Food

l o g o s

Yale’s Under gr aduate Jour nal of Chr istian Thought

food

Volume 11 . Issue i Fall 2020

on the issue MISSION

λ ο γ ο ς is Greek for “word.” The disciple John used logos as an epithet for Jesus, invoking language as an image of incarnation, the Word made flesh. In Christianity, Logos became personal. Because Christ clothed himself in flesh, he became a life giving light to us, revealing the truth of all things. The Yale Logos takes on this name because our mission is also personal and incarnational. We believe that by loving Christ and our fellow learners passionately, with our whole heart, soul, and minds, we align ourselves with Yale’s pursuit of truth and light.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Logos receives funding from the Yale University Undergraduate Organizations Funding Committee and from Christian Union Lux. The Logos team gratefully acknowledges the support of the Elm Institute, Dr. Norman Wirzba, and the coaches and members of the Augustine Collective. We invite you to get to know our wonderful staff here: https://www.yalelogos.com/who-we-are.

DESIGN Photograph credits: https://tinyurl.com/FoodImageCredits.

Food Design Team: Daniel Chabeda, Bella Gamboa, Timothy Han, and Raquel Sequeira.

SUMBISSIONS & INQUIRIES yale.logos@gmail.com

ONLINE www.yalelogos.com www.facebook.com/YaleLogos Instagram @yalelogos

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letter from the editor Dear Reader, In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells a parable about a great banquet. The master and host of the banquet sends his servant to invite an initial group of guests. Everyone who was invited refuses the invitation, citing busyness and immovable commitments. The master decides instead to people his bountiful banquet with the poor, crippled, blind, and lame from the inner-city to its furthest outskirts. They feast and know goodness. Those who refused the invitation lost their ability to do so.

With the dominance of factory farming and other means of mass food production, we have forgotten the trials of a life dedicated to growing and harvesting food. Today, we hardly dedicate time exclusively to a meal. Increasingly, our default is to forgo cooking, smelling, and savoring food for the sake of convenience. We take lunch on the go or work while we eat dinner. We skip meals. The everyday of eating too often leads to passivity of consumption, and in that passivity food––sacred and symbolic in many cultures––is reduced to a mere chore. As a result, we miss the joy, nourishment, and community that comprise the fullness of the experience of eating.

The staff of The Yale Logos is excited to serve the Food issue to you. Food is a meditation, undertaken alongside the reader, on the formative exchange between food and our culture, food and our loved ones, food and our planet, food and the Christian faith.

Though this journal is by no means comprehensive, our hope is that this sampling begins to restore eating from an everyday task to a small, daily celebration: a celebration of the life and death required for our sustenance, the people with whom we share and to whom we serve meals, and the intelligent creativity behind a delicious bite of a well-conceived dish. Ultimately, Food is a testament to the pervasive goodness of God, which finds a form even in the smallest crumbs left on a plate.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

– J.R.R. Tolkien In Truth and Love,

Jadan Anderson Editor-in-Chief

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contents

4 . Food: Fall 2020

culture 8 8

Food Porn: A Desolate Cornucopia Sharla Moody

11 11

Consider Fruit Bradley Yam

14 14

A Taste for Transformation Raquel Sequeira

18 18

Roiling Boil Jason Lee

22 22

Investigating Hunger Hannah Turner

25 25

Depart with Dignity Ashley Talton

30 30

communion The Altar Is Not a Stage Justin Ferrugia

34 34

Richness in the Desert Bella Gamboa

37 37

Honey and Holy Men Timothy Han

40 40

Elevating Work, Prayer, and Potatoes Ally Eidemueller

42 42

Even Now He Harvests Luke Bell

46 46

Death in the Pot Shayley Martin

48 48

The Scandal of Real Food Bradley Yam

52 52

community Tasting Eden Se Ri Lee

55 55

Taste and See Shi Wen Yeo

58 58

If You Give a Man a Kit-Kat Daniel Chabeda

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6 . Food: Fall 2020

culture

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Food Porn: A Desolate Cornucopia Sharla Moody

With the inventions of television and

the internet, virtually everything can be photographed, videotaped, and uploaded for viewing and enjoyment.

In some cases, this advent has ushered in important artistic innovations, like the Golden Age of Hollywood, which produced some of the most important films and artistic endeavors in centuries. Television and the internet have served as democratizing tools, making even niche educational subjects widely accessible. Some things primarily aimed at instruction, like cooking shows, have become a television staple, and others aimed at entertainment and pleasure, like pornography, infiltrate nearly every corner of the internet. On the surface it may seem like food and pornography are the most dissimilar subjects, but Kurt Vonnegut humorously paralleled the two in his 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions: And Trout made up a new novel while he sat there. It was about an Earthling astronaut [Don] who arrived on a planet where all the animal and plant life had been killed by pollution, except for humanoids. The humanoids ate food made from petroleum and coal. [….]

They asked Don if dirty movies were a problem on Earth, too, and Don said, “Yes.” They asked him if the movies were really dirty, and Don replied, “As dirty as movies could get.” This was a challenge to the humanoids, who were sure their dirty movies could beat anything on Earth. So everybody piled into air-cushion vehicles, and they floated to a dirty movie house downtown. [….]

So the theater went dark and the curtains opened. At first there wasn’t any picture. There were

8 . Food: Fall 2020

slurps and moans from loudspeakers. Then the picture itself appeared. It was a high quality film of a male humanoid eating what looked like a pear. The camera zoomed in on his lips and tongue and teeth, which glistened with saliva. He took his time about eating the pear. When the last of it had disappeared into his slurpy mouth, the camera focussed on his Adam’s apple. His Adam’s apple bobbed obscenely. He belched contentedly, and then these appeared on the screen, but in the language of the planet: THE END. [1] While Vonnegut seems to prophesy environmental disaster that could cause a perverse, sexualized view of food, he also foretold the creation of food porn, or food media that features decadent, glamorized shots of food. The term “food porn” clearly links it to pornography, though it need not be—and is almost never—actually sexualized; rather, the comparison stems from the decadence and extravagance in food media. Videos and photos that can be categorized as food porn glut social media feeds. If you logged onto Instagram today, you’d likely encounter it at some point: a video of a seriously underbaked cookie being torn in half to reveal a deluge of melted chocolate, photos of greasy burgers stuffed with bacon and far more cheese than would taste good, chocolate shaped on a potter’s wheel to make artistic shapes and statues. They’re fun clips to watch, especially if, like me, you’re prone to procrastination.

The idea of food porn dates to 1977, when leftist journalist Andrew Cockburn wrote that “[t]rue gastro-porn heightens the excitement and also the sense of the unattainable by proffering colored photographs of various com-

pleted recipes.” [2] Today, food porn usually refers to images or videos of glamorized, overextravagant food, in a style similar to glamour photography or sexual pornography.

Other types of food media might fall under the food porn category, like mukbang, which means “eating show,” a trend that originated in South Korea. In Korean culture, eating with family is at the center of meals. With the rise of divorce, single households, and excess work, it’s become less of a reality and more an artifact of cultural history to eat together. In turn, mukbang began, “in which a person eats enormous servings of food in front of a webcam, while conversing with the people watching.” [3] On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong, per se, about food porn, though instinctively something does feel wrong about it. Aesthetic appearance is certainly of some importance to food, especially in the professional cooking world, but the primary end of food is—or should be—to be consumed. Food, after all, is produced to be eaten, to taste good, to provide our bodies with needed nutrition. We do not consume food with our eyes; we chew and digest it. While the term “culinary arts” implies an aesthetic importance, the aesthetics of appearance—rather than those that contribute to taste or smell—do not directly contribute to our enjoyment of food for its proper end, which is to be eaten.

Food is scripted to be eaten, simply because it is a thing that is made to be consumed. Food is perishable and cannot stand as a piece of art forever.

If food is to meet its primary end, it must be eaten at some point. We do not, after all, plow fields, harvest vegetables and fruit, and butcher animals simply to make a visually-pleasing dish

to sit in a gallery for a day before being emptied into the trash. We make food because we need to eat it. This will always be food’s primary purpose.

Food porn, like sexual pornography, reduces or makes us forget the stakes of what is being depicted. Food requires sacrifice. Animals are killed–– and often treated in atrocious ways in the meat industry––and countless people toil over crops, often laboring for little pay, to provide us food. When food is presented as a glamorized item chiefly to be salivated over, no consideration is given to the actual effort and work needed to provide us with sustenance. Sexual pornography, on the other hand, reduces sex to a physical act documented and viewed for the sake of voyeurism and temporary gratification. Abuses in the porn industry are well documented, but even beyond these considerations, the objectification of people into mere sexual objects strips them of personhood. [4] When we view people as instruments to be used for our pleasure, we selfishly fail to recognize people as individuals worthy of dignity, with full personhood outside of their capabilities in relation to our own utilities. Likewise, when we view food as an item to be salivated over rather than actually consumed, we strip eating of the sacrifices that make it possible: all the animals raised for slaughter, the workers who slave on farms to pick fruits and vegetables, the cook who may barely scrape by working in a restaurant. When the chief end of food becomes visual rather than edible, food ceases to exist.

Instead, what was meant to be eaten becomes an intangible flicker on a screen. Voyeurism in all forms reduces things to utilitarian items, separating personhood from people turned into sexual objects, nutrients and sacrifice from food turned into entertainment.

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Food has secondary ends, of course. I like food that tastes good. I like food that smells good. The sensory experience of eating directly correlates to our enjoyment of food. Cooking and eating have also been ritualized. Quality time with loved ones, dates with romantic partners, and celebrations are all centered around food. Food is at the center of culture and our interactions with people.

But food porn defamiliarizes food and separates it from all its natural ends.

Food in videos or photographs cannot be eaten by viewers, and it’s not always clear whether food in food porn should be eaten by anyone. Some media features obscenely greasy, overstuffed, undercooked food. In one viral video that debunked glamour shots of food, glue was drizzled around the edges of a pizza slice to give the effect of gooey mozzarella cheese, while rendering it physically unsafe to eat. Food in videos cannot be smelled or tasted, only viewed. Almost always, these videos are watched by individuals scrolling on social media, meaning there isn’t even a communal experience of watching a video with another person. This media also presents food without any context: food is removed it from the culture of its origin and packaged neatly for solitary viewers to gaze upon during their social media scrolling. Philosopher Sir Roger Scruton wrote, Eating has in every traditional society been regarded as a social, often a religious, act, embellished by ritual and enjoyed as a primary celebration of membership.

Rational beings are nourished on conversation, taste, manners and hospitality, and to divorce food from these practices is to deprive it of its true significance. [5]

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What does it mean for food to be a social media trend rather than a tool fundamental to our human needs of nourishment and community? When the nutrition and the sensory experience of eating are subjugated to the visual aesthetics of food that viewers will never consume, we convince ourselves that extravagance serves a purpose greater than that which is dictated by God and nature. A culture primed to objectify—food as well as people—trades intended goodness for commodification, reducing all that makes life meaningful into impersonal items only appreciated for their utility in immediate, temporary gratification.

When people are objectified, they are stripped of their human dignity. When we objectify food, we deprive ourselves of the dignity that comes from eating and fellowship.

Notes [1] Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions.

New York: Delacorte Press, 1973.

[2] Cockburn, Andrew. “Gastro-Porn.”

The New York Time Review of Books, 8 December 1977.

[3] Holmberg, Christopher. “Food and Social Media—A Complicated Relationship.” HuffPost, 5 May 2014, https://www. huffpost.com/entry/food-and-social-media-a-c_b_4898784.

[4] Kristof, Nicholas. “The Children of Pornhub: Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault?” The New York Times, 4 December 2020.

[5] Scruton, Roger. “Eating our Friends.”

Right Reason, 26 May 2006.

Consider Fruit Bradley Yam

In an effort to restore a sense of

optimism in these trying times, I offer a meditation on fruit. Yes––apples, pears, plums, bananas and berries aplenty. Fruits have not only fed, nourished, and pleased humankind with infinite color and variety since the beginning of history, but they have also offered wisdom that has largely been forgotten in the modern industrial food system. In other words, when you might be feeling down, there’s nothing quite like thinking about the goodness of fruit. [1] It is generally agreed in the folk wisdom of most cultures that fruits (and vegetables) are good for you. The science on this topic can hardly agree more. In various meta-analyses, fruits (and vegetables) have been shown to be good at reducing your chances of cardiovascular diseases, certain types of cancer, and even depression. [2, 3] But fruits are not only good for you, they are also good for the environment. In general, fruits grow on trees, which store carbon, help to maintain clean air, provide wildlife sanctuaries, and improve soil quality. They come in their own biodegradable, edible packaging.

Fruit by-products are often extremely useful, producing dyes, oils, textiles, insulation, and let us not forget, alcohols. They are the ultimate sustainable product and the original, millenia-old player in the “circular economy.” In fact, fruits are a key part of the plant’s reproductive process––in other words, fruits help to make more trees and also more fruits. It is no wonder that the ancients often used fruit as imagery for the sexual and romantic. [4] And, to top it all, fruits are delicious.

But fruit is not simply the bounty of nature’s cornucopia, lest we bow in idolatrous worship to Pan. Beyond the blandly-lit Stop-And-Shop fruit aisles lies a long and wondrous history

of humankind’s co-development with our fruity cultivations. Each civilization often had their own defining set of fruits that produced the unique flavours, customs and economies of the region. As with many stories (think The Odyssey), this one begins with home.

Fruit orchards were arguably the first capital-intensive goods. Unlike grains or vegetables, fruit grows on trees that often require a long period of pre-pubescence before maturity. This implies a commitment to a piece of land, often requiring its protection and constant irrigation. Some scholars posit that this may have been the genesis of territoriality, urbanism and the formation of complex societies.

Consider the date palm, the poster-boy of Mediterranean fruit. The palm itself was esteemed for its wood and leaves and longevity, but the dates that it produced were sweet and could be consumed fresh or preserved through drying or the production of jams. The palm itself is able to grow in the harshest of desert conditions as long as a steady supply of irrigated water is provided. This interesting duality gave rise to the Arab proverb describing the date with “its feet in running water and its head in the fire of the sky.” Cuneiform records from ancient Ur (where Abraham, father of many nations, originated), indicate a deep knowledge of date horticulture, even describing the process of artificial pollination and the cultivation of “male”/ staminate dates for the purposes of artificial pollination.

The fact that date horticulture required artificial pollination gave rise to an even more interesting social dynamic: probably the first recorded instance of sharecropping. The owner of the date plantations often had too many dates to pollinate by himself, so he would hire labourers to tend

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to the plantations for him. But renting out the land itself was a complex social arrangement that faced many complex questions: what would happen if the crop failed? Who owns the ploughs and the hoes (expensive capital equipment)? The legal innovations to deal with these situations were first detailed in the Code of Hammurabi, from Babylon in 1700 BCE. Sharecropping was an arrangement between the tenant farmer and the landowner that involved splitting the harvest in some ratio between the two of them, which also divided the risk. The Code of Hammurabi details how to split the payments to repair damages from natural disasters, how to split pre-harvest storm losses, and how to accurately judge a tenant farmer’s effort (from the harvest of his neighbours). [5] It was also a cooperative arrangement that incentivized both tenants and owners to not defect on their agreements to maximize the long-term gain of both parties.

Turn your attention to the olive, perhaps the most useful fruit in all of history. Like the date palm, the evergreen olive tree, one of the most fire-resistant trees in the world, is uniquely suited to its mediterranean climate. Knobbled and gnarly, olive wood is extremely hard and good for furniture. In myth, Odysseus and Penelope’s bed was made from olive wood, indeed built into an olive tree, a symbol of the immovable and unshakeable domestic foundations of their marriage. It is the most mentioned fruit (along with the grape) in the Hebrew Bible. But perhaps the most useful product of the olive is its oil, which can be used in cooking, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and medicinals, fuels for lamps and for sacred purposes such as for “anointing”, in the Jewish tradition. In Hebrew, “Christ” or “Messiah” literally translates to “the anointed one.” The

12 . Food: Fall 2020

oil is an important marker of authority and spirituality. The notion of anointing is deeply intertwined with peace, harmony and unity of the people. For example, in Psalm 133, the psalmist waxes lyrical about how good and pleasant it is when “God’s people live together in unity.” This unity is compared to the anointing of Aaron, the old chief priest of the Hebrew people.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the connection between fruit and unity can be found in the cooperative nature of olive farming. [6] In other words, the hope for the peace and unity that the Messiah is supposed to restore is evoked by the precious oil of the olive fruit cultivated by a peaceful and united community.

