to mix an extra recipe of dough to make sure you will have enough for a fancy edge around the top.  Cinnamon goes in the filling, but throwing in a pinch of cloves and nutmeg will sharpen the flavor.  Recipes won’t tell you how to make a little foil sleeve to cover the rim before you put pies in the oven, or that you must keep large sheets of foil handy to spread over the tops of the pies the last 20 minutes of baking.  In fact, recipes never tell you most of what you need to know to make a really good apple pie.

That’s the way it is with making a home.  There are tons of shows on TV to tell people how to decorate a house, or how to buy furniture and accessories.  Shows today even explore all kinds of ways to create a family, from finding a mate, to how to have a great wedding and how to straighten out bratty kids or how to organize a home.  We even have plenty of shows telling us how to manage money and cook a great meal. 

What we never talk about is how to have a home that feeds the spirit.  What about prayer around the edges, love in the middle and discipline to do things right?  Five hundred years ago men of science used alchemy to try to find a way to turn lead into gold.  Today, turning common apples into pies or making a house into a home that will nourish the spirit are skills that have become as elusive as turning lead into gold.