food meditation

When I started seminary, I was married with no children. Both my wife and I were able to work while I attended classes. We were never rich, not by any stretch, but we seemed to get by.
By my last year of seminary we had two kids. I was in class all day, then working odd jobs at strange hours, and Kim was at home all day with two babies, then working odd jobs at strange hours. Money was scarce and getting even scarcer.
I’m familiar with broke. Growing up, my friends and I raised thrift store fashion to a high art. Having enough but nothing extra was familiar territory. Having not quite enough was becoming familiar, too. By the spring semester, things were pretty tight. We had a lot of those late night conversations about rent and groceries and tuition and on and on.

When vaccination time rolled around, we found ourselves at a free clinic
In a Pakistani neighborhood,
Reverse immigrants ourselves,
Negotiating shots and payments
In sign language and shouted repetition.

Not speaking the language turns you deaf,
Lowers your IQ twenty-five points,
And leaves you slightly dazed
When each transaction is ended.

Of the Christmas presents I gave and received that year, I can only remember one. One of my brothers sent us an assortment of candies: Toblerone bars, little sea-shell shaped hazelnut chocolates, and dark chocolate truffles. Looking over the array before us, I felt the haze of lust rush up the sides of my face, burning my neck and the top of my head, leaving me giddy with unplaced possibilities.
I think that feeling used to be called gluttony. I knew in the depth of who I am that by the twelfth day of Christmas, there would be no chocolate left in those red and green boxes.
I knew who was going to be the glutton. It would be me. Kim has a kind of self control that I’ve never even come close to mastering, even if I wanted to. I have absolutely none. I’ve heard that horses, left to themselves, can sometimes eat until their stomachs literally burst. If I were a horse, that would be me. At restaurants, I have to drink all the water conscientious waitresses pour into my glass. I eat all the bread, drink all the wine, and finish everyone’s dessert.
The first bite on Christmas Day was, to my surprise, enough. I didn’t want any more. I wasn’t trying to be virtuous, but to eat any more seemed obscene.
The candy lasted until March, I think. Every night I came home after hours of study, work, even prayer, feeling completely desultory. A kind of melancholy had descended on me that spring, an undercurrent of sorrow, a shadow of despair that I still cannot explain or understand. Certainly I was worried about our finances. Obviously I wondered what the future held. But it seemed bigger than that, like I’d been infected with a low-grade depression that allowed me to move, to study, to work, even to pay attention to my children, but little more. Enough, but nothing extra.
Every night I came home, did my parental duties, talked to my wife, and studied. Somewhere in there was the discipline of eating candy. I call it a discipline because that’s what it was. I had to intentionally approach the chocolate box, select a piece, and carefully and deliberately eat it. They were different, each variety. Toblerone was semi-soft and triangular. As it melted, the nougat poked through and demanded to be eaten and to stick to the teeth. The smooth spiral of the seashells were almost like real shells – shiny, hard, and unyielding before giving way to the heat of my tongue.
But without a doubt, truffle nights were the best. The cocoa powder’s bitter bite and the buttery interior gave way one to the next, carrying me to a near mystical transport.
But, maybe near-mystical is just a cop-out, a way of keeping this from the realms of either food porn or sentimentality, because bringing metaphysics into a discussion of food seems pretty lame, doesn’t it?
But there’s no getting around it. No matter which kind of chocolate I chose each night – and I only ever ate one piece a day – it reminded me of some things I’d known and forgotten. It made me think that maybe there was a different way to live, and I was headed toward it, I wouldn’t always feel this sense of foreboding, life has tiny bits of joy that supercede the obvious and sometimes crushing pains. Then there was a sense of something I had never known, at least, not in any sensory or even intellectual way.

It was like remembering the edges of a dream,
The kind of dream that leaves you happy all day,
Without remembering the content at all.

There are hedonists and there are spiritualists, at least, in my experience. Hedonists dive headfirst into pleasures of all kinds, physical, intellectual, emotional. For them, pleasure is as close to transcendence as you’ll ever get. The spiritualists shun physical pleasure, at least in principle, believing that there is something deeper and greater than “mere” pleasure. Physical existence is only a hindrance in the road to perfection.

But some ancients had a simpler, more complex view of things.
The Hebrew’s god
Created everything
And haunted the earth
In a million guises.

They met their god
In burning bushes,
In whispering winds,
In rivers rent in two.
Mountains skipped, stars sang, and trees danced.
The entire cosmos breathed in and out,
Caught in the ballet divine.

These ancients couldn’t have answered the question, “Is your god in the physical world, or separate from it?” For them, the infinite space between electrons was occupied by and caressed by and adored by that god. Physical life was complete in itself, because in physical living, they met their god.
The physio-pneumatology of the Hebrews was the taproot of the faithfulness of Jesus of Nazareth, prophet and more. Jesus sojourned in the wilderness forty days, a reflection of the Hebrews forty year pilgrimage on the way to Canaan. He told his listeners that their life’s worth lay in how they treated their neighbors, especially the oppressed. He offered living water to an outcast woman, and turned bread and wine into a gate opening to life eternal. In dying, he promised to open a new way of living. After his resurrection, he told his follower Thomas, “Put your hand into the hole in my side.” Physical and more.
My Roman Catholic friends recognize seven sacraments. Most of my Protestant friends pare that number down to two. But I wonder as I eat good chocolate,

Does anything we can do
Resist the power
Of opening our eyes
To the divine?