Like any other fruiting tree, olive trees take time to mature, between 3-12 years. For this reason, the Torah (Hebrew Law) prohibits the cutting down of fruiting trees, even in warfare. The olive tree itself grows extremely slowly, making its wood very valuable. Olive farming can yield benefits from cooperation for two reasons. First, olive yields usually increase with irrigation, irrigation being a capital and labour intensive job, usually requiring the cooperation of multiple smaller farms.

Second, olives are usually propagated via grafting, that is, taking a high-yielding olive species and grafting it onto all of the existing olive trees, thereby also making them high-yielding. Cooperation can thus increase yields by encouraging the selection of preferable traits in olive trees. Olive trees are also extremely long-lived, often being hundreds or even thousands of years old. Tradition has it that the olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane were the same trees that hung sadly over Christ in his moment of crippling, blood-dripping despair. It is no wonder then that one of the first Christian apostles, Paul, used olive tree grafting

as his central metaphor for the uniting of the Jew and Gentile cultures.

Now consider parthenocarpy. Parthenocarpy refers to a mutation that produces seedless fruits. They are often selected together with strains of fruit that are sweeter, instead of bitter or starchier. These mutations alone do not make for a viable species, simply because they cannot reproduce on their own. However, together with human cultivators and the use of offshoots, these have become some of the most successful fruit species today. Bananas and plantains fall into this category. Wild species of bananas are full of seeds and contain very little sweet flesh. By the time bananas entered into historical consciousness, they were already domesticated and exhibited parthenocarpy, but bananas found in the wild are still extremely seedy. Nature’s sweetest fruits would not be so sweet without human cultivation.

And if one were to think that fruit horticulture is a closed book, they would be mistaken. Cranberries were famously difficult to cultivate and pick because they usually grew in shrubby, thorny bushes in the middle of bogs.

However, since their introduction to the American Northeast in the 1850s, various methods of wetland cultivation have been developed. Popularized

by Thanksgiving and the purported medicinal properties for urinary tract infections, cranberries are now harvested en masse by flooding cranberry bogs and allowing the cranberries to float on top of the water, where they are then collected. Humanity continues to find new ways to cultivate and consume fruit for all their goodness.

And this is not to mention pineapples, which are really clusters of berries, or Japanese persimmons, which have preservative properties due to their high

levels of tannin, or the combinatorial varieties of citrus hybrids. Consider also the various fruit-related gift-giving cultures across the world, like how mandarins are a gift symbolizing prosperity and longevity during Chinese New Year, or how Sembikiya in Japan has popularized artisanal fruit with melons auctioning up for as much as $45,000.

If the reader at this point has obtained some relief, and perhaps some wonder, at the goodness of fruit, then this article has succeeded. But if curiosity permits the reader to wonder about why fruits are so good, they may find that this is actually a deep philosophical, almost religious inquiry. Fruits have always, in every culture, been considered the gift of the divine. It is not hard to understand why. In the very first chapter of Genesis, God proclaims “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all

the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.”

In the very last chapter of the last book of the Christian bible, in the middle of the new city, there appears again “the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2, ESV). In a time where many of us are praying for the healing of the nations, the goodness of fruit is a useful meditation, and may well lead to more fruitful meditations on the goodness of God. Notes [1] I will say, right from the beginning, that most of these wonderful bits of information were provided by the paper “The Origins of Fruits, Fruit Growing, and Fruit Breeding” by Jules Janick.

[2] Meta-analyses are academic papers that summarize the literature put out by

other papers. Each of these meta-analyses summarizes up to 100 papers at a time, giving an impressive sense of a wide breadth of literature.

[3] A good meta-meta-analysis: https:// academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/77/6/376/5474950 [4] Song of Solomon 7:8 “May your breasts be like clusters of grapes, and the fragrance of your breath like apricots.”

[5] From https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit. edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3022&context=cklawreview, it is interesting that this article also notes that the Hebrews did not seem to have a sharecropping arrangement, because it seems like they had other economic mechanisms for risk pooling, including the “bondsman redeemer” concept and community support, and the gleaning laws.

[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/ science/article/abs/pii/ S0264837716311589

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A Taste for Transformation Raquel Sequeira

The cover of Wired magazine’s March

2020 issue featured a scoop of fluorescent sherbet ice cream floating like a strange new planet amongst the stars.

In the first month of the coronavirus pandemic, the piece zoomed out from earth: “Humans are headed for the cosmos, and we’re taking our appetites with us. What will fill the void when we leave Earth behind?” [1] MIT’s Space Exploration Initiative, preparing for interplanetary colonization, wants to let space travel transform the human experience of food.

While it might seem like culinary culture would be low on NASA’s to-do list, the Space Exploration Initiative makes a strong case for why space food is a crucial area for investment and research. [2] Current space food merely squeezes Earth food into a spaceflight-efficient mold: maximal compressibility, minimal crumbs. But perhaps, as the founder of the Space Exploration Initiative argues, “it’s possible, even essential, to imagine an entirely new microgravitational culture, one that doesn’t simply adapt Earth products and technologies but instead conceives them anew.”

Conceiving anew is the essence of what philosopher Margaret Boden called “transformational creativity.”

[3] If “exploratory” creativity is composing a new song, “transformational” creativity is rethinking what music can be. (Imagine the invention of atonal music, or even rock and roll.) The products of transformational creativity may be controversial, since by definition they break the rules. Yet they also elicit “amazement,” according to Boden, because “some deep dimension of the thinking style, or conceptual space, is altered—so that structures can now be generated which could not be generated before.”

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Long before astronaut ice cream, food has been fertile ground for transformational creativity. The earliest humans to cultivate the earth enacted a completely new relationship between the consuming creature and the producing land, fundamentally changing our species. An innovation as simple as clay pots transformed food “from a public resource to private property” to be stored and traded, from a mere nutrient source to a sensual and creative object to cook and ferment and flavor.

[4] The beauty of transformational creativity in food, as in music, is that it allows us to create something uniquely suited to a given form and its constraints. By seeking a “best fit” between a concept and the way we express it, we can fill up every nook and cranny of a form’s constraints. Allowing bacteria to grow in grain or fruit may have seemed absurd, but this made it possible for bread to be fluffy and fruit to make you tipsy. Even now, people are still exploring the use of fermentation to create previously impossible food experiences.

In many ways, the modern food industry cuts off consumers from producers.

It is rare and in some cases nearly impossible for the average eater to know deeply the potential of their ingredients. Yet consider the incredible variety of dishes and flavors that has become standard to the modern palate: all come from different contexts with unique constraints and possibilities for food. Characterized by a cultural history of vegetarian religions, Southeast Asian cuisine excels in the flavoring of veggies and grains. In Peru, topographical constraint of mountains abutting coastline resulted in strange and marvelous mashups of starches with seafood. For me, understanding the relationship between constraints

and creativity in my favorite foods elicits wonder and delight.

In contrast, there is something unsatisfying when creativity fails at a best fit between form and content. Consider how piano reductions of orchestral pieces—or even orchestral versions of pop songs—often feel hollow or comical. Or consider the recent development of “Impossible Meat.” Environmental, nutritional, and even ethical constraints on meat consumption have been stretched to their breaking points, and one solution has been to create plant-based meat simulacra.[5] Impossible Meat gives you the “content” of meat flavor (essentially the flavor of blood, mimicked by the molecule heme) without the true “form” of meat. At the same time, it masks the flavor content of the plants that are the actual substance of the non-meat.

While an innovative way of salvaging our cravings, this decoupling of form and content diminishes our experience of both meat and plants. Transformational creativity, however, can expand the space of our relationship with food. Instead of mimicking the flavor of meat, we might search for hidden gems of flavor and texture in the flora of our individual environments to serve as the medium for new culinary creations.

When new constraints are imposed on us, transformational creativity becomes not a luxury but a necessity. The ability to reimagine the foundations of an art form, a technology, or even a cuisine allows us to move forward by creating something new rather than squeezing the old way into frustrating new constraints. If we value a best fit relationship between a concept and its expression, then new constraints on our forms of expression require exploring a new best fit. More importantly, seeing new possibilities rather

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than grasping after what has been lost is what saves us from despair.

In a not-so-hypothetical future, space travel could impose even more radical constraints on our food than we are facing on Earth. But the Space Exploration Initiative seems to look on these constraints as a chance for transformational creativity. They want to help space-faring humans not just survive, but thrive. For the Space Exploration Initiative, this means designing “embodied experiences’’ that are both humanly fulfilling and uniquely suited to space travel—zero-gravity-only meals, clothes, and instruments, for example. As creatively interesting as these ideas may be, why would they be necessary to our thriving? The point of the Space Exploration Initiative is not just that space food will taste better in space than freeze-dried Earth food, but that creating itself is part of what makes us human.

True human thriving, according to both ancient and modern philosophers, depends on the ability of individuals and societies to identify their purpose as human beings.[6] Just listen in on almost any conversation among Yale undergrads during shopping period to find the implicit belief that finding and fulfilling one’s purpose is necessary to the good life.

Creativity—especially transformational creativity—seems to be an essential part of our purpose.

Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain asserted that a “creative intuition” is part of what makes humans unique.

Thus, exercising our creativity “brings us closer to the truth of our humanity.”[7] J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, dubbed us “sub-creators”: Although now long estranged, Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.

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Disgraced he may be, yet is not de-throned, and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned: Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind… [8] A literary world-builder goes beyond mimicry to create new and abundant life, god-like. Similarly, transformational creativity—whether it produces a radically new style of painting, a revolutionary scientific theory, or a new way of baking—gives life to previously unimaginable creative worlds.

Tolkien believed that our sub-creative power comes from God, the prime Creator, and so must be enacted in accordance with His intention. …Though all the crannies of the world we filled with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build Gods and their houses out of dark and light, and sowed the seed of dragons—’twas our right (used or misused). That right has not decayed: we make still by the law in which we’re made.

In Biblical terms, we are called to the imitation of our Creator in the use of minds made “in [His] image” for sub-creation (Gen. 1:26).

Compared to literature and poetry, food is a more understated form of creativity that fills our bellies as well as our souls. Yet, like Tolkien’s sub-creation of fantastical species, creating with food fulfills the Creator’s mandate to be “fruitful” (Gen. 1:28). The food we make and eat today is the re-

sult of centuries of transformational creativity—a unique capacity of the species made in the image of a Creator who gave Himself as “the bread of life” (John 6:35). The incarnation of the Creator is the most radical “rule change” imaginable. Yet Jesus, with an author’s knowledge of the form of Mosaic law and content of God’s covenant with Israel, defined a new best fit, reframing humanity’s relationship with the divine. That space He created is the Kingdom of God. The transformational creativity exemplified by the Space Exploration Initiative may help humanity reinvent itself and our relationship to food, cleanse the planetary palette and start afresh.

But unforeseeable messes will surely be made on a new Martian Eden. Indeed, the Mars escape route is a response to the same problem that separates modern humans from food production: industrialization, which itself arose out of an incredible period of transformational creativity in science and technology. As far away as we fly from Earth, transformational creativity cannot help us with true self-transformation.

Christ, at once human and God, intimately and essentially relational, is both the model and the means of our reconciliation to the created world. If in humility we embrace our role as sub-creators in the Kingdom of God, then whatever space we find ourselves in—whatever chaos or crisis, whatever threshold of transformation—we will refract the true light of the Creator over the void.

Notes [1] Twilley, Nicola. “The Food We’ll Eat on the Journey to Mars (Algae Caviar, Anyone?).” Wired. Conde Nast, February 11, 2020. https://www.wired.com/story/ space-food-what-will-keep-us-human/.

[2] In fact, it’s not! NASA recognizes the huge importance of food to astronauts’ morale, and of crew morale to the success of any mission. See: Gohd, Chelsea. “The Space Station May Soon Smell like Fresh-Baked Cookies,” July 2, 2019. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-space-station-maysoon-smell-like-fresh-baked-cookies/.

[3] Boden, M. “How Creativity Works.”

Creativity East Midlands for the Creativity: Innovation and Industry conference, December 6, 2007. https://pdfs. semanticscholar.org/120e/b04b9b69b5f892904a2f6870b8c04cb33f82.pdf.

[4] Graber, Cynthia, Twilley, Nicola.

“Outside the Box: The Story of Food Packaging.” Gastropod. Podcast audio, June 27, 2016. https://gastropod.com/outsidethe-box-the-story-of-food-packaging/.

[5] “Impossible Foods.” https://impossiblefoods.com/.

[6] “Telos and Eudaimonia.” Web log.

Philosophical Ethics (020) @ Fordham (blog).

Fordham University, February 22, 2010. http://phru1100-020.blogspot.com.

[7] Mooney, Margarita. “History of Art as Philosophy of Humanity.” Margarita Mooney, September 30, 2020. https:// margaritamooney.com/2020/09/historyof-art-as-philosophy-of-humanity-maritains-creative-intuition-in-art-and-poetryas-a-guide-in-our-desiccated-culture/.

[8] Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy-Stories.” University of St. Andrews Andrew Lang Lecture Series. Lecture, March 8, 1939. https://fairytalebooks.org/fairy-tales/uploads/2017/01/Tolkien_On_Fairy_Stories.pdf.

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Roiling Boil Jason Lee

In my mother’s house, buddae-jiggae

is always served with a side of spinach. If any meal she made lacked vegetables, the spinach was how she compensated. Most stews come with seaweed or daikon or bean sprouts or long, spindly mushrooms simmering in red broth. In those cases, there is no need for spinach. Buddae-jiggae, however, does not contain anything green.

It contains meat, ramen, and kimchi, it is 800-1000 calories a bowl, and it is delicious. Compared to our family’s monstrous serving sizes, the little floral dishes of spinach were more for my mother’s comfort than any real attempt at nutritional balance.

Buddae-jiggae is an unconventional stew. An oxtail or chicken broth is filled first with sliced pork belly, since it takes the longest to cook. Then the kimchi is added, then the ramen. The components that follow—vienna sausages, beef franks, Spam, sometimes even shiny slices of yellow American cheese—are unique to buddae-jiggae.

All manner of processed meats and cheeses are stirred into the pork and noodles and left to simmer until soft.

My family often adds rice.

The name means army-base stew, after the primary supplier of its imported ingredients. During the Korean War and the years that followed, impoverished South Korean citizens and refugees from the North stewed and boiled whatever they could find for food. Oftentimes, this included the discarded rations of American soldiers stationed on the peninsula. Koreans lined up to purchase or beg for bags of scraps from the army, and they scrounged leftover Spam, ham, and hotdogs from base dumpsters. These first army-base stews, cooked over streetside fires, were said to contain cigarette butts.

18 . Food: Fall 2020

While some restaurants nod to its history through names such as DMZ soup, these days buddae-jiggae is regarded as a wholly Korean dish. [1] It retains some historical elements, namely Spam, but an array of Korean spices and higher quality ingredients, thanks to post-reconstruction wealth, have mostly erased the collective memory of stewed garbage. It’s a bit of an institution now, and I recommend it on winter days when you have the time for a nap after.

Yet there are those, especially among my grandparents’ generation, who cannot embrace buddae-jiggae as their descendents have. It was a dish they stomached while spooning out dirt and paper from the broth. It was a dish for which their parents begged. They begged in the glare of protected stores called post-exchanges (PX), which sold meat and supplies but were reserved for Americans. Americans, that is, and those close to them. The restrictions on who could buy from a PX engendered a range of dubious relationships between Korean women and American men. Women, once connected to soldiers, could purchase from PX stores for their own families, sell products to wealthier Koreans at a premium, and smuggle imported meats to the populace once Dictator Park outlawed their trade. The necessity of such arrangements remains a smoldering source of resentment among many from that time.

One generation removed, my parents do not feel the same aversion. Nor do I. Time has filtered any fury that used to spill from the stew’s dolorous origin.

I am left with a rich, meaty dish which I adore but my elders reject, whose associations for me consist of big bites and self-conscious spinach, but consist of poverty and humiliation for

thousands of people in my nation’s history.

How do I engage with an institution that has loved and fulfilled me, yet is built upon a legacy of grief ? This surfaces questions not only of time and history, but also of identity, responsibility, and repentance. I can’t ask a bowl of buddae-jiggae, “Who am I?” (at least, I won’t). But then, I am no longer talking about buddae-jiggae. I am talking about the church.

