I’m in a parish of cooks. Like Katherine Keenan and Sylvia Muff and Deacon McKenzie and Judith Vallejo: people who know how to create rich sauces and sizzle savory meats, who know what it means to dice an onion to bring out its possibilities and use real butter in their pans. I’m in a parish of people who know what it means to be hospitable: not merely to entertain, but how to open their homes and make you feel an honored and special guest, who host a lavish feast like the Mackies or an intimate evening like the Boyers. I count myself makarios—most happy and blessed—in these things.
Real cooking and real hospitality, alas! like good conversation and music, are vanishing arts. We’re being trained to settle for much less: haute cuisine from a steam bag, diners without candlelight, talk about television (or worse—computer advice), synthetic music from a boom box. We’re being re-trained how to live—all with the best intentions, I’m sure, but at what cost?
God made us to rejoice in His Creation, to drink deeply of its delights: to watch a sunrise from the first hints of rose in the night’s darkest blackness to its blinding glory as it floods the horizon with gold; to nurture the year’s first daffodil to blossom; to admire the arch of the deer’s perfect leap over the fenceline.
Hilaire Belloc, the poet, sometime theologian and occasional politician, wrote:
“Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine
There’s always laughter and good red wine
At least I have always found it so
Benedicamus Domino!”
We rush through busy lives, but somehow a lot of us have misplaced the meaning of what we're doing.
Popular Protestantism wants to tell us life isn’t about anything so narrow as “religion,” but our Catholic Faith teaches us that “religion” is what life IS about! It’s just that our Protestant friends have too constipated an idea of what “religion” is. It is about laughter and sunshine and good red wine. It’s about how to live and die squeezing every drop of joy from the whole affair.
We’re losing our grip on the rich texture of life, settling for banalities: we’re reducing poetry to text messages. We’ve forgotten how to Feast and how to Fast, and we’re less for these losses.
Lent is coming. The Great Fast which a whole lot of Christians will observe by giving up chocolate for 40 days (it’s okay—the Chocolate Companies will already have banked their Valentine’s Day profits). This is fasting for children.
How about giving up enough food (if your doctor allows—mine would be shocked into amazed acquiescence) so your stomach growls at you for the first 20 days of the Fast? How about turning off the TV for all but the news and weather? How about reading one of the Gospels for 40 days (I have a little pamphlet to help you do just that)? How about fasting from criticizing behind their back your favorite verbal target? Make this a Fast to remember.
And then, when it’s over, when the Alleluia is resurrected along with the Son of God, make Easter a Feast you’ll never forget.
If we’ve forgotten how to Fast, Feasting is even more of a lost art. Our fasts have become anemic and our feasts tasteless. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Our Fast should be rugged and our Feast robust. When they’re over, we should have fasted and feasted so we’ll remember.
Lent is coming. Get ready.—Fr Gregory Wilcox
No comments:
Post a Comment