Symposium!

Hey All,

I'm sure many of you are convinced that bringing Andrew on board was just the beginning of a phasing out on my part; gradually I would shift more and more responsibility to him, until eventually he was left holding the bag while I ran away scot free to frolic in fields of laziness.

FEAR NOT! I have returned with a vengeance. Furthermore, we are officially entering a new era in this blog's history. For the next few days, Andrew and I will be collaborating on a virtual conference of sorts; we will both be posting entries about various aspects of the book The Supper of the Lamb, which I have mentioned here before. In case you missed it, SotL (as I will heretofore call it) is... well, not really able to be categorized. It is unlike any book I have read: part cookbook, part food writing, part spiritual meditation, part cultural criticism -- all woven together with a thread of good humor and common sense. It is the kind of book that you want to share with everyone you know, but you aren't sure whether most people will tap into its peculiar sensibilities. For that reason it makes an ideal subject for our first collaborative effort. It contains "many multitudes", themes which are best explored by multiple authors. Without further ado, let the first Semi-Annual Symposium begin!

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Last Monday I attended TU's annual Snuggs Lecture in Religion. I went because the speaker was this guy, and he sounded completely awesome. The lecture was about the intersection of religion and science. I went cautiously expecting another lecture on the topic of evolution and creation (really, is there any more boring subject?), but was pleasantly surprised to discover that the lecture was actually about much more significant issues, the deeper problems that lead science and religion into conflict. The lecture really picked up steam as it went along; it started out with an interesting but perhaps overly technical analysis of necessity versus contingency (according to Scruton the new or "evangelical" atheists take as their foundation the assumption that all things are contingent), but the final section was an analysis of the sacred as it appears throughout human situation. Scruton's basic argument seemed to be that there is no scientific or genealogical explanation which can sufficiently account for the idea of the sacred in human life. His two big examples of the sacred were sex and death (duh), but what really stuck in my mind was the idea of cooking, eating, and drinking as sacred acts. I even boldly raised my hand and asked Dr. Scruton about the connection (knowing him to be a gourmand and an oenophile), and he agreed and gave some nice ties between eating and the divine.

Hopefully you begin to see where I am headed. Robert Farrar Capon titled his book The Supper of the Lamb, partly because of the recipe which winds its way through the book (Lamb for eight persons four times), but also because of the sacramental implications. Let's start with the obvious: The Lord's Supper (the Eucharist if you are a bit more high church, simply "communion" if you take it with wafers and Welch's or, God forbid -- and I mean that literally -- pizza and grape soda) is the perfected, transcendent meal. It is the sacred come to us, the Lord dwelling with us. Yet I think Capon (and Scruton) would say that this is simply the most extravagant example of sacred food. Every day we are presented with the possibility of tasting the divine. Capon says "Only miracle is plain. It is the ordinary that groans with the unutterable weight of glory." The smell of onions frying in butter; the wonder of braising meat; the ineffable mystery of pastry dough: all these point us to the meeting of God and man at the table.

Christ says in Revelation "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." We know this verse, yet I think we often cut it off before the end. When Christ enters in He does not simply wander into our house to admire the furniture and perhaps take off his shoes for a bit. He comes to eat; to sit at the table and enjoy our company course after course. If sex is the most intimate act attainable between two people, then surely eating is the closest we can come together as a community. We break bread together, and at the same time our hearts open up to each other -- and that is completely laying aside the issue of wine (which makes glad the hearts of men), that wonderful glue which binds heart to heart.

Food clearly shows us the heart of God, that glorious excess which helps to define His goodness. That food should not merely sustain but should bring us to rapturous heights; that Christ brings not merely water for nourishment but wine for celebration: these are miracles of extravagant grace that should point us finally to that most sublime extravagance, God become man.

Yet where do we find ourselves today? Far from sacred, food has become lumped solidly in with the secular. We analyze, categorize, and prioritize. All bows before before the altar of nutrition; all is reduced to calorie, carb, cholesterol. If the sacred is concerned with what is beautiful, then the secular busies itself with what is useful. As we have reduced sex down to an easily manipulatable biological function and offered it up prepackaged, so too we have converted food into a tool for survival, precooked and packed in neat little boxes waiting to be unfrozen.

Even the Church has fallen prey to the traps of the world. Every Sabbath, most Christians follow their formal worship by honoring (and eating) a sacred (and often literal) cow. The Sunday lunch has become an institution, and Denny's from coast to coast fill up every week with overweight, waddling Evangelicals waiting to stuff their faces with ham and eggs. We have forgotten the art of the family meal cooked slowly at home, blinded by the convenience of eating out. By abandoning the restraint that comes as a result of cooking your own food, we have embraced a culture where food is a notable exception to the clarion call for self-control (I am waiting for the new translation where Paul exhorts us to cultivate the jelly doughnuts of the Spirit). Or take the ghastly Protestant approach to alcohol. Instead of wine and beer leading us to celebration, we have banned them as dangerous objects, things to be shunned lest we indulge in excess. Yes, drunkenness should be avoided, but it is more evil by far to call unclean that which God not only calls clean but delights in. By thinking of food and alcohol merely in terms of their end results, we have lost the magic of the things themselves.

Capon calls us to rally against this relentless drive toward convenience and dullness. He desires to shock our palettes awake, and in the process awaken us to the mystery of the ordinary. Eating (and hopefully cooking) is something we do every day, yet it should be to us a source of wonder, for in it we experience the divine. In my next post I will more fully explore this perilous change from sacred to secular. For now, go open a bottle of Pinot Noir, whip up some homemade stock, and savor awhile the foretaste of glory we have been given.