Though it may seem a little stilted to compare the Christian faith to a bowl of pork, my relationships with both are similar. My faith and its community of believers are outlined in great love. My mother conveys her love for me in three ways: in speech, in food, and in prayer. My relationship to God and the universe, to the people I do and do not care for, to my purpose in life (whatever that means)—I have explored in faith, struggled with in faith,

severed and reconciled in faith. Whatever maturation and suffering and elation I have experienced in life has been wholly entangled with the church.

distorted theology and replicate these persecutions against LGBTQ+ communities through conversion camps and social rejection.

On the other hand, the church has been wholly entangled in a multitude of violent and oppressive systems. It has directly advocated for the colonization of African, American, and Asian lands. It has annihilated native and indigenous cultures and forcibly converted their populations not out of love, but from arrogance: not with respect for life, but on pain of death.

It has served as a passive and active agent in the calcification of white supremacy and as a vehicle for European hegemony.

I do not hate my faith. I do not derive any pleasure or status from recounting the depraved aberrations of what is meant to be a divine mission, nor from reducing or concealing the complexity of the church’s involvement with the violence above. We have done good work. Christian abolitionists helmed various efforts across Europe and the US, and isolated Catholics families smuggled Jews out of Nazi Germany.

Starting in the 1920s (some) missionary work peeled (slowly) away from empire and towards social service, while Black churches have served as both the staging grounds and expressions of liberation.

It was a tool for the enslavement of

Black peoples and a justification for their continued servitude. Believers have massacred Jews out of hate and

However, these accomplishments are irrelevant to my question. I know we’ve done good. I am concerned with how we are meant to engage with our great evils. Yet so often when I ask other fellow Christians, they rehearse the church’s worthy deeds, as if, by some moral arithmetic, these erase the numerous, unqualified acts of Christian wickedness.

Those who believe that rights expunge wrongs must review their theology.

Those who do not I nevertheless cannot entirely blame for their defensiveness. While Korean youth swallow army base stew having forgotten the dish’s demeaning origin, the contemporary church evangelizes and moralizes, having forgotten its predecessors’ grievous sins. In both contexts, subsequent generations have inherited a sanitized history, but for Christianity, the price of this forgetfulness has been the loss of our understanding of collective responsibility.

Biblical figures such as Ezra, Daniel, and Achan represent but a few of many instances in which believers were held accountable for the sins of their forebears. Christians are meant to believe that we are responsible not only for our own conduct, but for those with whom we share a relationship–– accountable not only for our own uncleanliness, but for the uncleanliness of those with whom we dwell. Yet we have narrowed our standards of righteousness until each individual conveniently need only concern themselves with themselves. We have forgotten that both our most damning sins and our most sublime joy are collective.

Neglecting the corporate aspect of our existence has left the church speechless as believers and nonbelievers alike come to new consciousness with respect to racial justice, gender equality, climate change, and poverty. Each topic raises genuine questions regarding how people are knit to their communities, to their past, and to each other. Yet many have, in the name of our faith, branded feminism as an excuse for pagan immorality and Black Lives Matter as a violation, rather than an affirmation, of the equality of life before God. They recast attempts at repentance and restitution as liberal seduction and communist propaganda.

Throughout it all, the house of God is silent.

In our inarticulacy, we have also abdicated a critical mission. “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.”

This was the task, among many others. Among many commandments, we were to demonstrate and reify a kingdom where the meek inherit the earth, and where fields and homes are set aside for the impoverished, the immigrant, and the stranger.

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When the church has so abandoned this mission that its primary advocates in modernity are nonbelievers, when the church is so unfamiliar with the character of its mission that it no longer recognizes it under new names, not only have we lost our flock, but we have lost ourselves. The “radical” has become something foreign and corrupting, instead of a prefix to our convictions. The Christ has become a Savior who wills the poor and weak to save themselves—and who excuses his followers for willing the same.

Liberation, vindication, reparation, healing, punishment, and redemption are topics to which our faith has much to offer. However, we have lost the opportunity to lead society in their pursuit. A plurality of the church, in its hostility towards this era’s reinvigorated movements against police brutality and white supremacy, has withered any ethos we may have had.

This does not absolve us of our responsibilities. That is why this article is written here, towards campus, and not solely towards the internal Christian body. We are inexcusably late, as much of the world is, to these racial and social justice movements that are only now entering the public eye despite generations of relentless organizing. But I have hope that this can be an opportunity for the church to recover its collective spirituality, repent of its legacies, and reconcile itself to the good work being done.

In many ways, intellectual traditions such as critical theory and the vast array of intersectional studies have become both a refuge and an indispensable tool for what should have been a pursuit of justice shared between believers and nonbelievers. They have expressed certain truths to which our faith also attests. For one, the reality

20 . Food: Fall 2020

of structural racism substantiates our belief that the world is fallen. It refers to how present and historic decisions have accumulated to invent race and subsequently privilege white culture, language, aesthetics, and values. It affirms that the discriminatory outcomes have proliferated throughout all of society. Christianity goes so far as to say all of our relationships, and all of our systems are, without exception, cut off spiritually, ecologically, economically, and socially from an equitable, just existence. It should not come as a surprise to Christians that racism pervades all aspects of our fallen world. It should spark not rebuttal but grief and righteous anger that creation’s many, splendorous colors have been twisted into a vile hierarchy.

It is all the more disappointing, therefore, that the most unified clarion from our church has been for protestors to muzzle their rage, to be patient, to be courteous. It is one thing to pray that victims find peace. It is another to ask that they bury their conscience for our comfort. Christians believe that sin— brokenness, if you will—must be actively combatted, in ourselves and in our world. Only an unfaithful reading could interpret the command to turn the other cheek as a command to suppress the widow and the orphan.

To be anti-racist, not merely non-racist. To heal brokenness, not merely disavow it. Believers and nonbelievers alike are called to an active pursuit of justice. What can be unclear, especially to those who are just now coming to this awareness, is what we can do as individuals to contribute to the work.

While I urge you to consult the vast repository of wisdom compiled by the many organizers in the field for specific actionables, the Christain faith’s concept of tzedakah can, I believe, provide the necessary posture.

Though it is a rather billowing concept, a fundamental aspect of tzedakah is being right with God. It is relationally defined, because being right with God means being right with ourselves, our strangers, our ancestors, and our offspring. Much more than merely interpersonal, this means just verdicts, dignified living, and reorganizing systems to cultivate grace in a broken world. Thus, our posture is one in which we are urgently setting right relationships between people and the world around us—so urgently that it is one of few instances where God tells us to leave the church and go.

I recognize that there are many who have suffered because of my church, my faith––suffered and lost enough that we are, in their eyes, unredeemable. Reader, if you are one such person, yet have stayed, you have expressed a grace that we can only hope to emulate. I am not asking you to forgive us. In the end, I am still answering my own question—how do I reconcile the potential for love that I see in my faith with its many horrors? Buddae-jiggae will always be a soup born of shame.

Yet my mother and its other inheritors have refired it to be an expression of greasy triumph. The church cannot be severed from its murderous ancestry.

Yet I and its other inheritors can still serve—not in some impossible notion of redemption by works, but out of an ethic of radical love.

of being and systems of governing.

Space borne of radical freedom, radical liberation, and radical hope.

Yet Christianity has tzedakah. Tzedakah, which is righteousness, spiritual unity, interpersonal integrity, virtuous society, justice-as-love, all interdependent and codefined. It is in tzedakah where I think the Christian faith begins to leap ahead of a secular pursuit of justice, and where we can begin to offer more-than-overdue backline support. The role faith can play is one of vision. Freedom and liberation founded on unconditional love, mercy, and forgiveness. Identity that is universally accepted yet as varied as the million faces of the divine. Dignity wrought into our most basic construction as images of God. Perhaps that is the answer that I am looking for. My faith’s potential for love can be made manifest, not in spite of, but in comparison to our history, by showing that there is more to be had.

That even now, all of us are aiming too low. That the steam from this roiling boil rises to a place beyond the horizon, beyond human imagination, beyond the radical, into something transcendent.

Notes [1] DMZ referring to the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea.

I say radical, because we must go beyond what is expected. Both Christianity and a secular pursuit of justice can be allied in their effort against the oppressions of the world. Both hosts–– by demolishing the systems that crush the human soul, by breaking the fangs of the wicked and plucking their victims from their teeth—are reclaiming space. Space for the full expression of human beauty, for more fulfilling ways

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Investigating Hunger Hannah Turner

24 hours. No social media.

I constantly find these challenges all over social media, ironically. To forgo prominent desires of our daily lives in pursuit of something else––to fast–– seems like the new trend. Has online social interaction become a necessity to our modern lives? I’d say the answer is yes—yes, and maybe even as much as food.

The mental attachment to social media can be just as strong as our physical need for food. This attachment grows as a casual scroll through Instagram in the middle of the day becomes the primary motivation to wake up in the morning. Because of our increasing dependence on social media, engaging in a “social media detox” challenge can be considered fasting.

But what is fasting? Fasting is the purposeful denial of a physical necessity in order to attain greater spiritual clarity. The physical aspect of fasting is straightforward, and you can sacrifice anything from food to water to social interaction. Traditionally, fasting is abstinence from food; in a fast involving food, you temporarily surrender the nourishment required for physical sustenance.

Fasting has been a common Christian practice since the first century, though it might be somewhat intimidating to contemporary Christians, and it remains prominent in other Abrahamic traditions. I think of Jewish practices during Passover or Shavout, or the fasting of my Muslim friends during Ramadan. In these periods, the religious adherent understands that fasts affect more than their bodies––abstinence from food carries spiritual significance and can lead even to spiritual revelation.

22 . Food: Fall 2020

This spiritual aspect of fasting challenges the common worldview that staunchly divides the physical and the spiritual.

elation in the form of renewed energy, clarity, or greater closeness to God.

The idea of the spiritual describes what is beyond the merely physical and emotional aspects of an individual’s life.

The spiritual is distinct from what, as a Christian, I call the Holy Spirit: one of the three persons of God, whom I believe to be the indwelling presence of God in my life. From my point of view, the Spirit is very different from the spiritual. [1] But regardless of beliefs, everyone has a relationship with their spiritual self which can be explored and sharpened. The relationship between our body and spirit while fasting is clear: when fasting, we give up our physical desires to pursue deeper spiritual understanding and development.

You can be simply searching for clarity, or, as in my case, to find yourself closer to God, the Creator of the universe.

During the day, I spend over three hours on social media alone. My screen time has only increased during the pandemic. I give too much attention to the phone I carry around with me all day, everywhere I go.

Fasting carries unfamiliar religious overtones, but you might already fast in your everyday life. For example, you’re fundamentally fasting when you deny yourself that cup of coffee because you want to find a better source of energy.

When you “quit” social media for a week, you are fasting, too. Though social media does not provide essential energy like food, it instantly gratifies our desires for social interaction and so increases the release of dopamine in the brain. [2] Fasting from social media denies your brain that instant gratification and can offer spiritual rev-

…

So, my first fast was from social media. Before my abrupt week away from social media, I would spend hours on my phone consuming content. I could recognize the immediate but temporary joy I felt from logging into Instagram. Soon, social media’s comparison-drenched environment overwhelmed me to the point of physical exhaustion. I needed a break. I used the week I spent away from social media for reflection. After abruptly giving it up, I began to purify my love for social media by investigating why I felt the need to create and consume. At the end of the process, I was no longer exhausted and overwhelmed. Thinking about my relationship with social media made me think about my relationship with food.

I thought maybe I needed to purify my love for that, too.

My second fast was from food. I fasted for three days. My primary concern in this fast was that food is a physical need. Food is life-giving: chemical bonds in my food are broken down to create ATP that fuels my body, and the things I eat keep my body functioning and strong. And, just as daunting, fasting and I do not seem compatible at all: on average, I eat three meals a day, have snacks whenever I feel like it, and always drink a cup of coffee.

The fast was difficult. I was hungriest at the beginning and at the end of my fast. The entire time, the knowledge that I was not eating loomed over me, and my stomach perpetually growled.

I experienced moments of dizziness and had to sit down. However, I spent

…

In the fight between physical and spiritual hunger, I’ve concluded that one will inevitably be stronger than the other.

Giving up an absolutely necessary component of my life to attend to my spirit was almost unfathomable. It seemed that the strength of my physical hunger far outweighed my spiritual hunger. I thought that my physical hunger would be unbearable.

my time fasting from food with intentionality, being sure to seek the spiritual benefits of fasting by praying and reading the Christian scriptures.

I learned about God’s character and about what He did for His people. I learned to prioritize my faith over my physical hunger. As a result, like after my social media fast, I was left more patient and empathetic, especially toward my family. I wasn’t trying harder to be more Christ-like––slower to anger, quicker to kindness––but seeking God through fasting naturally allowed for this change in character. …

Fasting is a test of will. It is also a test of priorities, and a chance for us to realize what is most nourishing to us. For me, fasting is also a test of faith. My fasts symbolized my relinquishing of control to God, who promises an enlightened, guided, and fully satisfied life.

[3] This was no small feat: a sense of

control g i ve s me peace, while lack of control gives me anxiety. During my time of fasting from social media and food, I was relieved from the burden of control.

Non-Christians, too, can reap the benefits of fasting. Fasting produces humility as we face our weaknesses––dependence on everyday luxuries, like social media or an extra cup of coffee in the morning. Fasting also cultivates discipline. When you fast, you practice (inconveniently) giving something up and delaying gratification for something better in the long term. As confidence in the value of discipline grows, the discipline developed through fasting can be executed in other areas of life, from fitness to school work. Most importantly, non-Christians can also experience some of fasting’s spiritual rewards.

Anyone who desires a clearer sense of purpose or peace would benefit from the clarity that results from fasting. Using extra time and mental space to reflect and focus on our emotional, communal, and spiritual needs can help us increase our motivation and resolve.

But growth does not occur within our comfort zones. I had the desire to be focused, disciplined, and gain spiritual strength, and it became stronger as I disciplined myself through fasting. I had to do something about the hunger in my spirit, so I slowly surrendered my control. I became completely full. I did not hear even a faint cry of my physical hunger because it, too, was full. The lessons and the change I experienced were the most difficult but necessary things I’ve learned in a while. I need to control my feelings so they don’t control me. I need to be in a closer relationship with God. The key is to have constant reminders that the spiritual, as well as the physical, is an absolutely necessary component of my life. Others who fast may need to be reminded of the value of the quality of humility. Whatever your goal, committing to a fast is just a start to the long, fulfilling journey of refining your spiritual life.

Notes [1] Evans, Jimmie H III. “The Third Person of the Trinity: How the Holy Spirit Facilitates Man’s Walk with God.” Fidei et Veriatis 1, no.1 (2016). https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1027&context=fidei_et_veritatis.

[2] Krach, Soren, Frieder M. Paulus, Maren Bodden, and Tilo Kircher. “The Rewarding Nature of Social Interactions.” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience (May 2010). https:// doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2010.00022.

[3] Isaiah 58, New International Version.

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24 . Food: Fall 2020

Depart with Dignity

Ashley Talton

Many of

the people in the Zen Hospice end-of-life care facility, such as Mrs. M, are unable to eat. And yet, the most popular room in the house is the kitchen, where the aroma of freshly-baked cookies can be found, while people are chatting around the table.

[1] Even though the people there can’t enjoy the taste of the cookies because of illness or decreased taste sensitivity from age, the joy that the smell of the cookies provides is unmatched.

Speaking from a strictly scientific perspective, eating is “nothing more or less than a transfer of energy between two organic systems.”[2] However, viewing the act of eating in this reductionist way strips away the essence of a meal.

Food brings people together around a table, laughing. Food brings people dignity through the privilege of making decisions about what we eat, who we eat with, and when we eat. Food is a medium for compassion when its provision meets someone’s tangible needs. Food is not simply an essential of physiological survival; it is so much greater than that. Food provides “sustenance on several levels.”[3] Eating is a multi-sensory experience. Taste is not the only thing that is valued about food, but the holistic experience of the occasion of a meal is highly valued, too. Food is fellowship, compassion, and, most of all, dignity––the very elements that contribute to our humanity, our connections with one another, and what every person deserves.

As a thirteen-year-old, Mrs. M had found joy in laughing and reminiscing over a celebration dinner with her friends after the soccer district championship game. During this period, she had more choices about what to eat,

but less control over with whom she shared meals. In college, Mrs. M took time out of her busy schedule between classes to catch up with a friend over a meal, instead of spending that extra time working on a p-set. This was one of the first times in her life that she had complete control over where, with whom, and what she ate. Ten or twenty years later, she shared a meal around the table with her kids, asking about their day at school and discussing what happened at work with her spouse. As Mrs. M grew older, the number of choices she was able to make regarding her food increased abundantly. Volition, the power to make choices for yourself, is the core of what food provides for us when we choose when, when, where, and with whom to eat. Volition implies dignity.

