Desire, cont.

Per the audience's request, I want to share with you what I offered our group during our sharing time this past weekend.  It is a beautiful excerpt from an essay in The Spirit of Food; this particular essay, written by Denise Frame Harlan, has been extremely poignant in my reading of this book so far.  The entire essay is gorgeous, like a refreshing summer rain in North Carolina, but I only read a couple of paragraphs.  I want to share them with you.


Where I begin, the author is describing her experience of sitting in a lecture in college.


He pulled out a stained yellow copy of Robert Farrar Capon's The Supper of the Lamb, opened the book, settled his glasses on his nose, and began to read.


"For all its greatness," Capon says, "the created order cries out for further greatness still.  The most splendid dinner, the most exquisite food, the most gratifying company, arouse more appetites than they satisfy.  They do not slake man's thirst for being; they whet it beyond all bounds."


I listened, stunned.  Are Christians supposed to have appetites and thirst?  To whet is to sharpen - are we to sharpen our appetites for the things of earth?  The professor's face flushed and flushed again, and tears streamed from his eyes as he read about "The Inconsolable Heartburn...by which the heart looks out astonished at the world and in its loving, wakes and breaks at once."  This heartburn, Capon says, this sadness for what is not yet here is ultimately a longing for God's final feast, the supper of the Lamb, when the Host of Creation will set all things right and will do so more beautifully than we can imagine.


The created order cries out - I knew that from Romans.  Creation groans for further greatness still.  Greatness in the kitchen?  Greatness as a supper?


I knew intellectually that God was not about souls but about all things, just as I'd memorized from the book of Colossians - above all things, working through all things.  But literally all things?  Less than ideal things?  Gritty things?  Risky things?  Beautiful, sensual things?


As if it were a near-death experience, my life flashed before me while the balding professor read scenes of wild blueberries eaten on a sunny mountainside, of riding a bicycle with hands raised to the sky, of watermelon rind pickles eaten at Thanksgiving, and of fingers tipped with green olives.  I remembered my first taste of Communion wine at midnight Mass in the Colorado Rockies, my favorite sugar cream pie, and my grandmother's homemade noodles with chicken.


I glanced to my side to see my classmates as astonished as me by the professor weeping for joy over onions and flour, sausages and cigars, over a God who lavishes the whole universe with his affection, a God who holds us all in a state of dearness.  The pen fell from my hand without my notice.  I was more openhearted in that moment than I had ever been.


I'd never known what to do with all the love in my heart for this beautiful mess of a world. All this time, I'd be trying to temper and tame my passion for mountains and tea and road trips and cheesecake and people.  I'd known God my whole life, had known Christ for a decade, and had focused on Jesus' suffering and sacrifice.  I'd been afraid to love anything too much for fear that I'd disappoint God and prove myself too worldly, too attached to the everyday stuff of creation that would hinder my race toward heaven and the life hereafter. I'd been afraid, and I'd held my heart back.  Suddenly it occurred to me that this fear, this withholding, might be sin.  Maybe I'd had everything all wrong.


A man read a cookbook, and I met God again, as if I'd never met God at all, as if all my worship had been an attempt to tame a gorgeous world that did not need taming, but adoration.


As he closed the reading, the professor apologized and pulled out a handkerchief, leaving me thinking of Moses and his need for a veil after his meeting with God on Mt. Sinai.  I ran to a bookstore and bought the book.


Needless to say, this passage as provoked much in my heart.  I think it provoked the friends I was able to read it to as well.  What a gift - to hear a message that is so different than the stifling, restrictive, choking ideas I've had of what it means to be a Christian.  To lose everything, to lose yourself, to lose your love and desire and idiosyncrasies to a faith that wants robots.  While I hear that, and internalize it, compounded over years and years of my sponge-like phase of adolescence, doing my homework really helps.  I've not been able to get into Scripture much yet; it's still hard for me to even pick up the book, to hold it and know what it used to mean for me.  But these new voices in m life are beacons of hope; they're lighthouses in the distance while I'm still out on the dark, ominous ocean of skepticism, doubt, anger, and fear.


One woman approached me after our sharing time and told me my voice should be on audiobooks (i.e. books on tape).  If nothing else, that statement alone made my sharing completely worth it - books on tape, my dream!!