Let's talk about food: The apple wasn't the problem

[Cranach the Elder, 16th c]

If we're going to talk about food, we need to start with theology. Before chocolate was invented, a snake put "sinfully delicious" and "decadent" on the menu. Somebody fell for the marketing ploy, and we've had a complicated relationship with food ever since.

We've also had a complicated relationship with sex, and with siblings, and with weapons of mass destruction. It's all there in Genesis (where the WMDs are swords). And pretty soon, right-thinking people started coming up with rules to keep people from doing bad things. You can have sex with this person but not that one. You really shouldn't deceive, sell, or kill your brother. Beat your swords into plowshares.

The rules helped to restrain bad guys, and they gave would-be good guys some helpful pointers. Still, there were plenty of bad guys to go around, and good guys could get pretty anal about what other people should or shouldn't do. Anyway, it's obvious that you don't create a good marriage simply by avoiding sex with the wrong person, and you don't have a pleasant Thanksgiving dinner simply by not killing your siblings, and you don't banish war simply by wiping out as many weapons as possible. The rules are helpful--adultery, fratricide, and genocide are really bad ideas--but if you want a Peaceable Kingdom, you're going to need more than rules.

Same with food. We have a food problem all right: famine, starvation, and food insecurity in some places; morbid obesity, addictions, and eating disorders in others; and everywhere an amazing increase in diseases exacerbated by eating badly. So of course we have come up with rules: Cut back on fat. Cut back on salt. Avoid sugar. Avoid carbs. Eat low-glycemic index carbs. Eat less meat. Eat no meat. Count calories. Eat your vegetables. Eat organic. Eat local.

Some of our rules are nonsense, and some exist so snakes can sell more products. But many--such as Michael Pollan's famous "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants"--are excellent. Trouble is, though some of us follow the rules (sometimes with the result of improving our own health but sometimes to the point of obnoxious self-righteousness), the world still has a major food problem. In fact, it seems to be getting worse.

So here's the theology, which may sound vaguely familiar to people who have read St. Paul's letter to the Romans:

• Food is good, though the world has a serious problem with it.
• Rules for healthy eating are good, though nobody follows them perfectly.
• Even if we followed food rules to the letter, we would not solve the world's food problem.
• We need a whole new way of thinking about food: one that emphasizes celebration, hospitality, and sacrament.
• Then we can just forget about the rules, right?
• Wrong. Many of the rules are excellent in their place; they just aren't capable of restoring paradise.
• Only celebration, hospitality, and sacrament can do that.

This Sunday at St B's midhour, we'll talk about food as celebration. Next Sunday, September 29, we'll look at food as hospitality. October 6, we'll discuss food as sacrament. We probably won't talk about food rules at all.

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This is part of a series of short posts especially for people who attend St Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, IL, where I'll be leading conversations about food on September 22, September 29, and October 6. I'll post about food every weekday between September 16 and October 4.

The Story of Stuff: a study guide

A year and a half ago, Annie Leonard released The Story of Stuff, a 20-minute video about the dangers of over-consumption. It "has become a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation," Leslie Kaufman wrote in Sunday's New York Times: "So far, six million people have viewed the film at its site, storyofstuff.com, and millions more have seen it on YouTube. More than 7,000 schools, churches and others have ordered a DVD version, and hundreds of teachers have written Ms. Leonard to say they have assigned students to view it on the Web."

Critics object to the video's negative portrayal of big business, inaccuracies, and oversimplification. Even if you agree with Leonard’s main point—that we buy far too much, and that this is bad for us, for others, and for the earth—you may find the video unnecessarily confrontational.

Like it or not, chances are your kids (friends, relatives, coworkers) are going to watch this video, and it may come soon to a church near you. Stick with it, even if the first three minutes appall you. Leonard raises issues that Christians are already discussing (see, for example, the discussion of fair trade at the Ten Thousand Villages web site) and that we need to talk more about with our kids. For example:

• Let’s assume that some businesses do operate for the benefit of humankind and the earth. How do these businesses care for the environment? What are their policies on work hours? Wages? Health benefits? Child labor? The products they make? The way they market their products?
• Can a business care for the environment and its employees and still make a profit?
• How much of my identity is related to things I buy? Which of my purchases have made me happier? Am I happier today because of anything I bought last year?
  