Eating alone in a hospital room is very different than meals surrounded by friends and family at earlier stages in life. Physical challenges from aging or severe illnesses make the act of eating more difficult. Taste buds have atrophied and become less sensitive, and chewing is not as easy as it once was and may even cause discomfort. Food is also connected with memories, and a particular dish that once brought joy may bring pain forty years later.[4] A milkshake that reminds Mrs. M of the happy first date with her deceased husband now symbolizes an experience that she’ll never have again.

Choices that may have been taken for granted have now vanished, rendering the experience seemingly similar to life as a small child. The days of choosing to eat whatever you want at whatever time you please are long gone, as mealtime is whenever the food is served to

you. In certain cases, medical interventions with artificial nutrition prolong the life of a person at the cost of their increased suffering because we are unable to accept death.[5] Food is a way we show our love for one another—starting at birth when our parents and caregivers provide us necessary nutrition as we are unable to help ourselves. As we age, food remains a popular way to show how much we care for someone, whether by taking someone out to dinner or baking goods for them. Jesus recognized the power that a meal has, and He can be seen time and time again providing for people out of love. Mark 2:15 says, “And as he reclined at [the] table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many who followed him.”[6] The scribes and the Pharisees, those who valued religious traditions and the law, criticized Jesus for whom He chose to dine with.

[7] Yet Jesus’ love extended to the tax collectors and sinners, those whom the Pharisees despised, because He had compassion on them.

Since food is a way in which we show our love for others, it is hard for us to stop providing for our loved ones with food. However, an essential aspect of loving someone means preserving their dignity, even at the end of life, when so many choices they previously had with food have now disappeared.

In 2 Samuel, Barzillai approached King David, saying “I am this day eighty years old. Can I discern what is pleasant and what is not? Can your servant taste what he eats or what he drinks? Can I still listen to the voice

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of singing men and women? Why then should your servant be an added burden to my lord the king?�[9] King David’s reply honors his request to live out his days on his own land and blesses Barzillai. King David indicated his love for him and links this love with his request for dignity.

Dave, a forty-two-year-old suffering from pancreatic cancer had been receiving intravenous feeding. His wife, Sharon, was hesitant to stop his intravenous feeding, afraid that it would be akin to starving him, as the fluids were his only source of nutrition.[8] However, the hospice staff recommended the withdrawal because his body was no longer absorbing any of the fats, sugars, or proteins from the fluids.

The fluids were only serving to make his symptoms worse, with skin swelling and trouble breathing.

Though decisions regarding medical interventions are ethically complex, we must not solely consider the benefits of providing nutrition to the person. We must remember the entire significance of a meal, because its value is not necessarily in the physical act of eating but also in the flavor, community, and choices that meals come with. If prioritizing the richness and fullness of life is at the center of what is desired for a loved one as they near the end of their life, one must entertain the idea that this may not include artificial nutrition.

Sharon decided to discontinue Dave’s artificial nutrition, and he was able to eat a few bites of food, purely to enjoy the taste.[10] These last few days of enjoyment would not have been pos-

26 . Food: Fall 2020

sible had the family not realized what they wanted to prioritize.

The importance of dignity, particularly at the end of life, cannot be denied.

Although it is difficult to pin down an exact definition, dignity can be categorized into areas like communication, autonomy, respect, and empowerment.[11] What does dignity look like when considering all its aspects in relation to food? Communicating clearly with someone what their options are for eating and food. Giving someone autonomy to make choices instead of assuming what is best. Respecting someone’s decisions that they make regarding food: empowering and affirming them.

After a long night of unsuccessful fishing, Jesus appeared to his friends and invited them to breakfast.[12] He knew exactly what they needed, and He understood that food can be used to give people a fuller experience of life. Perhaps the invitation is where our dignity is retained, in knowing that someone else desires to spend time with us, to talk, and to listen. Surely, the taste of food matters, but it isn’t everything. The sooner we realize that, the sooner we may be able to accept our mortality. Taking away someone’s volition for the sake of helping them fails to recognize one of the core aspects of food — that it is dignity. Preserving dignity means having not only a holistic understanding that sees the food experience as more than simply a chemical exchange, but also an understanding of how the preservation of dignity and love go hand in hand.

Notes [1] Miller, BJ. “What Really Matters at the End of Life.” TED. Accessed October 16, 2020. https://www.ted.com/talks/ bj_miller_what_really_matters_at_the_ end_of_life/.

[2] Rappoport, Leon. “The McDonaldization of Taste.” In How We Eat: Appetite, Culture and the Psychology of Food. Toronto: ECW Press, 2003.

[3] Miller, “What Really Matters at the End of Life.”

[4] Rappoport, Leon. “You Are What You Eat.” [5] Zitter, Jessica Nutik. “Food and the Dying Patient.” The New York Times, August 21, 2014. https://well.blogs.nytimes. com/2014/08/21/food-and-the-dyingpatient/.

[6] All Biblical quotations from the ESV. [7] Mark 2:16 [8] Gawande, Atul. “Letting Go.” In Being Mortal. Toronto, Ontario: Anchor Canada, 2017.

[9] 2 Samuel 19:35.

[10] Gawande, “Letting Go.” [11] Kennedy, Grace. “The Importance of Patient Dignity in Care at the End of Life.”

The Ulster medical journal 85, no. 1 (2016): 45–48.

[12] John 21:12.

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m o c

28 . Food: Fall 2020

u m

n o ni

communion logos . 29

The Altar Is Not a Stage Justin Ferrugia As

is the case for many American towns, driving around my hometown on a Sunday morning, one is guaranteed to see families dressed in their “Sunday best” walking down the street, crowded church parking lots, and groups gathering and mingling around an ornately dressed figure.

To this day in America churches are the focal points of Sunday.

But why? Why are some members of the community so tied to this seemingly antiquated and allegedly cult-like ritual? At the end of the day, isn’t it just to be social? Why can’t people just socialize in a “normal” way?

I personally have never encountered a moment of doubt so severe as to lead me to those questions. But I do, at times, struggle to keep at bay the (incorrect) assumption that forms the foundation of contemporary culture’s misunderstanding of religious ritual.

This assumption is that religious ritual is inherently performative. The performative view of faith focuses on others rather than God: faith becomes more show than substance.

That is to say that when I go to Mass, when people gather outside church, we are doing it primarily for others to see and to remain members of our community. This means that acts of the faithful—prayer, devotion, and participation in the sacraments—are outward demonstrations of our own possession of faith. To put it simply, this assumption posits that ritual is a means by which we prove our righteousness and holiness.

In Luke’s parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, the performative view of faith is that of the Pharisee. In the time of Christ, Pharisees were learned Jewish jurists and theologians. They

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were in the upper echelons of Jewish theological and legal authority. Tax collectors, to use a hip priest’s analogy, held a similar place in Jewish society as the IRS does in American society.

They were the lowest of the low.

The parable is written as such. “The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself, ‘O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity—greedy, dishonest, adulterous—or even like this tax collector.

I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income” (Luke 18:11-12).

Here, we see the Pharisee using the ritual in which he participates as justification for his righteousness and holiness with respect to the tax collector.

I slip toward this trap more often than I should. But when a culture allows this view to cloud its perception of all religious ritual, it allows the aberrant to become the norm. When the aberrant is the norm, it leads to the exasperated question: why participate in this ritual? …

The answer to this question lies in resolving this perceptual aberration and exploring the act that Christian ritual sustains: faith. Too often, we forget that faith in God is a paradox, a struggle, and a fight. We do not have faith, we do faith.

Ritual, far from being performative, is the sustenance—the food—fueling the ongoing, constant, and concerted struggle (though full understanding of God can never be had in this life) towards faith.

St. Thomas Aquinas, a prominent figure in the Christian intellectual tradition to which I subscribe, describes faith as “a mean between science and opinion.” [1] (ST II-II q.1 a.2). This

six-word-story of faith encapsulates the truth that faith cannot be described as static—at rest. Rather, faith is a constant activity.

To understand how St. Thomas and many theologians both before and after him view faith, I find it helpful to consider a question with which many of us grappled in middle school geometry. When presented with an idea, say a triangle, I can easily form the opinion, because my teacher proclaimed it as truth, that its interior angles sum to 180 degrees. Once I form this opinion, I can hold it as long as I want and it takes no additional work to do so. If I want to reach full understanding, however, I need to complete a geometrical proof. This state of full understanding is also static. But what happens in between?

It takes work to move from opinion to understanding, described by St. Thomas (and St. Augustine in a slightly different way) using the Latin verb cogitare. St. Thomas says that this cogitative act, “…properly speaking, [is] the movement of the mind while yet deliberating, and not yet perfected by the clear sight of truth.”[1] This cogitative act is the mechanical crux of Christian faith. It is not something possessed, but an action partaken in or lived—a habitus, as St. Thomas would say. This constant state of active deliberation is necessary to achieve stability in the middle region between science and opinion.

In the deliberative act of faith, one stands in a paradoxical position. We are able to experience a certainty (usually promised by science), even if we only possess the limited understanding of opinion. This is not full sight or full comprehension. Rather, it is a delicate state of the intellect held in balance

through a constant act of the will—a constant state of thinking.

For some, this account of faith might be overly logical. To understand why faith is not, indeed cannot be performative, I find it helpful to clarify the mechanics of faith and the necessary spiritual and intellectual exertion it requires. It’s hard and it requires great courage. Only through this lens can one understand why Christians are so wedded to ritual. The faithful are constantly in need of the nourishment and sustenance that Christ, through his death on the cross and the institution of the sacraments, gives us. Like water stations at regular intervals of a foot race, Christ, through the sacraments,

gives us not ways to demonstrate our faithfulness, nor a list of requirements, but rather the fulfillment of our foundational necessities when running the spiritual marathon that is a life of faith.

In its true state, Christian ritual, far from being performative, is instead a humble acceptance of Christ’s sacrifice. The reason this performative view of ritual is so insidious and has the ability to corrupt not only those who partake but the perceptions of those who do not, is because it perverts the accepting of a gift that is necessary for our survival in a life of faith into something worthy of praise. …

There is no more concrete way to apply the Christian concept of ritual to St. Thomas’s account of faith than through the Eucharist or Holy Communion. St. Thomas himself acknowledges that “…spiritual life has a certain conformity with the life of the body.”

The Eucharist is unique because it is nutritive both in the corporeal sense, and in the spiritual sense.

In Catholicism, the celebration of the Eucharist is one of seven sacraments.

It culminates the sacrifice of the Holy Mass, which is the most well known and commonly celebrated ritual among Catholics. It is easy to see how an observer may misconstrue the celebration of the Mass as a spectacle. Af-

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ter all, the Mass takes place on an altar that often resembles a theater. Many people also point to the perceived opulence of churches as evidence of self-aggrandizement.

However, in the realest sense possible, the celebration of the Eucharist is no more than an invitation to a meal. As Catholics, we believe in transubstantiation, which simply means that when we consume that wafer of unleavened bread we are, in the realest sense, consuming the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ.

In a corporeal sense, this wafer of unleavened bread provides us with real caloric nutrition. In a spiritual sense, this meal gives us the nourishment and energy we need to continue the marathon of faith that St. Thomas describes.

This spiritual nourishment is anything but small. Every time the Mass is celebrated, we are invited to the last supper of Christ and given what we need to survive, indeed to thrive in the paradoxical life of faith.

The Pharisee would accept this invitation and gift with self-serving thanksgiving. If the Pharisee were invited to share a meal with a friend, he would give thanks that he had the opportunity to show everyone around him how good a friend he was by accepting a gift necessary for his survival. When he walked in the door he would say “Thank you, not for the gift you have given me, but for allowing me to show those around me how important I am to you.”

This is the danger of viewing Christian ritual like the Eucharist as performative. We instinctively feel that the Pharisee’s attitude is wrong—it is not something that we would ever consider doing. That is why it is so essential for us as Christians both to guard against

the view of faith as performative in our own minds but more importantly, as a culture, to not let this aberrant idea of ritual obscure the norm.

I want to make explicit that agreement on correct ritual is not necessary to reject the view that Christian ritual is performative. I do not want to convey the relativistic idea that everyone of every faith or no faith must see all religious rituals as equal. I do not, and plenty of people would say the same about me.

But, what I can say, and what I hope we as a culture can say, is that even if we do not see all rituals as equal, we understand their very real necessity.

Notes [1] Aquinas, Thomas. Summa theologica.

Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1911-1925. II-II q.1 a.2.

[2] Aquinas. Summa theologica. II-II q.

2 a.1.

Even if these ideas about Christian rituals might seem irrelevant, the idea of ritual itself is foreign to no one. The rich stereotypes of American suburbia yield an abundance of examples of the American sacred liturgy. These daily rituals are the parts of our lives that corporeally sustain us. Perhaps you derive great peace from your NPR-filled commute, or perhaps your daily trip to Dunkin’ Donuts provides some necessary predictability in your life while giving you the energy to begin a new day.

Whatever they are, our rituals, our routines, sustain us. If this current world is any indication, we see that many people are willing to risk their lives—crawl over broken glass—to continue with their ordinary rituals. Even if we cannot agree, many can empathize with this feeling. Why must we view Christian ritual differently?

What starving person would not crawl over broken glass to a thanksgiving feast? What parched person would not climb a mountain to reach a lake on top? What Christian would not risk their life, endure suffering, or encounter hardship to attain the one thing necessary to sustain the real marathon that is faith?

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Richness in the Desert Bella Gamboa

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

- Psalm 63:1

Longing is a familiar feeling. We miss

those we love who are far away from us; we yearn for a return to normalcy and the end of this pandemic; we literally, physically hunger as every few hours our bodies require additional sustenance.

In Psalm 63, King David of Israel, the psalmist according to the psalm’s title, captures in beautiful but fraught language his longing—for God. David desperately thirsts for God, as he would for refreshment “in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” Certainly David, whether in his youth as a shepherd, or later in his life as a king on military campaigns, was familiar with physical thirst and the desolation of a dry desert; indeed, the title tells us that this psalm is from when David was “in the wilderness of Judah.” Even if most contemporary readers aren’t so familiar with such conditions, David’s simile remains evocative, and we understand his feeling of dehydration and thirst.

But what does it mean for David to thirst for God? Such an idea can feel frustratingly nebulous; God is not a sip of water from an animal skin (or Hydroflask).

Though we might not always be able to identify the object of our desires as readily as David does, I do think that we hunger and thirst for God. Various human longings which we do not even associate with God might make David’s words more palatable: his experience of hunger can matter to people who have never encamped in the Judean wilder-

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ness, or even thought about desiring a God who may or may not exist.

From a Christian perspective, a longing for God can be quite easily explained: we are God’s creation, made in His image, according to the creation account in Genesis. Yet as a result of our human imperfections, we are not the best versions of ourselves, and we are not connected to God as we ought to be.

We experience a sort of God-shaped hole—the result of separation from the One who made us, and of the original perfection of creation.

The silhouette of this God-shaped hole results from God’s character and nature, which shapes human longings.

Our need for relationships is consistent with the Christian Trinity. If God is three Persons in One, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, He has been in relationship within the different Persons of the Trinity for all time, before there were angels or humans or anything other than Himself. (The Trinity is really hard, perhaps even impossible to understand, but one can try to envision this intrapersonal and interpersonal relationship without trying to detangle the Trinity.)

Made like God, humans naturally desire companionship and intimate relationships. And if we are created by but distanced from a God who knows us so intimately that “even the hairs of your head are all numbered” (Luke 12:7), we understandably long to be known deeply—in ways that are often elusive in relationships with humans as limited as ourselves, rather than an omniscient Father.

Likewise, people hunger for beauty—a natural impulse if we are children of the Creator of a beautiful, complex, and creative world. That God is a God of abundance and beauty is apparent in the lovely language of Psalm 65:

You water [the earth’s] furrows abundantly, settling its ridges, softening it with showers, and blessing its growth.

You crown the year with your bounty; your wagon tracks overflow with abundance.

The pastures of the wilderness overflow, the hills gird themselves with joy... they shout and sing together for joy. (Psalm 65:9-13) The Lord’s bountiful provision and the verdant loveliness of the natural world reflect His nature as well as our own.

We are made for the fullness of hills and valleys that “shout and sing together for joy,” yet are so far from that reality; longing and dissatisfaction are a natural result of this disparity between what is and what ought to be.

But for one who, like David, believes in and is in relationship with God, how can that hunger for Him be so acute?

