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A Stir Fry, a Stomach Ache, and a Sermon

A Stir Fry, a Stomach Ache, and a Sermon

Last updated on: January 13, 2025 at 12:56 am by Mary Pezzulo

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A Stir Fry, a Stomach Ache, and a Sermon 2025-01-13T00:56:01-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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A dish of chicken stir fry with noodles

image via Pixabay

It started with a chicken stir fry.

I am very good at reading labels. I have to be. But this package wasn’t labeled. The grocery store had donated all their soon-to-expire meat to the wonderful little food pantry in town for a tax break. We were having a bad week, so I went to the pantry and came home with the stir fry, whose label must have fallen off somewhere in the great big meat freezer. I saw the discount price tag but not the ingredient label. It looked like the case contained nothing but raw chicken with too many bell peppers and onions.

I fried up the stir fry for Adrienne’s dinner, wondering who would sell pre-cut raw chicken already combined with frozen vegetables. I always put the vegetables in after the chicken is cooked, personally, so they won’t turn into mush. The mixture I was cooking smelled strongly of something I thought was the badly overcooked bell peppers.

I took a taste of the chicken before I put the gluten free tamari sauce on. There was a strong flavor to match the smell, but I couldn’t quite place what it was. I ate another piece without realizing what I’d done.

It had been more than a decade since I’d tasted regular soy sauce. I realized, all in a moment and far too late, that the two bites of chicken I’d just eaten were marinated in soy sauce. The peppers had been so brown because they had soy sauce as well.

Soy sauce is not gluten free.

I ran to the sink to rinse my mouth, but it was too late.

The next thing I did was gaslight myself.

I don’t know why I did that. But I know that many people with food sensitivities will do the same thing. The first wave, after performing every possible triage to mitigate the reaction, is to gaslight yourself. “Maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe my allergies have changed. Maybe I was allergic to something else all along. Maybe I was exaggerating for attention when I used to get sick all the time.”

I have been sick with one thing or another my entire life. I have been in pain an awful lot of the time. I have been told it’s all in my head or I must be exaggerating for attention more often than I can name. When I was a child and had to walk around on a broken ankle because my parents said it was only sprained. When I was screaming in pain from the bowel obstruction that had yet to be diagnosed. When I was in arrested labor from all the poisonous herbal tinctures those vile abusive midwives had given me, and another midwife claimed my labor wasn’t progressing because I just didn’t want my baby. When I was adamant that the amenorrhea and secondary fertility wasn’t just me psyching myself into it somehow, before the PCOS was diagnosed. All the times my mother called me a drama queen and a hypochondriac. I’ve screamed that I was sick and not been believed, again and again.

Maybe I just made up the whole gluten sensitivity. Maybe I was being ridiculous and a showoff.

Of course, I wasn’t. It took until the chicken reached my large intestine, eighteen hours later. I could have drawn you a map. First I got the shaking and the anxiety attack for no apparent reason; then my feet started to tingle, and then the heartburn, and the stabbing pain right at the top of my gut. And I was sick for two days.

I’m sorry to always be writing about being sick. But I don’t know how to be any other kind of person. The only person I have ever been is a sick person, and a traumatized Roman Catholic, and that’s the lens through which I see the world.

It’s also the lens through which I pray, and I tried to pray. I’ve been trying to pray all weekend. I even went to Mass, which can be hard with my set of challenges.

At Mass, I told God how miserable I feel lately, because I was taught to unite suffering to Him, but after the events of the past few years I’m not sure if He wants to be in union with me anymore.

It is through this lens– that of a traumatized, chronically ill Catholic with a stomach ache, sitting in the foyer at Mass because I panic if I sit in the pews– that I had the very silly notion that maybe God is a little bit like a non-celiac gluten sensitivity. In that people can gaslight you all they want, to the point where you start gaslighting yourself, but the truth of the matter does not change. God remains real. What God is doesn’t depend on what we think of God. God just goes on being God.

That’s all I have for you just now. God is God, and the wonderful things that you know about God are real– even if somebody has abused you into thinking you made them up.

That, and do be careful of unlabeled chicken. Gluten can lurk in all kinds of places.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to “The Little Portion” on paypal or Mary Pezzulo on venmo

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