My parish offers a two-year class in church history, and today we read an encyclical letter, “On the Development of Peoples,” written by Pope Paul VI in 1967. Noting that justice “calls for great generosity, willing sacrifice and diligent effort,” he made the discussion personal:

• Are we “prepared to support, at [our] own expense, projects and undertakings designed to help the needy?
• [Are we] prepared to pay higher taxes so that public authorities may expand their efforts in the work of development?
• [Are we] prepared to pay more for imported goods, so that the foreign producer may make a fairer profit?”

After thinking about these questions for a while, read the New Testament letter of James. It sounds like it was written directly to us.

Creators of the flesh

Though I am not Jewish, I have a wonderful rabbi. Here's what he tells me about praying for the sick:

Whenever we pray for a sick person we say, "May God who blessed Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, bless and heal _____, the [son or daughter] of ______." The last blank is not the father. The sick person is always referred to as the son or daughter of the mother. We invoke the mother's name. This is based on Jeremiah 31:14-19.

[Check it out: it's the passage on Rachel weeping for her children.]

And so the rabbis remark on this passage that in the end of days when it comes time to redeem Israel, God will not listen to the pleas of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses. Rather, what moves God most is the plea of Mother Rachel. This is based on the simple Jewish notion that what women and God share in common is the very custodianship of the sanctity of human flesh. Both are creators of the flesh. Men by definition are not. For that reason we pray for sick people in the name of their mother.

In case you're wondering, my rabbi is not worried about being politically correct: he's Orthodox.

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Bunny: Third week of Easter

Our garden has a new resident. The dogs are ecstatic.

The partridge and the rabbit are still sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil, whatever revolutions occur. If the forest is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which spring up afford them concealment, and they become more numerous than ever. That must be a poor country indeed that does not support a hare. Our woods teem with them both.

--Henry David Thoreau

Kaveny, Commonweal, & Complementarity

If you subscribe to Commonweal magazine, click here to read an insightful column in the March 28, 2008, issue by Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology at the University of Notre Dame, about the premises of Pope John Paul II's "new feminism." (If you aren't a subscriber, the web site probably won't let you read the article, at least not yet. Take the plunge: for 50 cents a week, you can buy yourself a regular infusion of "Religion, Politics & Culture" that far surpasses any mere blog.)

In Mulieris dignitatem (1988), John Paul defended two seemingly irreconcilable notions: the equal dignity of men and women, and the restriction of priesthood to men alone. Kaveny compares his apostolic letter with the article "Woman" from the 1912 Catholic Encylopedia and finds many similarities:

...both documents emphasize the equal dignity of women and men. Both underscore the importance of Christianity in bringing new insight and commitment to the transcendent value of women's lives. Both present the Virgin Mary as the ideal woman. Both emphasize the importance of maternal virtues for all women, not merely physical mothers. Both strongly defend a divinely ordained difference and complementarity between men and women. Consequently, both are worried about the baleful effects of blurred gender roles.

Kaveny is troubled by the conclusions drawn by the 1912 article: that women and men should not have the same vocational and educational opportunities, that women should not be directly involved in politics or even have the right to vote. John Paul did not share those restrictive views, she acknowledges, but we "don't know why he didn't. We know only that the premises of his anthropological argument are virtually identical to those in the encyclopedia."

"Complementarity" sounds good at first. "God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27). If the divine is best reflected by males and females together, not just males or just females, isn't it then obvious that each gender contributes something that the other does not?

Complementarity, however, can be used to exclude as well as to include. To John Paul, complementarity meant that only men can be priests, just as only women can be mothers. But complementarity could also mean that, just as a whole family includes both a father and a mother, a whole priesthood includes both male and female priests.

Wouldn't such a complementary priesthood be a more faithful reflection of God's image, which is male and female, than is today's all-male Catholic priesthood--few of whom have even had the normal male experience of being a husband and a father?