Perhaps conversion or Christian life evokes an image of sudden fulfilment and rosy, uncomplicated perpetual contentment—but that is a superficial and inaccurate expectation.

Mother Teresa, the iconically self-sacrificial nun, experienced a profound sense of God’s absence for decades; in one letter, she laments “Where is my faith?—even deep down, right in, there is nothing but emptiness & darkness.

My God—how painful is this unknown pain. It pains without ceasing.—I have no faith. – I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart—& make me suffer untold agony.” [1] She seems to have felt stranded in “a dry and weary land where there is no water,” distant from the refreshment of faith, a sense of God’s love, and relief from her agony.

Mother Teresa’s words recall those of another psalm, in which the psalmist (in this case, not David), addresses God: As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God… When shall I come and appear before God? My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?” (Psalm 42:1-3) Even the deeply devoted experience spiritual droughts and doubts; at times, God’s living water feels absent, and only our own tears and pain seem to remain.

So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory.

Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you.

So I will bless you as long as I live; in your name I will lift up my hands.

- Psalm 63:2-4 David responds to his thirst by seeking out an oasis. Even as he internally experiences a desert, he enters into “the sanctuary,” where God is present regardless of his internal state, and there “behold[s God’s] power and glory.”

Sometimes, actions do what feelings cannot, and are themselves an important part of a life of faith; emotions are slippery and difficult to control, but our feet are much more easily directed. David, despite his internal drought, goes to the sanctuary, as Mother Teresa continued to serve and love others even when she did not feel God’s love.

In seeking out God in His sanctuary, David—and, in her way, Mother Teresa—responds to a divine invitation: “I

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am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.”

(Psalm 81:10) The Lord tells His people, whom He has provided for and protected in the past, to open their mouths to receive His fulfillment. David and Mother Teresa acted in response to God’s promises and their understanding of His character, even if their feelings did not match their minds and deeds. David, with parched lips, praises God not out of upwelling emotion, but from his conviction that God’s “steadfast love is better than life.”

My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food, and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips, when I remember you upon my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night; for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.

My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.

- Psalm 63:5-8

David acts out of his confidence in God’s promises, even when they were not apparently fulfilled. But God has not left those who long for Him—that is, all of humanity—without hope of satisfaction or fulfillment, the fruit of His promises. God commits to sating us with His Son, Jesus, who calls Himself “‘the bread of life…. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’”

(John 6:48, 51)

In a striking reversal from the opening lines of the psalm, David exclaims that his formerly famished “soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food,” and his longing is replaced with joy.

Though he anticipates such satisfaction in the future tense, leaving his current state ambiguous, he seems confident of this fulfilment and joy. David opened his mouth wide and anticipates God’s filling it. Proverbs offers some insight into the change David has experienced: “From the fruit of a man’s mouth his stomach is satisfied; he is satisfied by the yield of his lips” (Proverbs 18:20).

In making God’s praise the yield of his lips—in acting and praising regardless of how he felt—David’s words produced Godly fruits that fill him.

It does seem incredibly nebulous and unapproachable—the idea that this intangible God allegedly sent His Son (whatever that means) a couple millennia ago and now expects us to be filled

by Him. Indeed, following Christ does not always provide perceptible feelings of satisfaction and plenty, as Mother Teresa and David indicate. But that hunger for God feeds our curiosity about Him; a sense of His distance or a longing for Him can, paradoxically, draw us closer to God. Learning more about Him in turn makes us increasingly aware of imperfections in ourselves and our world and can increase our longing for what is lacking. Thus, thirsting for God creates a sort of posi-

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tive feedback loop, increasing both our longing for and closeness to Him. Our thirst for God propels our steps to His temple, even when our hearts do not viscerally rejoice in His love. Even small, seemingly undivine moments of goodness and fullness—when the “hills gird themselves with joy” in the New England autumn, when laughter or a good conversation with a friend provide some glimpse of God’s ever-present, even if not always felt, love—provide an appetizer for our ultimate satisfaction “as with fat and rich food.” These breadcrumbs, sacralized by the Bread of Life, feed our hope of finally sitting at God’s table.

Notes [1] McGrath, Sheila and Harrington, Teresa Ann. “The Doubts of a Saint: Mother Teresa’s Unfelt Faith.” Sisters of St. Benedict, St. Mary Monastery. Accessed December 4, 2020. https://www.smmsisters.org/ who-we-are/sister-stories/86/the-doubtsof-a-saint.

[2] All Biblical quotations from the ESV translation.

Honey and Holy Men Timothy Han

In 1909, Ezra Pound published “The

Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” a retelling of the Christ story in epic tone. In Pound’s proto-fascist reading, Christ becomes not a sheep led to the slaughter, but a warrior-martyr in the tradition of William Wallace, Joan of Arc, or John Brown. The Christ figure is all-powerful, “a master of men.” Pound’s Christ is not the chief priest whom the Book of Hebrews described, but rather akin to the warlords of Israel’s ancient mytho-history. He is not Melchizedek offering (or receiving) prayer over Abraham, but rather Abraham himself, still bloody from the warpath. In his poem’s last couplet, Pound makes the warrior-martyr analogy explicit by using the image of the honeycomb to link Christ to Samson, Jonathan, and John the Baptist: “I ha’ seen him eat o’ the honey-comb Sin’ they nailed him to the tree.”[1] Ezra Pound’s politics were thoroughly repugnant and un-Christian, but it is worth examining the connection he drew between the three aforementioned Hebraic figures. Why do the Biblical writers use an image so tame as the honeycomb, symbolic for the sweetness of God’s law, to link together a violent, warrior tradition in Biblical literature?[2] And what is John the Baptist doing next to Samson and Jonathan?

Samson was one of the great judges of Israel, a warrior who stood up for the oppressed Hebrews against their foreign oppressors. Unique among all the chieftains named in Judges, Samson commanded no warbands, but fought alone. Raging crazily like a lion in the hills, Samson prowled the rugged, Judean countryside. The author(s) of Judges make(s) Samson’s leonine metaphor explicit in an early episode.

Journeying to meet his bride for the first time, Samson briefly leaves the company of his parents and encounters a lion in a vineyard. In a fit of bestial passion, Samson tears apart the lion with his bare hands, and leaves the carcass to rot. A few days later, while traveling to meet his bride again, and bring her home with him, Samson walks past the same carcass. He notices a swarm of bees have used the rotting husk as a shelter to create a beehive. Scooping honey out of the corpse with his hands, Samson returns to his parents and offers some to them, but never tells them how he got the honey.

The previous chapter, Judges 13, describes the painstaking care Samson’s parents took to keep him holy and pure throughout his childhood. Consecrating their heaven-sent child according to the Nazarene rite, Samson’s parents made sure he never drank wine, ate unclean food, or cut his hair. After that prefatory chapter, Judges 14 reads like another fall of man: teenage rebellion, youthful indiscretion, and temptation culminate in a tragic and horrifying saga.

The premise itself of Judges 14 is an act of lust: Samson, desirous of a Philistine woman, disobeys Hebrew tradition and his parents’ advice, deciding instead to intermarry with a foreign people.

On the journey to meet the Philistine woman, Samson runs off. Escaping the watchful eyes of his parents, he flees into a vineyard, presumably to find a winepress and drink. Maybe it had long been his habit to drink whenever he could slip away from his parents. Maybe he was just curious what wine tasted like. The next scene––Samson tearing apart a lion with his bare hands––suggests that he is already inebriated. And finally, after the whole encounter, Samson decides not to ritually purify himself after killing a beast, but immediate-

ly goes, bloody and drunk, to meet his betrothed for the first time.

Samson’s parents resolutely do not react to this entire ordeal. Somehow, his parents cannot smell the blood on Samson or his clothes. They cannot smell the alcohol on his breath. They ask no questions about where he has been; apparently, it is quite natural for their strictly-raised son to run off for hours at a time without saying anything. The mum resignation of Samson’s parents suggests that he has always been a rebellious child.

Nevertheless, it is on the subsequent journey to bring Samson’s betrothed home that the Nazirite monk commits his greatest sin.[3] On the way back, Samson runs into that same vineyard–– again, without his parents, again, to drink. After becoming intoxicated, Samson finds his lion’s carcass, and scrapes out honey from the corpse to eat. This accomplished, Samson goes one step further by giving that sullied honey to his parents to eat. Not only does he know it is against Hebraic divine law to interact with a corpse, every sensible human knows that it is against natural law to scoop out honey from an unburied, decomposing body, and eat it. But in addition to sinning himself, Samson also induces his unsuspecting parents to sin. At least in the Garden of Eden, Adam understood the circumstances of the situation and knowingly made his choice to eat the forbidden fruit. Samson’s parents, by contrast, have no idea that they are eating forbidden food.

The seductive sweetness of honey is an apt analogy for the pride and ruin of Samson. A man too powerful to be bound by God’s law and too weak to resist the temptations of the flesh, Samson lived too much on the side of greatness. He was a freedom fighter

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for an unfounded nation, the liberator of an ungrateful tribe, surrounded by enemies, betrayed by those he loved. A man of sorrows, Samson sat impotently as his best man cuckolded him, then days later held the charred corpse of his first wife in the ruins of her home, burnt alive by her own people. Hunted like a beast, he was a renegade outside the law, beyond the law, bound by no law––divine or mortal. With the jawbone of a donkey, he made asses of Israel’s oppressors. In the wilderness of Judaea, Samson slaughtered Philistines like sheep.

Samson’s birth was not only a gift to his barren mother, but God’s answer to the prayers of oppressed Israel; Send us a savior, they prayed, and God sent Samson. But ultimately, the liberator was too free-spirited to obey even God’s law, and like an unwieldy blade, failed to accomplish his task. Samson died like he lived: a danger to all. Betrayed to the Philistines by his second lover, his captors put Samson up for show in their great temple of Dagon.

Humiliated and scorned, the Hebrew warrior-martyr used his great strength to shake loose the very foundations of the building, and crushed all the scoffing Philistines under the weight of their temple.

If Samson was the antithesis of the law, a free spirit who lived to uproot the very foundations of a tyrannical empire, then Jonathan, Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Israel, was the embodiment of royal authority. Like Hector or Edward the Black Prince, Jonathan is one in a long tradition of warrior-princes who never ascended to the throne.

Groomed as the heir-apparent from a young age, Jonathan demonstrated every princely

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issued a royal decree earlier in the day that no Israelite should t a s t e food until they had thoroughly destroyed the enemy.

Rebuking his father’s foolishness, Jonathan remarks how hunger had prevented the Israelites from turning a small, tactical victory into a devastating rout.

virtue: martial prowess, restraint, humility, and love for his people.

At a time when Israel was so impoverished that only two swords or spears could be found in all the kingdom (one for King Saul and one for Jonathan), the prince led raiding bands against the Philistines. In one feat of martial glory, Jonathan routes an entire Philistine garrison by charging them, nearly by himself.[4] Hot on the chase like a lion who has spotted his scattering prey, Jonathan speeds after the fleeing Philistines, slaughtering one after another, and leaving a trail of dead bodies to mark his brutal ascent. Spurred on by divine favor, Saul follows his son’s charge, and an Israelite warband hunts down the scattered remnants of the Philistine army.

Late in the day, bloody from the pursuit, Jonathan comes across honey in the forest. Famished, Jonathan dips his staff in the honey, and takes strength from it. His horrified companions reveal that Jonathan’s father Saul had

But the next day, when King Saul inquires again of God what to do, the Lord refuses to answer. Stunned by this divine reproach, Saul swears that whoever had eaten the forbidden food must now surely die, even if it be his own son. Eventually, God judges Jonathan sinful, and picks him out of the entire country to blame. But Saul, reluctant to kill his child, allows the army to beg for Jonathan’s life and spares him, reneging on all his royal decrees and oaths.

The immediate lesson of 1 Kings 14, wherein this story unfolds, is the foolishness of monarchs. King Saul displays his stupidity and stubbornness in making rash proclamations, and his impotence and illegitimacy in refusing to carry out his threats. Nevertheless, somehow, God found that it was not Saul, but Jonathan who had sinned.

When the bloody prince first tasted the honey, he had no idea he was disobeying his father: too far ahead in the pursuit, Jonathan had never heard Saul’s command. Even if Jonathan had no knowledge of the law, could he still have sinned?

God could have found Jonathan guilty either for eating the honey, or for disparaging his father, perhaps both. It is

ultimately unclear whether God judges Jonathan guilty for the act of eating the honey, although the text strongly suggests so. However, it is clear that Jonathan did sin when he stated the obvious: his father was wrong. This story, written and promoted by court composers, argues that the king is always right, even when he is wrong. Saul, who made a stupid law, is not guilty. Jonathan, who unknowingly disobeyed a stupid law, is guilty.

But for the purposes of Ezra Pound’s analogy, the comparison between Samson, a warrior-monk who sinfully ate honey at the spot of his martial triumph, and Jonathan, a warrior-prince who sinfully ate honey in the midst of his victory, is obvious. Like Samson, Jonathan would ultimately die fighting in the Philistines. In the tragic battle of Mt. Gilboa, the Philistines killed Crown Prince Jonathan, two of his brothers, and King Saul, shattering the Israelite monarchy and plunging the disunited tribes of Israel into civil war for a decade.

Finally, one arrives at the outlier: John the Baptist. The great herald of Christ, John appears in every gospel text, but perhaps features most prominently in the opening chapters of Mark. The first to write a gospel book, Mark begins the New Testament by introducing us to a primitive desert prophet, alone in the wilds of Judaea. This holy man named John eats honey and wild locusts, clothes himself with camel’s hair, and baptizes his followers in the waters of the Jordan.

Even if he was not a warrior like Samson or Jonathan, John the Baptist demonstrates a number of similar leonine qualities. Mark’s decision to open his New Testament with “the voice of one crying in the wilderness” imitates the mighty roar of a lion. In fact, when Jerome sought to assign each gospel writer a symbolic cognate from the four living creatures of Ezekiel 1, he assigned the lion to Mark. By comparing

John, Christ’s herald, to a lion, Mark also makes the argument that Jesus is the heir to the throne of Jerusalem. The kings of Judah had adopted the Lion of Judah as their royal mascot: what better argument for Christ than to depict his herald as a lion in the wilderness of Judah?

But unlike Samson, John the Baptist is a holy man untainted by temptation.

Unlike Jonathan, John has rejected society. A Levite by lineage, John is no prince, but a desert seer and holy man.

In many ways, John closely resembles Adam in the Garden of Eden: alone, constantly in communion with the divine, and subsisting only on that which God has naturally provided for him.

John even dresses like his primordial ancestor. Just as God made clothes out of animal skins for Adam and Eve, John makes clothes out of animal hair and skin.

Mark explicitly depicts John like Adam in order to make the point that his book is a new Genesis for the human race. When one opens up the gospel of Mark, one opens up a story about the beginning of the Christian world. John heralded the fulfillment of the old order, and the revelation of the new.

Here was a holy man who, instead of liberating his people from a foreign occupier through his terrible, swift sword, liberated his people from the oppression of sin through the sword of truth.

John preached about the coming of the Messiah that his disciples might know the truth, and that the truth might set them free. Here was a monk set apart from all others, who, instead of falling into material temptation like Samson or Jonathan, faithfully lived by the Lord’s righteous creed. John defended his flock not against the slings and arrows of Philistine armies, but the scoffing contempt of Pharisee scribes. John used his leonine ruggedness not to win political power like Samson the Judge or Prince Jonathan, but in order to humbly surrender his disciples to Christ.

Most importantly, just as honey functions as a plot device to reveal the sinfulness of Samson and Jonathan, in Mark, honey demonstrates the faithfulness of John the Baptist: a holy man who actually obeyed God, even unto death. A drunk, bestial Samson disobeyed divine and natural law by eating honey and–– foreshadowing his own temptation–– tempted his parents into unknowingly eating forbidden food. Jonathan, prideful after a great victory, ate honey in violation of his father’s law and, when confronted with his sin, chose not to repent but to rebuke God’s anointed king. But John the Baptist, instead of succumbing to temptation or vanity, meekly went into the wilderness to obey God’s calling. In Mark, the poverty of John’s diet––honey and locusts––emphasizes the severity of the Baptist’s obedience. At the outset of a book of new beginnings, Mark juxtaposes John against the honey-eating, holy men who came before him, and uses the Baptist to herald the new glories of the Christian gospel.

