Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Cooking - a Spiritual Practice

I read this, by a pastor John O'Hara, and wanted to capture it for me to ponder more and not lose it in cyberspace.
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It might just be the last honest place left. A sanctuary built into our living spaces that frees us to roll up our sleeves and creatively interact with the yield from God’s good creation, the kitchen calls us to a universal vocation and a spiritual exercise.

We cook for a variety of reasons, both noble and ignoble, sacred and common. It’s a practice that cuts across the boundaries of culture, class, religion, ethnicity and gender. It is a uniquely human pursuit and a universal experience that creates for us a bond which transcends all artificial lines of division. To cook is an exercise that teaches us to live with creation – and to live in sync with the rhythms of the Creator, if we are patient enough to wait for that goodness to flow our way. Often the temptation comes to circumvent this rhythm and flow; and it usually manifests in the towering backlit signs of fast-food drive through windows piercing the darkness of our hungry and hurried world, or in the form of fruits and vegetables shipped halfway across the earth to fulfill our dietary whims and industrial carbon quotas. How we eat what we eat and why we eat it are, beneath the surface and beyond the glittering reverberations of advertisers, spiritual questions that deserve the kind of wrestling and soul-searching normally reserved for prayer meetings and seminary classrooms. We have an existential relationship with other living things: we grow, we live, we die, we feed others from the stuff of our existence. Our relationship to food is a touchpoint for that world to which we mystically and metaphysically belong.

When I am in the kitchen, I am aware that I am preparing something real and visceral, something to be broken and consumed, enjoyed and shared. More than a mere illustration of something spiritual, it is spiritual in its’ very essence. When the Church of Jesus was in its’ infancy, the Acts narrative points to people making a daily discipline of worship and meals shared. Somehow I feel that we have lost our way in the fog of our industrialized efficiencies. Quick trips to the super warehouse mega store to pick up a slab of this and a pound of that – or more threateningly, something food-ish that has already been prepared, packaged and preheated and frozen in a factory before it reaches us – reduces us to a kind of two-dimensionality, to the vocation of a consumer; when instead we are so much more complex and beautiful creatures who were designed to participate in the food chain, not just feed off the top of it like some glorified trough. What we gain in convenience through supermarkets and fast food, we lose in the quality and tenor of that relationship to what we consume. In the preparation of food, in choosing foods that are local and in season, we are fractionally returning to a more vibrant stewardship over creation. One cannot help but imagine that doing so enhances our worship relationship with the Creator.
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Heather and Bill come home tonight. I think Bill flies back to Iraq Thursday.

2 comments:

Karen Deborah said...

Yeah, what you just said. Converstaions and thinking like that need to be at the table with tea and some kind of luschious rhubarb dessert that you just made.

Have you ever read Mary Farrar's book "Choices?" I think you would appreciate it. The daily question is; are we going to be a consumer or a producer? We can live so cheaply if we will do our own work.
And as for me I would really be celebrating if my rhubarb would take hold. I may have to worship without rhubarb.

Debbie in CA : ) said...

When I grew up and found myself in charge of meal prep I found myself without any skills. I set to work as I did with all education -- set goal, chart course, succeed. Somewhere along the way I found a spiritual pathway through the veggie aisles and the grain bins. My "cooking" goal transformed into "nourishment" in the complete sense; it took on spiritual facets and my thirst for culinary knowledge became a devotional quest.

This quote captures what I felt so strongly way back when and it has grown even stronger as time has passed. My family has rarely eaten processed foods (the two youngest have never even set foot in McD's) and even more importantly we have eaten the meals we have prepared around a table we have set and filled with our own conversation. Even our treat nights of pizza and a movie include our own hand-crafted pizza and a family film that we interact with (some would say, "Blab right through").

We are not typical, I know, but it is nice to know we are not alone in this world of fast and programmed.

Thanks for keeping the homefires burning so that I do not feel so alone on those days when I can't find a friend who remembers why we preheat an oven. ; D

It is always a joy to visit with you, though we are both so busy living life that the times are few and far between (maybe even more special because of that fact). Enjoy you summertime fun with Heather and Baby Will (he's so adorable). I will keep Bill in my prayers as he returns to defend democracy in this crazy mixed-up world. May God bless you all.

XO ~~ Debbie

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