Come Be My Light

I have begun reading the controversial book about Mother Teresa’s struggles, Come Be My Light (Doubleday, 2007). The author, Brian Kolodiejchuk, MC, sets her private writings in their historical, religious, and biographical context. His description of the mystical tradition of interior darkness, especially as described by the sixteenth-century saint John of the Cross, is both accurate and troubling. Here are some excerpts about “the painful purifications one undergoes before reaching union with God”:

They are accomplished in two phases: the “night of the senses” and the “night of the spirit.” In the first night one is freed from attachment to sensory satisfactions and drawn into the prayer of contemplation....

Having passed through the first night, one may then be led by God into the “night of the spirit,” to be purged from the deepest roots of one’s imperfections. A state of extreme aridity accompanies this purification, and one feels rejected and abandoned by God. The experience can become so intense that one feels as if heading toward eternal perdition....Prayer is difficult, almost impossible; spiritual counsel practically of no avail; and various exterior trials may add to this pain. By means of this painful purification, the disciple is led to total detachment from all created things and to a lofty degree of union with Christ, becoming a fit instrument in His hands and serving Him purely and disinterestedly. (22–23)

I find it hard to reconcile this kind of mysticism with an incarnate God who is the source and redeemer of “created things.” But perhaps I am misreading “total detachment.”

Mother Teresa did not try to escape created things. She did not reject the physical world in favor of spiritual experience. Her lifelong ministry to the poorest of the poor plunged her into more physical reality than most of us could bear.

Midlife sensory banquet

On our recent trip to see relatives in Arizona, I was frequently reminded of the different ways people take in information. According to the MBTI, people tend to be Sensors or Intuitives. Sensors gather information through their five senses. They are alert, observant, curious, often detail oriented. They are not likely to trip and fall over the coffee table simply because their housemate rearranged the living room—they go through life with their eyes open, living in the moment.

Intuitives, by contrast, seem to spend more time in the romantic past or imagined future than in the present. The visible world is, for them, a launching pad for theories, inventions, schemes, interpretations, ideas, brainstorms, patterns, theologies, impressions, connotations, imagination, dreams, possibilities . . . and with all of that buzzing in their brains, no wonder they occasionally forget to come in out of the rain.

If the human person is a combination of earth and spirit, the Sensor is likely to pay more attention to earth, the Intuitive to spirit. My husband and I and both our daughters lean toward spirit, while most of our relatives are solidly earth-based. We listened in awe last week as they talked extremely knowledgeably about minerals, gems, fossils, photovoltaic cells, cacti, reservoirs, beer making, jewelry design, energy conservation, rare birds, rock polishers, and on and on. These people see what’s in front of them, understand it, and know what to do with it.

As one relative, recently married into the tribe, said (referring to several cousins who are artisans and inventors): “Creativity runs in the family.” Then, turning to David, she asked, “Are you creative?”

I was startled. As a person with Intuitive leanings, I tend to think of creativity as relating to ethereal pursuits. A novelist is creative, as is an artist. David, a journalist and a musician, is creative in several areas. But unlike his creative cousins, he doesn’t often make things that can be seen, held, and manipulated, so a Sensor may not immediately see his creativity. Similarly, an Intuitive may not immediately see the creativity of the person who enjoys finding rocks, splitting them, and polishing their inner surfaces to reveal layers of sparkling color.

Sensors and Intuitives open up and enrich each other’s experience. This is especially true after age 40 or so, when Sensors get more interested in possibilities and Intuitives begin noticing the physical world. My metamorphosis began when, 20 years ago, an interior designer pointed out the flame stitch on a chair’s upholstery. Before then, I noticed whether a chair was red or blue, and I could tell the difference between leather and cloth or solid and floral. The flame stitch, however, was a revelation. Suddenly I began seeing it everywhere. I fell in love with it. I even started noticing other differences in texture and design.

The sensory banquet soon expanded to include food as well as upholstery. The girl who hated to cook started turning into the woman who enjoyed experimenting with taste and color combinations at the table. Every time my aged mother would come to dinner, she would look at her plate and say, “I can’t believe it. I never thought you’d be able to do this.”