Honey works as a plot device to reveal the all-too-human glories and sins of three Biblical holy men, revealing the intemperate indulgence of Samson, the rebellious pride of Jonathan, and the meek submission of John. And finally, in the new Genesis found in Mark, Scripture transforms honey from the reward of self-aggrandizing victors, to the sweetness found in obedience to Christ’s Law. Notes [1] Ballad of the Goodly Fere, Ezra Pound, New Directions Publishing, 1909, https:// poets.org/poem/ballad-goodly-fere.

[2] “How sweet are your words to my taste, / sweeter than honey to my mouth!” - Psalm 119:103.

[3] The word monk is both anachronistic and an exaggeration, but the connotation of someone uniquely and distinctly set apart for a holy lifestyle appropriately describes the Nazirites.

[4] Jonathan’s armorbearer joined him in the assault.

[5] Mark 1:3.

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Elevating Work, Prayer, and Potatoes Ally Eidemueller The

painting The Angelus by JeanFrançois Millet depicts a man and a woman praying over their potatoes in the evening. The shaded silhouette contrasts the sun’s setting rays on the horizon. Over the man’s right shoulder, the sun engulfs the image, which draws the mind to something greater than the pitchfork and meager harvest, which represent the simple but inherently good livelihood of the pair. Behind the woman, almost resting on her back, is a church steeple, which pierces the sky, connecting Heaven and Earth.

In the silence of the painting, we hear the tolling of the bells.

Three times a day the bells chime: 6am, 12pm, 6pm. At the joyous prompting of the bells, the people in the painting replace their thoughts with prayers towards Heaven. They stop their work and pray the Angelus, which reflects on the Annunciation and the Incarnation. In the beauty of the painting, we are elevated above the simplicity of daily work through prayer.

Much like this painting, our daily life is not static. In Ecclesiastes, we are reminded of the variety of blessings at different times in life. [1] There are times for work, yes, but there are also times for mourning, times for laughing, and times for celebrating. Ecclesiastes argues that a human life well lived does not seek to escape all difficulties or smother sadness, but instead embraces each of these times, knowing that goodness, truth, and even joy, underlie the toils and triumphs of life. For example, if the people in the painting put their entire hearts, souls, and minds into their potato harvesting, even when difficult or painfully mundane, their lives would have substantially more meaning than if they remained indifferent to their livelihood. But still there is something more. The true purpose of their work is only actualized when

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it is offered in thanksgiving, when their eyes look toward Heaven.

In the mundane and painful experiences of the day to day, we search for a deeper meaning that transcends our reality: both to give meaning to our sufferings and to elevate our joys. Our sufferings unite us with Christ on the cross; joy provides us a small taste of eternal life, not as a fleeting instant, but, by the grace of God, as a light in the hiddenness of one’s soul. This joy points toward, without satisfying our desire for, Heaven. The ultimate celebration brings together the human and divine; the joy and sacrifice; and the visible and invisible.

God created the world and “God saw that it was good.” [2] Therefore, the goodness of the things of the world provide an avenue through which we catch a glimpse of the greater reality of the divine. George Weigel, author and biographer, writes that the sacramental imagination is the “conviction that God saves and sanctifies the world through the materials of the world.”

[3] In the world and all the things in it, we experience the extraordinary work of God’s grace.

Although we might not fully lose the sense of goodness in our experiences and the things we do in the day-to-day, we take on a false persona when we separate our daily toils from God. This happens when we seek our fulfilment through pleasures or refuse to search for a deeper meaning in order to shield ourselves from the painful realization of our inadequacy without God. Further, Kazimierz Brandys’ depicts this modern life of detachment in “The Defense of Granada”: Tormented by a confused desire, longing to forget the program for its realization, the

crowd wants to discover the flavor of life, which allows it to taste the pleasure of the space of existence. [4] Originally written to describe a society that numbs the search for life’s meaning, this passage alludes to a life without flavor—a life that is unable to fully acknowledge the satisfaction of existence. Thus, a world conceptually detached from Heaven deprives man of that which is fundamental to his life. In the search for flavor and taste, a life well-lived must surpass the abstract and be grounded in something concrete, like work, prayer, and potatoes, without turning its back on mystery.

[5]

In order to grasp the search for meaning, we must embrace reality rather than shun it. The beauty of the world around us is imbued by the grace of God. In his book Orthodoxy, English writer G. K. Chesterton beautifully describes a life well-lived through a depiction of Christ: The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall.

His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the

damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness.

There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth. [6] Simply, Christ wept. He expressed anger. He ate. He drank. In concealing His mirth, a joyous spring of laughter gushing from an acute love in the depth of His soul, we recognize this bottomless joy of God as a gift we can only receive from the Lord. The greatness and hiddenness of this mirth exposes to us the depth of human existence, which can only truly be celebrated when in union with God. As people, we search for meaning in the concrete. Because of this, God became incarnate, and His Son, fully divine

and fully human, died on the cross out of love for us. The ultimate celebration brings together the divine and the human, which is made possible by Christ’s sacrifice. This is exemplified in the Sacrifice of the Mass, by which we partake in Christ’s sacrifice and receive the Lord under the humble species of bread and wine.

Notes

The tolling of the bells unceasingly reverberated throughout New Haven.

The Saint Mary’s grey cobblestone steeple towered above the surrounding buildings and seemed to pierce the impenetrable autumn sky, and the bells enveloped the world around me as I neared the church.

[5] Read more on mystery in Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.

Print.

Clang, Clang, Clang

[1] Ecclesiastes 3:1-13.

[2] Genesis 1:10.

[3] Weigel, George. Letters to a Young Catholic. Basic Books, 2015. 92.

[4] Brandys, Kazimierz. Defense of Granada. 1956.

[6] Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy. Ignatius Press, 1995. Print, 167.

[7] All Biblical quotations from the NAB translation.

Inside the church, a priest celebrates the Sacrifice of the Mass. We bow and kneel, recite and sing, elevating the toils of our daily lives. The priest stoops over the bread and prays the consecration… For this is My Body, which will be given up for you. He holds up the humble host that joins heaven and Earth in God Incarnate.

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Even Now He Harvests Luke Bell

Farming is an expertise. Having lived

on a farm in northeast Georgia, I speak from experience. Ever since I can remember, Angus cows, Massey Ferguson tractors, and southern rodeos have always been as commonplace to me as walking. Farming, however, is more than animals and machinery. It’s a mindset, a lifestyle, an art that takes decades to master.

The media, through pictures and advertisements, often portrays farming as a sentimental pastime. They display farmers fishing with grandkids against the backdrop of a sunset; plowing fields in air-conditioned cab tractors; and harvesting perfectly ripe crops from immaculate fields fit for the front cover of Farming Magazine. I’ve never known farming like that.

In reality, farming is hard. Really hard. In commercials and advertisements, the audience never sees the arduous face of farming. They never see the freezing February rain soaking

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through your jacket as you work deep into the night, desperately distributing hay bales for your cows. They never see the blistering July sun roasting your back as you repair fences, hand-digging fence post holes while tightening, splicing, and cutting barbed wire that’s liable to lacerate your hands in one moment of inattention. They never see the waking up before dawn, going to bed after dusk, social plans cancelled due to unexpectedly long hours, and the emergency phone calls to impound stubborn cows who view fences as a suggestion.

No, farming is altogether a different ordeal compared to media portrayals. Without experiencing the toil and exhaustion familiar to farmers everywhere, people might construct an incomplete picture of what farmers really do and who they really are.

Knowing the stories they’ve lived, the people they’ve touched, the scars they bear, and dreams they chase is the only way to know who a farmer really is.

It’s easy to make the same mistake with Jesus––the mistake of buying into an inaccurate and heavily doctored image of him. Today, a stereotypical picture of him looks something like this: long, luscious hair, smooth, pale complexion, perfectly groomed beard, and a flawlessly white garment made of the finest fabric. He is so ethereal and mystical in these portrayals, almost too aloof to concern himself with the affairs of earth. We seldom contemplate the raw humanity of his nature.

The more accurate picture would have been this: cropped, curly hair; rugged, dark complexion, a slightly undomesticated beard, and a rough brown tunic made of cheap linen. His appearance was as average as a first-century Jew could get. Nothing about him would have disclosed his identity as God in human form. Concealed under this flesh and bone, however, was more than a carpenter, good moral teacher, or even an archetype of love and sacrifice. He was a Savior on a divine res-

cue mission, determined to save and redeem society’s most despised and rejected. …

The landscape: first-century Palestine.

The weather: scorchingly hot and arid.

Following numerous miles of hiking through mountainous terrain, today’s agenda is a divine appointment with a most unexpected attendee.

In approximately 30 AD, Jesus is traveling to Galilee from Jerusalem. The typical journey can be made either by hiking along the coastal route through the Plain of Sharon or crossing over the Jordan river and traveling across Perea, later circling to the eastern side of Galilee. Due to theological and racial tensions, Jews fastidiously avoid the shortest route between Jerusalem and Galilee. That route passes through Samaria, the region Jesus now seeks to enter.

The Jews and Samaritans detest one another. After the Jewish exile from Israel in 722 BC, a remnant group of Jews remained in Palestine and constructed a hybrid form of Judaism.

They moved the official place of worship from Jerusalem to Mount Gerizim, discarded nineteen of the twenty-four books of the traditional Jewish canon, but, worst of all, they intermarried with surrounding nations, diluting their Jewish identity. This was social (and religious) heresy in light of contemporary Jewish laws. Seven hundred years later, Jews view the Samaritans as the contemptible race of defectors who had betrayed their heritage. Samaritans view the Jews as the self-righteous, pious elite who spurn those who fall short of their theological and ancestral superiority. Violent confrontations between both ethnicities are not uncommon, so as Jesus travels into Samaria, he enters a region of virulent

racial hostility. He is, in a sense, behind enemy lines.

Having hiked nearly twenty miles through mountainous terrain, Jesus arrives in Samaria in a state of sheer exhaustion. Sweating profusely, he comes to the town of Sychar where he finds a well, sits down, and rests. He looks around. It’s noon, and the landscape is desolate. He sends his disciples to buy food from the nearby town while he stays on the outskirts near the well. He is all alone.

Several minutes later, a Samaritan woman arrives to draw water. This is very strange. At that time, women usually gather together at dawn or dusk to retrieve water. The timing of their chore facilitates friendships among the town’s women and avoids the heat of the sun. This woman, however, comes alone in one of the hottest hours of the day. Her lone presence is unusual, and it is likely indicative of her disrepute among other women in town.

Fastening the pulley’s hook onto her jar, the last thing she expects as she lowers it into the well is to interact with the mysterious man watching her. Jewish men—especially Jewish rabbis—do not publicly speak to women in first century Palestine. Moreover, Jews and Samaritans almost never interact due to racial and theological tension that conversation would exacerbate. That Jesus, a male Jewish rabbi, would interact with an outcast Samaritan woman would have been unthinkable. Jesus makes the first move to break the silence.

“Will you give me a drink?” he asks politely.

“You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman,” she snaps back. “How can you ask me for a drink?”

She is stunned by his willingness to break social customs. But Jesus is unfazed. In fact, he uses her resistance to introduce the real issue he seeks to address.

“If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water … Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Pivoting on the concept of water, Jesus calmly maneuvers from the physical to the spiritual, from the seen to the unseen, from the temporal to the eternal.

This is His classic conversational strategy. Very carefully, He sows His words with spiritual seeds designed to implant a curiosity for the mysterious within the listener. The water Jesus promises alleviates spiritual dehydration. It is the invitation to a relationship with himself so that whoever drinks of His water will satiate the deepest, yet often repressed, thirst of the human soul–– to know God. The woman recognizes the conversation’s paradigm shift, and she investigates.

“Sir,” she says, “give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

Stopping here, one would expect Jesus to immediately give her the water.

She seems willing to trust Him, so it only seems natural for Him to accept.

This however, is the opposite of what Jesus does. Instead of offering the woman what she asks for, Jesus steers the conversation into a painful topic.

“Go, call your husband and come back,” Jesus asks.

“I have no husband.”

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“You are right when you say that you have no husband,” Jesus says. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

If a seed falls on cold, calloused soil, it will never take root. It might as well fall on concrete. To ensure the seed is not wasted, farmers plow the ground until it is tender enough to receive the seed.

This is exactly what Jesus does.

Jesus knows the baggage she carries from being a quintuple divorcee and current adulteress. He also knows that the facade the woman wishes to put up to conceal her guilt is the very thing that will hamper her ability to embrace his living water. So though it seems painful and even pitiless, he withholds his offer of eternal life until she relinquishes her past. She cannot have her shame and his living water simultaneously. She must choose one.

Without opening her heart to embrace the seed of truth Jesus offers, her heart will never truly be at peace. And Jesus won’t let her stay like that.

Now that she has been found out, she deflects Jesus’ doctoral diagnosis with a theological inquiry.

“Sir,” she confesses, “I can see you are a prophet. Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the only place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

She hopes to redirect the conversation into an abstract, impersonal controversy regarding worship. But Jesus knows exactly what she is doing. In fact, this is the direction he wants to go. Despite her resistance, Jesus has planted a seed, and it has lodged exactly in the place he sought to sow. He now waits patiently for its fruition.

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“Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem… The time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks.”

Once again, Jesus uses His technique of transforming physical topics into spiritual realities. True worship, according to Him, is not about temples, mountains, or even religious atmospheres. True worship is to love God with mind and with heart, in spirit and in truth. That is what the Father seeks. That is why Jesus has come all the way to Samaria—to teach a lonely, guilt-ridden outcast what true worship really means. The seedlings are emerging, but the fruit has not yet yielded.

“I know the Messiah is coming,” she confesses. “When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

She is cornered. In a desperate attempt to evade Jesus’ invitation, she proposes one last excuse. She objects that only the Messiah, the one who will come with an everlasting kingdom, will be the one she trusts. Until then, this conversation is over.

This, however, is exactly what Jesus wanted. In seeking to discontinue the conversation, she inadvertently agreed to trust the very person speaking to her––the Messiah himself, and Jesus takes this opportunity. The buds are sprouting.

“I who speak to you am he,” Jesus declares.

As soon as he says this, his disciples return from gathering food. She is stunned. She cannot believe what she just heard, yet in a strange way, she

does believe it. It is he, the Messiah, the one she has waited for her entire life. The sowing was successful; the fruit has yielded.

Leaving her water jar, she runs into town and begins exclaiming that she has found the Messiah, the Savior of the world. The disciples look over their shoulders at the Samaritan as she runs by, and then they turn to Jesus. They are clueless, but Jesus doesn’t respond.

Instead, he watches the woman in the distance as she rejoices after taking her first sip of living water. A smile breaks across his face.

Sitting down near the well, the disciples break and distribute the bread they just bought from the village. They also ask why on earth Jesus was talking to a Samaritan. The bread makes its round to Jesus, but he motions “No” with his hand. Looking around and remembering he has just hiked twenty miles, the disciples become concerned with Jesus’ health.

“Rabbi, eat something,” they plead.

“My food,” Jesus claims, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. Even now the reaper draws his wages, even now he harvests the crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together.”

Spiritual harvesting is not easy. In fact, without God’s intervention, it is impossible. For just one person, Jesus hiked over twenty miles, shattered contemporary mores, and pried into the most awkward and painful part of a woman’s life just to offer her living water.

One person, one heart, one recipient of his salvation is worth all that sweat and toil.

As a child, I was captivated by my dad’s farming expertise. Tractor, truck, fence, or barn, he knew how to repair any issue. I tried to help in these endeavours, but I frequently exacerbated the problem by mishearing his directions. My dad, however, would calmly walk over, explain the correct procedure, and effortlessly undo the mess I had made. I stood and watched in wonder. Somehow, he would repair in seconds what I thought impossible to accomplish. Jesus’ mastery is the same, though he works through spiritual techniques.

He is the skilled locator of souls and the master harvester––the expert farmer who does not till fields with a plow of iron but tills hearts with the words of life. He doesn’t sow with seeds of plants, but with seeds of his own truth. He doesn’t harvest crops for profit or gain, but He harvests people for worship and relationship. And until He redeems everyone willing to become a true worshipper of the living God, He will not stop tilling, sowing, and harvesting so that the sower and reaper may be glad together. Farming is an expertise. One can only marvel as they watch the expert Farmer.

logos . 45

Death in the Pot Shayley Martin

You may know the God who led an

entire people out of slavery by splitting a sea. Or who made a couple loaves of bread and some fish into a meal for more than 5,000 people. But there’s another story that you don’t hear about as often. It’s about the same God, but for me it makes the whole rest of the Bible hit different. I want you to meet the God of exploding cucumbers.

