Book 2

I started my second (probably first, official) book of the summer: Robert Farrar Capon's Supper of the Lamb.  I stumbled across this gem when I was writing my theology paper about the ethics of food and have been wanting to read the whole thing ever since.  I've written a bit about him before, but this guy is an Episcopalian priest and amateur chef; and should also do stand-up comedy in my opinion.  He is witty, smart, clever, and brilliantly insightful about life and connecting food to theology.  One of the reviews of the book says, "One of the funniest, wisest, and most unorthodox cookbooks ever written."  I completely agree so far.  Here is an excerpt:

There is a habit that plagues many so-called spiritual minds: they imagine that matter and spirit are somehow at odds with each other and that the right course for human life is to escape from the world of matter into some finer and purer (and undoubtedly duller) realm.  To me, that is a crashing mistake - and it is, above all, a theological mistake.  Because, in fact, it was God who invented dirt, onions and turnip greens; God who invented human beings, with their strange compulsion to cook their food; God who, at the end of each day of creation, pronounced a resounding "Good!" over his own concoctions.  And it is God's unrelenting love of all the stuff of this world that keeps it in being at every moment.  So, if we are fascinated, even intoxicated, by matter, it is no surprise: we are made in the image of the Ultimate Materialist. (xxvi)

Capon

Every word penetrates the core of my being.   [Doing my best not to stand on the tremendous soap-box I have built without you noticing.]  You may have heard this from me before, but I'll go there again: so many of our churches today and the great teachers of today inculcate us with the message that the world is bad.  "Be in the world, not of it," from Romans has been misused, in my opinion, to teach us that loving anything on this earth too much is sinful.  All of the goodness that we experience on this earth is nothing compared to what we will encounter that one glorious day that we raise up in to the heavens and really experience life.  So, if that's the case, it's not that we just don't care about the things on this earth, we actually reject them - label them as sinful - so that we can sit on our rear ends and wait for the earth to explode.  Or, we traverse the earth, bashing people over the head that don't think like we do because it's all part of the good, Christian mission.  


God made stuff.  God made people.  God made difference.  And he saw that it was all good.


I don't know what this means for me and my life right now, or what point I'm exactly trying to make.  I especially don't know where all of this feeling came from at 8:30 in the morning. I haven't even had coffee yet!