Eventually I started noticing things my Sensor friends had known all their lives: for instance, that a dog is a much better companion if you train it and bathe it, or that a house can look really good if you put things away when you’re done using them.

Being an Intuitive, I’m not really sure what Sensors start discovering at midlife. I’m sure they have every bit as much fun as we Intuitives do. Maybe even more, since we keep can’t help thinking about the Next Big Thing, whereas they know how to savor the moment. All of us, though, can find joy in the improbable recipe for the human person. We are earth, and we are spirit, each ingredient equally vital to our humanity.

Multinational minerals

.This is a row of bowls made from polished stone. They are so thin as to be translucent, and the sun reflects off them as if they were made of water.

We are in Tucson, and today we walked through booth after booth at the annual gem and mineral show. My father-in-law and his wife love rocks--gems, though they don't wear jewelry; fossils, though they don't believe in evolution. They just love to look at, hold, and sometimes own beautiful things.

They are not alone. People come to this show from all over the world, some to sell, some to buy. One year we bought amber from Poland; the next year, garnets from Alaska. This year we didn't buy anything, but we admired rubies from Thailand and Myanmar. The bowls in the picture were made in India.

Clarification on the virgin birth

I did not mean to imply in the previous post that Leo I invented the doctrine of the virgin birth as a way for Jesus to avoid original sin. Christians believed in the virgin birth a long time before Leo. I meant that Leo joined his belief in the sexual transmission of original sin to his belief in the virgin birth in order to show how Christ could be fully human, yet without sin.

Belief in the virgin birth of Jesus is older than belief in the sexual transmission of original sin. The virgin birth shows that Jesus' birth is even more miraculous than those of other angel-announced babies: Samson, Samuel, John the Baptist.

I think the virgin birth also links Jesus' birth to the creation of the world.

Just as Adam was created from dust and spirit, Jesus was made from a human mother and the Holy Spirit. Just as Eve was drawn out of Adam's side, Jesus was born from Mary's womb.

Christ has often been called the second Adam. St. Paul came up with the idea: see Romans 5:12-21; 1 Corinthians 15:22-23. The virgin birth is one way of showing that Jesus, like Adam, "is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation" (Colossians 1:15).

Looking for an ancient godly gourmand[e]

In the Hebrew Bible, the material creation is good.
According to ancient Hebrew stories, God made a world, "saw all that he had made, and found it very good" (Genesis 1:31). He made plants that were beautiful as well as delicious (2:9) and gave them to the first humans as food. He created love and sex: "The Lord God said, "It is not good for man to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him" (2:18). He told the primal pair to enjoy each other: "Be fertile and increase" (1. 29). And Adam's lyrical response to Eve (2:23) leaves no doubt about his attitude: "This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh."

In the earliest Christian tradition, God became part of the good material creation.
When the good world was broken, according to ancient Christian stories, the God who created the world came up with a way to re-create it. The creative Word "became flesh and lived among us." Jesus, said the creeds, was "true God," "one in Being with the Father." He also "became man," a man who turned water into wine--gallons of it--so a wedding feast could continue, a man whose enemies called him "a glutton and a drunkard" (Matthew 11:19).

The ancient Hebrews, like today's Jews, had a healthy attitude about bodily pleasures. The ancient Christians went one better--their God became a human being and earned a reputation as one who appreciated a good party. So here's my question--

Whatever happened?
Why did so many Christians quickly switch from enjoyment and thanksgiving to abstemiousness and guilt? Why did some early monastics think they were honoring the Creator when they shunned the company of others and gave up most food, all sex, and even clothing and shelter? Why did a great saint, Jerome, write, "I praise wedlock, I praise marriage; but it is because they produce virgins"? Why did a greater saint, Augustine, believe he had to be "continent," that is, to give up marriage and sex, in order to follow Christ? Why are there so few married people on the list of Catholic saints, even post-Vatican II saints?

I'm looking for an early Christian writer who praises creation, affirms marriage, revels in beauty, delights in good food, and gives thanks to God--without adding, even in small print, that forsaking all these things is even more admirable than enjoying them.