The story is in 2 Kings. It’s only four verses. There was a prophet in Israel named Elisha, who lived during a time when Israel’s king wasn’t really listening to God. God did miracles through Elisha that Christians usually only associate with Jesus, like raising people from the dead. And after one such passage, in which he brings a foreign woman’s son back to life, there’s this unassuming little section: Elisha returned to Gilgal and there was a famine in that region. While the company of the prophets was meeting with him, he said to his servant, “Put on the large pot and cook some stew for these prophets.”

One of them went out into the fields to gather herbs and found a wild vine and picked as many of its gourds as his garment could hold. When he returned, he

cut them up into the pot of stew, though no one knew what they were.The stew was poured out for the men, but as they began to eat it, they cried out, “Man of God, there is death in the pot!” And they could not eat it.

Elisha said, “Get some flour.” He put it into the pot and said, “Serve it to the people to eat.” And there was nothing harmful in the pot.

– 2 Kings 4:38-41 Elisha had just come from a different region—no famine is mentioned there.

But these prophets in Gilgal were probably scraping by, tired and hungry.

They were desperate enough, at least, to eat unknown wild gourds.

Around the Mediterranean there grows a wild vine called the exploding cucumber. When you press on an exploding cucumber, its large seeds squirt out in a “stream of mucilaginous liquid” [1]. Every part of the vine is toxic and causes vomiting, diarrhea, and sometimes death [2]. It’s not certain that the “gourds” in 2 Kings were exploding cucumbers, but many commentators think they were because the Hebrew word used is paqqu’ah, which comes from the verb paqa’ meaning ‘to split, spring off, burst’ [3, 4]. Either way, that’s what the prophets were up against: not an invading army or a gag-

gle of demons, but a weird-looking, noxious wild vegetable.

The passage doesn’t say outright that God is the one who made the soup suitable to eat, but that’s the clear implication. Flour alone can’t neutralize the poison in an exploding cucumber (nor the other kind of gourd that some scholars think the prophets gathered).

This particular reversal from deadly to edible was a miracle.

Yet the gourd story stands in stark contrast to the miracles on either side of it. The previous miracle is about God using Elisha to bring a woman’s son back to life when he dies of a mysterious sickness. In a dramatic scene, Elisha lays himself on the boy, “mouth to mouth, eyes to eyes, hands to hands” (2 Kings 4:34). The boy revives and sneezes seven times, and his grateful mother falls at Elisha’s feet. That’s the preceding story.

The next story is very short—a little bit of bread becomes enough to feed a hundred people after God says, “‘They will eat and have some left over’” (2 Kings 4:43). And in the story after that, God uses Elisha to heal the leprosy of a foreign commander. He tells the commander to wash seven times in the Jordan River, and the commander gets angry because that seems too simple.

But the commander’s servants convince him to follow Elisha’s instructions. He is healed and decides to worship only God (2 Kings 5:1-15).

All three of those miracles would make good movie scenes. God spoke; people both cried out to Him and doubted Him openly; healing was accentuated with dramatic gestures. The gourd story wouldn’t be nearly as fun to watch.

Besides the prophets calling Elisha “man of God,” nobody invoked God at all, and God didn’t speak aloud. And all that Elisha did to fix the situation was drop in a handful of flour. It probably would have looked to a passerby like he was just thickening the soup a little.

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Yet because of God’s simple intervention through Elisha, one hundred people were saved from death, or at least from terrible sickness.

This is the God of exploding cucumbers.

The prophets made a pot of soup that, instead of filling their stomachs, would have turned them inside out and emptied them completely. They didn’t just botch the soup—they reversed its original purpose. But God, quietly and unceremoniously, fixed it. They got to eat a meal together without having to forage and cook again, even though they shouldn’t have been able to eat what they had prepared at all. He took their mistake, their ineffective and harmful attempt at feeding themselves, and made it into something good. There was nothing harmful in the pot.

Many of us are lucky enough not to lack food like the prophets did, but we still lack things like time, energy, and security, or we feel them threatened.

And like the prophets, we grab the first thing that looks helpful, never suspecting that it will turn us inside out and scrape us dry. For me, I like to grab onto the feeling that I’m being helpful, that I’m needed. But instead of sustaining me, that feeling gradually twists my thoughts until I reorganize my life around it and derive all my self-worth from it. And that’s damaging. If I prove unhelpful, if something or someone fails despite having my help, I feel empty and useless.

We all grab onto life-sucking solutions.

I used to think of Jesus’s horrible, people-inflicted death as reflecting some sadism that we all have in common. But of course, the religious leaders didn’t harm Him just for the sake of harming Him. They harmed Him for the same reason that most people do most things—because they thought it would help them. They felt their power and security and sense of normalcy threatened, and they grabbed what looked

like a good solution, for them and maybe even for their whole nation.

Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.

“What are we accomplishing?” they asked.

“Here is this man performing many signs.

If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”

Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”

He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one. So from that day on they plotted to take his life.

– John 11:47-53 The religious leaders’ solution turned out to be a nasty explod- i n g cucumber. If Jesus’s death had somehow been final—if we had really managed to separate ourselves from God completely—we would not only have d e s t - royed our chances of getting the security and normalcy and unity we were looking for, but we would have emptied ourselves of everything good.

But then, God did more than just fix our mess—He made it into the greatest gift ever given! Just as He made the purge-inducing stew into a meal that the prophets could share, He used our mistake to destroy the last barrier between us and Him. When Jesus died, he suffered the punishment that should have been ours. When he came back to life, he defeated death.

sake. And sometimes that backfires because I spend tons of time and effort angling for that feeling, only to fail or feel unappreciated or realize I haven’t been helpful at all. About a month ago, I stressed and scraped so much that I got sick. I laid in bed for a solid two weeks with the shades drawn, doing nothing. And I realized that the world didn’t fall apart. I realized that everyone was fine. I moved to a spot by the window, stretched out in the sun and truly rested for the first time in a while.

That’s the God of exploding cucumbers—when we cook up nasty things, when there’s death in the pot and we’re preparing to feast, He doesn’t just click his tongue and throw our food in the trash. He makes poison into sustenance.

Notes [1] Barki, Beste. “Ecballium elaterium.”

The Nature of My Memories. Blogger, December 7,2015. http://natureofmymemories.blogspot.com/2015/12/ecballium-elaterium.html [2] “Cucurbitaceae,” Meyler’s Side Effects of Drugs, 16th ed. (Elsevier, 2016).

“2 Kings 4:39.” Bible Hub. Accessed November 1, 2020.

[3] “2 Kings 4:39.” BibleHub. https://biblehub.com/commentaries/2_kings/4-39. htm.

[4] The New Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius Hebrew-English Lexicon, 1979, s.v. “ .”

[5] All All Biblical quotations from the NIV translation.

Here’s a much smaller personal example. As I mentioned, too often I like the feeling of helpfulness more than the chance to help people for their own

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The Scandal of Real Food Bradley Yam

We do not presume to come to this your table, O Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table. But you are the same Lord, whose nature is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the Flesh of your dear son Jesus Christ, and to drink his Blood, that we may continually dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.

– Prayer of Humble Access

Acccording to a Chinese idiom

, there is an ancient Chinese myth that a filial son can cure his parent’s diseases by cutting off meat from his leg and feeding it to them. Over time, the idiom has come to represent filial piety. This practice might seem superstitious, medieval, even barbaric to us, but it says something about the hierarchy of value in ancient Chinese society. It expresses the primacy of progenitors because the existence of their offspring depends on them. Like most other hierarchies in the world, Chinese filial piety is mediated by food.

The food chain that we imagine is more than an ecological description. It’s a hierarchy of consumption that says who gets to live at the expense of another.

We seldom think about eating as an act of survival, but everything that we eat was once alive. Then, to insist that we should die a natural death is to place ourselves at the top of that hierarchy.

That’s not too far off from implying that to eat another human being is a special kind of evil.

Montaigne famously used the cannibalistic practices of the Tupinamba

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people in Brazil as an example of cultural relativism. But we shouldn’t be too distracted by the exceptional cases of cannibalism that do emerge in history: the Tupinamba (supposedly) ate the flesh of their dead enemies in a ceremonial honor ritual, not for subsistence.

In contrast, the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist ought to be understood precisely as consumption from necessity, as an act of survival. [1] This is the essence of real food: that which sustains and nourishes us.

It would be reasonable to a bystander then to experience confusion, perhaps revulsion, that a religion would believe that they are subsisting on the flesh of their leader. But it goes beyond sacrilege if we are to take their claim seriously that their leader is also their God. This represents a complete contradiction, even a reversal, in the hierarchy of value that these religious folk espouse. It ought to make us sit up and notice.

The Christian scriptures are full of evidence that the Eucharistic practice is not anomalistic but central to understanding the Christian faith itself.

In the creation narrative in Genesis 3, it could be argued that death is introduced not as a direct curse of God but as a result of being separated from the fruit of life. Mankind is banished from Eden and is forced to produce his own food “by the sweat of [his] brow,” but this food was not meant to sustain him indefinitely, hence it will only feed him “until [he] returns to the ground.” In other words, real food leads to real life.

Man’s need for real food continues to echo through the biblical narrative.

God demands a child sacrifice from Abraham, and it has to be his only beloved son, Isaac, in a parallel to the sacrificial practices of some sects in the ancient near east. But this sacrificial hierarchy is subverted when God interrupts the sacrifice and provides a sheep in place of Isaac. God implies that the sheep is a mere stand-in when He promises that He Himself will provide the real sacrifice.

The Israelites wander through the desert and are going to starve. In an act of miraculous intervention, God sends down manna, a bread-like substance, to sustain them throughout their journey. God’s only stipulation is that they do not gather it on the Sabbath.

There are a multiplicity of laws relating to food and food production in the Levitical law, including sacrifices and diet restrictions. It created the categories of “clean” and “unclean” food.

The full meaning of this is not apparent until Jesus, who bears the title of the Son of God, later also comes to be understood as the true sacrificial lamb of God, who takes away sin once and for all. His flesh and blood is (1) the true sacrifice (2) the bread of life (3) the food by which we are made clean.

To partake in the Eucharist then is to intentionally embrace feeding on God. In John 6:52, the onlookers argued fiercely amongst themselves: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Instead of watering down their supposition, Jesus confirms it: “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” Je-

sus describes the Eucharist as a necessary act of survival.

“Does this offend you?” Jesus continues to ask, “then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before!”

Any offense at the consumption of His human flesh can only be exponentially multiplied by the revelation of his divine nature. The act of the Eucharist can only be understood as nothing less than a scandal.

The Eucharist subverts the hierarchy of consumption. But it doesn’t end with a single twist: mankind does not end up on top. The followers of Christ were not called to take advantage of his sacrifice but follow him in it. “The

disciple is not greater than his master.”

In Romans 12, the Christian apostle Paul espoused the following dogma: “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.” The Eucharist doesn’t just subvert the hierarchy of values––it continuously transforms it.

The Eucharist reveals that the Christian religion is deeply transformative.

It asks for nothing less than a revolution of our entire understanding of the nature of reality, and the reality of nature. It asserts that the hierarchies of value and consumption that we think make sense in this world are actually

built around false notions and absurd power dynamics. The Eucharist invites us into a new world, a world of living sacrifices, and it does so by asking us to eat our God. Notes [1] Without getting into an endless controversy, it suffices to say that many Christians do believe that the “real presence” of Christ is present in the elements of bread and wine, which are subsequently consumed.

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community

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Tasting Eden Se Ri Lee

My phone started beeping sporadically in the middle of my YouTube workout. Five KakaoTalk messages popped up, all sent from Umma. [1] Dinner was going to be served in five minutes.

Grumbling under my breath, I hurried over to the kitchen. “I’ll eat the leftovers later – is that okay? I had lunch like two hours ago,” I told Umma apologetically. I returned to my mat where I laid down, unable to resume exercising.

I brooded over whether I should’ve just stayed in the kitchen and eaten.

I tried counting the times I had eaten with my family in the past four months I’ve been home. It shocked me how easily I could recall those occasions yet struggled to remember the times I had chosen to skip a family meal—there were simply too many. Grimacing at the soundness of Appa’s nickname for me as the “lodger,” I wondered why I had trouble engaging in the simple act of communal eating. [2] My reason for not joining my family for dinner was, though valid, so trivial: I wasn’t hungry enough to have dinner at that hour. If I had eaten during regular lunch hours, I would have been hungry by the time Umma made the meal announcement. Yet, I ate lunch late because I wasn’t hungry around noon because I had a late breakfast because I woke up late. Everything I did, including the timing of my eating, was at my own convenience.

At Yale, a self-oriented meal schedule seemed perfectly normal. “Oh, I’m a bit busy” or “I’m in the middle of something” had always been passable excuses for declining sudden meal requests, which were so rare in the first place. Scheduling meals while frantically inserting them into GCals was widely the norm. Yet, at home, it felt uncomfortable—almost sinful—to say

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no to a meal request, even when made last minute.

The discrepancy between eating culture at Yale and eating culture at home confused me. Was I guilt-tripping myself for leaving the kitchen, or was feeling guilty a normal response to situations like these? According to the culture at Yale, the former would be true. But my childhood memories pointed me towards the latter. Before my years at boarding school and college, I remember dropping whatever I was doing at the moment and zooming off to the kitchen as soon as Umma or Appa announced a meal. My time away from home slowly shifted my eating habits from being community-oriented to self-tailored.

Nostalgic for my childhood days, I resolved to comply with what was normal at home. A few days later, Umma made another last-minute meal announcement (coincidentally) near the end of my workout. I quickly dabbed the sweat off my face and walked towards the kitchen, abandoning my usual routine of heading straight into the shower.

I saw that the rest of the family had already started eating. Heart beating faster than normal, I took a deep breath as I slid next to Unnie, trying hard not to meet her startled gaze.

[3] The rich aroma of scallions mixed with soy sauce loosened the tension in my stomach. I wondered why the smell of Umma’s cooking never once enticed me to stay. I realized it was because I had never noticed. On past occasions, the frustration I felt at Umma’s sudden interjection blinded my senses from everything else.

Feeling suddenly ravenous, I reached for the half-eaten plate of tofu pancakes when Oppa pointed to an odd-

ly patterned china set scattered on the island table. [4] He looked around the dining table and asked whose it was.

Surprisingly, it was Appa who answered. “It’s from one of my Instagram followers.”

I almost choked. “Wait, you have an Instagram?” Unnie and I blurted out at the same time.

“And one of your followers sent you a present? Is it a sponsorship? How popular is your account?” Oppa added.

The rest of the meal went by in the blink of an eye, with Unnie, Oppa, Umma, and I making futile attempts to guess Appa’s username and pry more information out.

As the plates turned empty and Oppa got up to return to his Latin philosophy studies, I fought the urge to stall him and everyone else. The last one to leave, I regretted all the times I missed out on laughing and engaging with my family. All this time, I was blatantly ignorant of how good God was to make food an essential human need. He could have sustained us through some other way; yet, He made food something we cannot live without. “Food must have a purpose other than sustenance,” I thought.

Now that I had this meal, the answer was so obvious. Food is a medium through which humans can put their individual lives on hold, reconvene, and build relationships. Without it, we wouldn’t experience the frequent joys of connecting with each other – we would easily get lost in our own busyness. Why then, in all my years of eating, had I not realized its purpose and power in bringing people together?

While dwelling on this question, Branson Parler’s article in Think Christian led me to the story of the fall in Genesis 3.

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[5] Parler explained that when Adam sinned, he isolated himself from God. He hid behind the bushes with Eve, both ashamed of their nakedness when God sought him. It was this isolation that broke the relationship between God and humanity.

What Parler wrote next elucidated why food’s purpose—reuniting people— didn’t strike me as obvious: sin broke human relationships too, and this normalized isolation in the world. The normalization of isolation obscured the plainness of food’s glue-like power.

It seemed to me, at first glance, that human relationships were untouched by Adam and Eve. “[Eve] also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it... and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden” (Genesis 3:6, 8). Together, they sinned and attempted to hide their shame.

The next couple of verses cleared up my confusion, showing how quick Adam was to turn against Eve. When God started questioning Adam whether he had eaten from the tree, Adam said, “The woman you put here with me––she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it” (Genesis 3:12). In a feeble attempt to justify himself, Adam tried to reason with God that he was somehow less guilty than his wife, without whom he wouldn’t have sinned.

It was in this moment that Adam isolated himself from Eve, breaking the

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first human relationship. It was then that isolation became a part of the human identity. The concept of isolation didn’t exist in God’s original plan for the world; it never had a place in the Garden of Eden, as Eden itself was the state of being in eternal communion with one another and with God. The concept of eating alone, living alone, and doing things alone, which became normalized in fast-paced settings and became at times a necessity because of the pandemic, didn’t exist back in the days of Eden.

