April 2010 Archives
Values That Should Not Be Forgotten
Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter examines grief and hope, and how these feelings are rooted in a natural environment. Despite the tremendous hardships she endures, Hannah Coulter finds restoration in working the land and serving her community. Through Hannah’s narrative, Berry promotes dissipating agrarian values. Technology has overshadowed the visible position of the farmer, thus creating a disconnection place of origin. Berry attempts to capture the experience of a Southern woman through interaction with the land. Although the veneer has blemishes, he depicts the attitude and hard work necessary for survival. Hannah Coulter and her family depend upon the harvest of the land. She connects to the land, her family, her community, and her faith. The various areas of her life converge, providing a sense of wholeness. Through Hannah, we learn the earth and caring for each other should not be forgotten.
May Reader's Guild Selection: Till We Have Faces
Lister to Peter Kreeft's commentary on C.S. Lewis's solution to evil, worked out in fiction. Kreeft also addresses the fascinating question "Why does God wear disguises?"
"Earth's Crammed With Heaven" - A review of The Supper of the Lamb
“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit around and pluck blackberries.”
The title itself is not misleading – The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection – speaks plainly its intention to take us beyond the pantry shelves and cupboards full of cookbooks, promising tasty dinners and happy times. Still, our group here in Endicott, NY was a little caught off guard, expecting recipes to inspire us as much as words and getting, instead, a complex plainness (“those who do not find me a snob will call me a boor”, p. 9) in the author’s approach to food, life and spirituality. What we thought would be an evening of recipe sampling became instead a collective scratching of the head – was it that we were intimidated by the old-timey baking methods or just not inspired enough to take the time?
Substitute onions for blackberries. Add the verb chopping for plucking and the poet has captured the entirety of Capon’s second chapter in one free-from verse. Capon entreats us to pay attention to the lowly root vegetable: “You think perhaps that it is a brownish yellow vegetable, basically spherical in shape, composed of fundamentally similar layers. All such prejudices should be abandoned. It is what it is, and your work here is to find it out.”
How could any one of us approach this ordinary task with blasphemous, willy-nilly chopping methods ever again? We’ve seen too much to go back. Are we really willing, though, to take the time and creative energy to approach lowly food items as an act of worship, as the author almost demands? We’ve been ruined for the ordinary. And we left money at the bookseller for the privilege.
Ironically, I finished reading the book while recovering from an emergency surgery that required I eat only clear liquids and bland food items. Others of the group were beginning Lenten fasts that limited sugar or meat or alcohol or caffeine. Really, though, what better time to discuss the “reflection” part of Capon’s title? The reflections, summed up in a more-prosaic fashion than Capon’s title or Browning’s poem could be the spirituality of ordinary stuff: “In a real world, nothing is infinitely bad. My bottle of bogus Kirsch bears witness that there is no bottomless pit in any earthly subject – that to be good or bad is not as much of an achievement as to be at all. Even the devil, insofar as he exists, is good. What he does wrong with this existence is all small compared with what God does right about him.” (p. 7)
From poet to prophet, Capon takes a Jeremiah approach to the cultural brainwashing we women have absorbed in our life-long enmity with the calorie (or, “little invisible spooks”, as dubbed by the author). I knew as soon as I heard it that he was right. I just needed the permission to think so. I grew up in the diet-obsessed 1980’s and remember meal after meal at my grandparents’ table – which had once been so generous in biscuit and gravy, bread, butter and tomato slice – where now home-cooking was served up with a side of shame for all that we allowed to enter our mouths. Hearty conversation was replaced with stingy dietary rules; Give us this day prayers were replaced with Father, forgive us, for we have sinned confessions after – and sometimes, during – each mouthful. All for the transgression of allowing a pat of butter on a glistening mound of mashed potato or a slice of frosted chocolate cake after a rousing song of Happy Birthday.
In my generation, shame became the secret ingredient in every recipe handed down from a long line of grandmothers and now Capon gives me permission to go old-school and return our dinner plates to their rightful place of festal, rather than ferial, eating. This is not to say that there is no place for exercise and fasting for our health, but there is also a time to eat and ne’er the twain shall meet. If I could go back to the table and offer to say grace, I would memorize this prayer from chapter three:
“O Lord, refresh our sensibilities. Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in, and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with, and casseroles that put starch and substance in our limp modernity. Take away our fear of fat, and make us glad of the oil which ran upon Aaron’s beard. Give us pasta with a hundred fillings, and rice in a thousand variations. Above all, give us grace to live as true men – to fast till we come to a refreshed sense of what we have and then to dine gratefully on all that comes to hand. Drive far from us, O Most Bountiful, all creatures of air and darkness; cast out the demons that possess us; deliver us from the fear of calories and the bondage of nutrition; and set us free once more in our own land, where we shall serve thee as thou hast blessed us – with the dew of heaven, the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine. Amen.”
May it be so in all rooms and all relationships and all seasons of our lives. May it be so.
Readers Guild
The IAM Readers Guild 2010 blog.