to cook is to create is to worship

In all of my resistance toward and refusal to admit that I'm making a New Years resolution, I make them.  I just don't like to call them resolutions or associate them with New Years at all.  It just happens to be a coincidence that several promises or goals I make for my self settle in around the time of January 1st.  Definitely not the same thing as a resolution.  Definitely.


So one my resolutions this year is to start reading for pleasure again before I go to sleep.  I did this with a couple of books last year, not really intending to, but it ended up being a time I really anticipated every night.  It became a way for my mind to stop, to begin it's process of resting before I actually closed my eyes to do so.  It was just me and my friend, the author, having intimate conversations about life and all its wanders.  I the couple of books I read were really phenomenal.  I loved it.  


I'm starting out by reading the Spirit of Food book that I wrote about a couple of months back.  I read the first chapter last night and already I am swooning.  It's an essay by Patty Kirk called "Wild Fruit" and is about her passion for preserving handpicked wild fruit.  She draws an enchanting parallel between God and God's creation and our shared tendency to create.  In a Christian workshop that Kirk attended, their group was asked to discuss ways that humans are like God and unlike other animals.  Here is what Kirk writes,

|We ran out of room on the whiteboard before I could offer my revelation.  Here it is.  Just as God combined parts of his creation - lights and dark sky, dirt and breath - to make other things, we also combine things - berries and sugar and lemons and heat - to make other things and pronounce them good.  We don't just graze, like cattle....We don't simply kill and devour the animals we eat, as my dogs do.  We slaughter them, remove their skin or feathers, and roast or boil or saute them.  We make sauces for them from grains and liquids and combine them with vegetables.  In short, we cook.

In a recent conversation with Natalie, we were discussing the frustrating problem of wanting to put good things in our bodies, and not being able to afford doing so.  The fact is, eating organic is a luxury.  There is a reason that folks on welfare, families with a billion kids, and college students are all eating Easy Mac and Top Ramen - it's cheap; and it's probably not even real food.  

What's even more interesting though, is how I have begun to fantasize about life on a farm.  While I typically hear stories about the simple, dirty, unglamorous life of farming families, in all honesty there are many parts that sound luxurious to me.  To experience the process of planting, working, and nurturing your own fruits and vegetables; to be present to the life and death cycles of animals; to literally work my hands for my own sustenance and to have been a part of its existence would be a dream.  I'm certain that I have idealized the life of a farmer in my mind - the simplicity, the routine, and the grit would drive me insane.  But there is a part of me that really envies these authors and their opportunities to be part of their own livelihood; to be part of the cycle and part of the earth.  To know how she works and moves; how she lives and dies, then lives again.  Kirk goes on to say that,

|Cooking, for me, is the emulation of the deity's most essential habit: to create.  As such, to cook is to worship. 

As I read some incredible texts last term on the idea of human community as being evidence of being created in the image of God, I now am brought to the edge of a question: If I can find one way in which it seems as though we are actually, for real created in the image of God, then what else proves it besides community?  Is it our impulse to create?  But more importantly, do I believe we are created in the image of God in the first place?  I want to believe so; and I want to believe we were created in the image(s) of a God who is good, who exists in relationship, and who creates by nature.