I couldn’t even imagine what living in the Garden must have been like for Adam and Eve because existing in unending and unbroken relationships seemed an impossibility in today’s world.

The pervasive isolation made it hard for me to see that food’s purpose went far beyond basic sustenance and gastronomic pleasure. Food is God’s attempt to preserve His original order amid the chaos that entered the world through Adam’s sin. It is one of God’s many gifts that lets us experience Eden, from which sin banished us. The greatest of these gifts, I think, is Jesus, who tore the veil that separated humans from God, permanently mending humanity’s broken relationship with Him. Jesus further united us all in communion by breaking His body as bread and pouring His blood out as wine for us all to share.

Just as God invited me back to Eden through Jesus, He had done His part in giving me food so that I could live out the life He had originally meant for me to experience. All I need to do is to accept and embrace its purpose.

The next time I receive an unexpected meal request, I will remember that a shared meal is like tasting Eden, a place that was once so impossibly out of reach, yet, through the gifts of God, became accessible to me on a daily basis. Though eating solo will still be necessary on some occasions, I now know to treat every meal invite with more respect and caution and to thank God for repeatedly inviting me into Eden––for patiently waiting for me to finally taste His goodness.

Notes [1] Umma means Mom in Korean.

[2] Appa means Dad in Korean.

[3] In Korean culture, females call their older sisters Unnie, as it is considered rude to call them by their actual names.

[4] Similarly, it is inappropriate to call an older brother by his actual name. For females, the appropriate title to use to address their older brothers is Oppa.

[5] Branson Parler. “Eating alone, eating with Jesus.” Think Christian, August 31, 2015. https://thinkchristian.reframemedia.com/ eating-alone-eating-with-jesus.

Taste and See Shi Wen Yeo

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

– Matthew 11:28.

Food

has a cult following. Consider the Yale College Facebook page named “Free Food at Yale.” Before COVID-19, everyday there were announcements upon announcements asking people to come to claim free food all around campus—leftover pizzas, chicken nuggets and all things of the sort. Having gone to a few of these gatherings myself, I was surprised at the number of people who showed up—often more than the number of people who showed up at my weekly Bible study. Even now, to get people to show up to mixers, Zoom conferences or take their surveys, many student organisations promise food as an incentive.

These food-based advertising campaigns tend to be exceptionally effective when the food is a hard-to-make or hard-to-find cultural staple. Rather than the generic pizza, Consider the Korean-American Students at Yale’s recent offerings. Their virtual movie screening of the Korean film The Host was paired with free Shin Ramen and Choco Pies, which could be picked up from a Cross Campus booth. Anyone who grew up in a remotely Korean environment immediately associates these foods with comfort and love.

Needless to say, the movie night was incredibly successful.

Many churches, too, have been using these sorts of food-based advertising campaigns. This phenomenon is especially prevalent in immigrant churches. So the question arises—why has the church harnessed the power of physical sustenance as a channel of evangelism?

“Stay for lunch!” some church members would say to a first-time tentative church-goer. Back home in Singapore, I once saw a church waving mammoth banner that read something like, “Bring your lunch! Join us here!” For context, it was directly opposite a sweltering hot hawker centre and sought to offer reprieve for lunchtime diners within the church compounds.

It is undeniable that food is a primary means through which many first encounter Christ. Food is often used to entice non-Christians into a Sunday service. And evidently, food is effective.

I like to think about it from the perspective of a dear friend I met at the Korean United Methodist Church here in New Haven. Attending graduate school outside of Korea, without friends or family in a cold, lonely foreign land, she comes to church every

Sunday. To her, the familiar strains of the Korean language in church are lovely to hear lovely to hear; but, it is really the lingering smell of kimchi wafting towards the sanctuary from the basement of the church, the steady bubble of the stew, and the hiss of the rice cooker that remind her that she is welcome. It speaks to a primal side of her, surpassing the mental boundaries that she might have and speaking to her inner self who knows the love infused in her mother’s cooking. While initially skeptical,the food provides a clear message of love—“You are safe here. You are welcome here. You belong.” That is the same message spoken over by the sermons she hears on Sundays. There are many others like her.

And the effectiveness of food in increasing church attendance makes sense. It is far easier to say, “Come to church with me for some kimchi and rice!” than it is to simply say “come to church with me.” Food lowers inhibitions, increasing the instances of non-Christians accepting the invitation. This model seems to work particularly well in immigrant churches, where the very identity of church is defined in contrast to an outgroup.

In the case of this Korean church in New Haven, the appeal was finding Korean food and Korean community in an otherwise American, English-speaking society. In this way,

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56 . Food: Fall 2020

immigrant communities seem to align themselves with that particular aspect of Christianity—the outcast group defined against external forces.

Not only does food welcome the lonely and the foreign. It also, I think, parallels the ubiquitous love proclaimed in many Sunday sermons. Just as it is written in Psalm 139, “Where can I flee from Your presence? If I go up to the heavens, You are there; if I make my bed in the depths, You are there.”

At the point at which one bites into the food offered by a church, there may be an instant link to the food they ate back in their home country, the food that their mother prepared growing up, the food of familiarity and belonging. Experiencing this warm, primal love again in a church links those experiences of love with the church itself, reminding them that God is omnipresent in time and in space, giving us familiar comforts even in a foreign land.

But this power of food comes with its associated dangers and risks. In the Korean church I attended as a child, food was often a source of a lot of tension and politics. My earliest memories of church involve adults stampeding from the 400-person service down to the canteen, where women would dole out food from large pots and men would sit and eat. I remember my mother stressing out about weekly small group fellowship—while she wanted to prepare food that evaded criticism from other women, the food had to be modest enough to not cause a burdensome expectation on the woman in charge of preparing food the next week. The kind of food people would bring to fellowship also drew many comments about their socioeconomic status and the extent of their commitment to church, which

drew the church into human politics and divisiveness.

The biggest risk is if, in the end, food is the thing that is holding everyone together and keeping everyone coming to church, then it has distracted from the gathering’s main purpose, which is to learn about and worship God. And the danger is always present and very strong, simply because in a community where people share most things in common—language, attire, food—there could end up being no room for Jesus to bind everyone together. A church must always be conscious of this risk and not let food become the idol.

The next time someone offers you food at church, stay. Though their lips might say “stay for lunch!” what they really are saying is this: “taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in Him.” Food can be the way in which many people from all nations and tongues apprehend the Lord, making His kingdom come over all the earth, that more people might come to know and love Him.

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If You Give a Man a Kit Kat Daniel Chabeda

He is crying, quietly because he’s al-

ready a spectacle lying in the mulch beside the only path to the laundry room.

You wish you didn’t recognize him, but you already made eye contact through his curtain of tears. Maybe it’s an orgo midterm again, you think charitably.

Crouching down in the soil next to your new suitemate, you can feel his distress like honey bees in your teeth. Thinking quickly, you tap Brian on the shoulder while reaching into your bag. Brian sits up, and you press a fully wrapped, king-sized Kit Kat into his hands. He wipes his eyes. “Thank you.” You smile, soothed, and offer, “Do you want to talk about it?”

I do. This is a familiar scene: one person feels a negative emotion, someone else offers them food, and both people end up happier. This positive stabilizing effect is termed emotional regulation by psychologists, but does the phenomenon make sense? How does food regulate the emotions of both the food recipient and offerer? If we consider God as an offerer of food to humanity, in what ways do we both become happier?

Behavioral psychologists study the intrapersonal and interpersonal mechanisms of this social interaction, termed

food offering, to understand why eating and offering food makes us feel so good.

Within you and me, there is a psychological and physiological feedback loop: our present emotional state changes the way we consume food, which in turn affects our later emotional state. When we experience stress, we are more likely to consume high-caloric, snack-foods: more chocolate and fewer grapes. [1] The raising of serotonin in the blood from eating these high-carbohydrate, low-protein foods can decrease our feelings of being helpless, distressed, or depressed.[2] Food consumption has a calming effect even for 1-day old infants: babies given a sugary solution by pacifier cried much less than babies who were given water. [3] These intrapersonal mechanisms are deeply ingrained in our regulatory systems before we can even feed ourselves.

The interpersonal mechanisms driving food offering between you and me are less apparent. One plausible explanation for the positive emotions experienced by both the giver and recipient of food is Empathic Emotion Regulation (EER).

According to the EER model, when an observer sees another person in a distressed state, they experience empathy; this empathy transfers the distressed

feelings to the observer. To alleviate this new psychological stress, the observer will aim to soothe the distressed person.

In this model, the empathic response of the observer drives them to take action to help the other person feel better.

Because eating food can have so many calming emotional effects, we offer food items to one another as a means of interpersonally regulating emotions.

Finally (and I think amazingly), this shared experience of stress relief over food leads the two people to feel a closer bond to one another (see Figure 1).

Among the many ways to offer emotional support––verbal encouragement, hugs, direct assistance with a task–– food offering is unique and potent.

Food is an early need. Food offering from parents is one of the first behaviors that one experiences as an infant, and children inevitably form psychological connections between food, emotional regulation, and social interaction.

[4] Secondly, food is such a basic need for survival that to give a food item in your possession to someone else conveys a deep desire for the other person to live, even potentially at your own expense. For those of us who live in food security, we might not consciously make an immediate connection between food

Figure 1. A flowchart adapted from Hamburg et al. illustrating how empathic emotional regulation functions.

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offering and survival, but our visceral emotional response when receiving a free donut reveals that those implications are still present. Lastly, food is a universal need, so food offering has the unique ubiquity to be an appropriate interpersonal behavior irrespective of culture, relationship type, age, sex, etc. While it would be inappropriate in Western culture to soothingly stroke the hair of an acquaintance, food can be offered appropriately even to total strangers with little awkwardness. Nigerian chef Tunde Wey hosts a dinner series, Blackness in America, where unacquainted guests of many races come together over a meal to discuss issues of race, violence, and policing in America. [5] The ability of food offering to facilitate meetings of strangers over a meal even turns enemies into allies and friends. [4] In fact, God did it.

In the Judeo-Christian framework, God is the first and ultimate food offerer.

Genesis, the opening book of this scripture, begins with the account of God creating a delicious and nutritious world full of edible flora. God offers plants to all creatures for their nourishment and, in a stroke of generosity, plants humanity in a beautiful garden where they lack no good food.

And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit.You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.� And it was so. – Genesis 1:29-30 This first food offering from God to humanity is analogous to the early-devel-

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opmental food offering between mother and infant; through this offering, the first sense of connection to, reliance on, and relationship with God is established in humanity.

By Genesis chapter 9, humanity has fallen. Rebellion against God (through an act of eating) led to division and pride and excess and poverty; humanity existed as enemies of God’s peace, justice, and righteousness. And there is death. In this chapter, God expands his previous food offering of plants to include animals.

Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.

But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.

– Genesis 9:3-4 This second offering corresponds to God’s conveyed desire for humans to live, potentially at His own expense.

However, it appears that He withholds a portion of the gift. God prohibits His people from eating meat with blood: its life. Why would a God who desires good for His people withhold something containing life?

To examine the significance of blood, let’s consider our basic motive for eating. We eat to stay alive. And every living plant and animal we have eaten had to die first. This exchange is so familiar it is forgotten: we need to take life away from our future food to sustain our own lives. This bodily necessity can consume our thoughts and actions, but God communicates in Genesis 9 that physical life is not our only need––and we cannot get everything we need for life in its fullness from some meat! The exclusion of blood reveals a condition of lack which alerts us that though our physical vitality might be sustained by meat, we lack spiritual aspects of life as long as we cannot receive the life of the flesh, the blood. When an Israelite let the blood of bulls and goats spill onto the ground, they witnessed their defi-

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ciency as the animal’s blood drained from their diet. God’s command is not an arbitrary prohibition, but a sober, loving signifier of our spiritual need.

This need exists because of sin. I know that this word can evoke strong distaste and maybe even distress due to how some Christians and churches use it to judge, condemn, or prop up their personal morality. But sin is a necessary and accurate word to describe the lack God highlights through the exemption of blood; sin destroys life. Sin separates us from God who is life. Being in sin, we are spiritually dead. This is a huge problem, and requires a huge solution.

The prohibition of blood consumption in Genesis 9 serves as a warning against approaching a solution in insufficient ways, “for it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4). [6] But what is sufficient?

Let’s return to the EER model and consider a response to a more extreme situation. Imagine another scene. She is standing above the gravestone of her father, her form pale and still like paper mâché. Her soul has let out all its air and cannot stop the walls of her heart from caving into the hollow left behind. You tenderly approach her, trying to catch the slips of paper mâché that the wind is stripping off her back.

From up close you notice her eyes are downcast, dragged earthward by the gravity of grief. You take her hand in one of yours and smile empathetically.

You draw your other hand from your bag, and gently press the still-wrapped, king-sized Kit Kat into her palm…

NO! Kit Kats are not enough for death.

And even casseroles, though more appropriate, are not sufficient. The magnitude of the gesture––store bought candy to simple snack to four course meal––must correspond to the severity of the distress. But what kind of food offering is appropriate to regulate distress as large as spiritual death? What meal could be so intimate that it could bridge the gap of enmity between us

and God and form a bond of closeness?

What food did God offer to humankind when we were left dead in our sin, poor and isolated and proud of our impoverished independence? He gave us His only Son, Jesus: the Bread of Life, the Lamb of God. In the context of EER theory, God’s food offering is quite provocative. How despondent and pitiful we must have felt––and made God feel!––for God to scour His parish pantry and refrigerator of perishables in search of just the right item to soothe our squalid state. Picture Him, bent on knee and reaching into the back of Cherubim cupboard for the already-sprouting potatoes––those get tossed into Hell––before He turns and perfectly tends to a wok of Seraphim stir-fry. It won’t be enough, He knows.

The humans who thought they were generally decent people––merely sometimes at fault––are actually dead in their separation from the Life of God. But God wants to bring us close (Isaiah 43:1-7). God wants to call us friends (John 15:15). So finally, God walks up to His own Son’s bedroom. The Son has coexisted in unity with the Father from all eternity. They don’t need to make eye contact. The Son is God; He knows the Father’s will. The Son knows that He will be offered as a sacrifice, that the Bread of Life must be eaten by all humans who would seek eternal life.

The blood of the Lamb must be shed.

Jesus takes the Father’s hand and, in a universal monstrosity, the Father offers Him to us as a free gift: the ultimate food offering.

Jesus Christ was offered to abundantly satisfy our need for spiritual life. He lived on earth generously, fulfilling the needs of countless distressed people.

Then He was unjustly killed. But by the power of God, His body was resurrected to an unending life so that we could receive that same life! Anyone who believes Jesus was resurrected and is living Lord will freely receive life and relationship with God by His grace. If you de-

sire this fulfillment, God has prepared the table.

Through all the psychology and the theology (and the puns), maybe you are still unconvinced that God has anything to do with you. This is a valid doubt.

But how would your perspective of who God is and how He wants to relate with you change if He knocked on the door of your heart? What if he was carrying some food?

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.

– Revelation 3:20 Notes [1] Oliver, G., and Wardle, J. “Perceived Effects of Stress on Food Choice.” Physiology & Behavior 66, no. 3 (1999): 511–15. https:// doi.org/10.1016/s0031-9384(98)00322-9.

[2] Markus, C.r., Panhuysen, G., Tuiten, A., Koppeschaar, H., Fekkes, D., and Peters. M.l. “Does Carbohydrate-Rich, Protein-Poor Food Prevent a Deterioration of Mood and Cognitive Performance of StressProne Subjects When Subjected to a Stressful Task?” Appetite 31, no. 1 (1998): 49–65. https://doi.org/10.1006/appe.1997.0155.

[3] Smith, Barbara A., Fillion, Thomas J., and Blass, Elliott M. “Orally Mediated Sources of Calming in 1- to 3-Day-Old Human Infants.” Developmental Psychology 26, no. 5 (1990): 731–37. https://doi. org/10.1037/0012-1649.26.5.731.

[4] Hamburg, Myrte E., Finkenauer, Catrin, and Schuengel, Carlo. “Food for Love: the Role of Food Offering in Empathic Emotion Regulation.” Frontiers in Psychology 5 (2014). https://doi.org/10.3389/ fpsyg.2014.00032.

[5] Judkis, Maura. “Discomfort Food: Using Dinners to Talk about Race, Violence and America.” The Washington Post. WP Company, August 23, 2016.

[6] All Biblical citations are from the English Standard Version.

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