Holy Envy

This weekend I was out for a beer with some friends, half of whom were Jewish, and somehow our meandering conversation struck on the topic of keeping kosher. Not just the avoidance of pork and other such options, but the cleaning of dishes and the care of the kitchen, and about how some friends had gotten married and set up a kosher household, though they had been living in non-kosher households through college and early adulthood. As I listened, I was struck with a case of what theologians call “holy envy” — that feeling one gets when someone else’s religion offers something lacking. In some cases, of course, holy envy is the precipitating factor that leads people to convert, to change religions. But in more situations, holy envy can be that inner spur that makes you dig deeper into your own religion, to look for resources that can strengthen your own practice. Barbara Brown Taylor writes beautifully about it here:  https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/my-holy-envy-other-faith-traditions

Well as I sat there talking and drinking I realized I had a case of holy envy. I asked myself how I felt about the fact that my religion didn’t affect my eating and drinking. And for a hot second I wanted to convert to Judaism, but I talked myself down, using the mountain metaphor I love. The mountain metaphor initially claims that all religions are just different paths up the same mountain, but to this we answer that the religions are actually paths up different peaks in the same mountain range. The view is similar but each one unique; and if you try to climb them all at once you will end up just hiking around the foothills and never getting to the stunning views of the heights. So instead of starting me on a new path, holy envy pushes me to find out what my religion does teach me about eating and drinking. And when I look into that, I don’t find much about what we should eat and drink – and much more about how we should eat and drink.

Jesus was known for eating and drinking with the wrong people – with sinners. He was known for eating and drinking with hungry people — particularly, sharing food with them. And a generation later, Paul condemned the church in Corinth, not for eating and drinking the wrong things, but for eating and drinking unequally. (1 Cor 11:17+) When you get together for a meal, he wrote, one of you remains hungry while another drinks to excess. Our best research into the situation on Paul’s hands suggests that the Corinthian meals were a kind of potluck – or, more exactly, a potluck only shared in small table groups, not shared equally for all. Paul wrote to persuade them that they needed to share fairly around the community, even if some were rich and some were poor – when they gathered as a church, they ought to have those distinctions erased.

I’m a vegetarian and have been for a long time, with a mix of motives, from health to climate care to respect for the lives of animals. You may not know that there is a short passage in Paul’s letter to Corinth about vegetarianism as well (1 Cor 8:1+) The issue at stake is that most meat, in Roman-occupied cities, was available at the pagan temples where it had been slaughtered in sacrifice to the gods. Paul himself believed it was fine to eat meat sacrificed to idols — because idols don’t really exist, he wrote — but at the same time he said, “if my eating meat causes scandal or a crisis of belief for a brother or sister who believes eating such meat is unchristian, then I’ll happily eat vegetables for the rest of my life, rather than cause them to stumble in the faith.”

I’ve never found myself in a situation just like this, but I think of this principle when I choose locally grown food for the sake of the farmer who is my neighbor. I also think of this when I practice “flexitarianism.” For example, one Christmas in Uganda, my host family gave me a huge plate of chicken and I, thoroughly lacking the language or the cultural skills to turn it down gracefully, did my best to eat it. I had a stomachache later, but the love and fellowship they offered was preserved — and that, I think, is what really mattered.

So, if I ask myself what my religion teaches about eating and drinking, I actually do hear a clear message: honor all people, even if they believe differently from you; make choices that do not cause others to suffer; share food with the hungry; and share table fellowship with all. This may not help me answer those questions about washing dishes or choosing a menu, but it helps me integrate my faith into my daily life in practical ways, which is, I think, what the holy envy was about in the first place.

we need a village

A few weeks ago Michael and I had our youngest niece and nephew stay over for nearly a week while my sister (the kids’ mother) flew to New York to visit our mother as she continues to recover from all her treatments. The kids are number 8 and 9 in the roster of my nieces and nephews, and I’ve been changing family members’ diapers since my teen years, but this is the first time I’ve done anything nearly so ambitious as to offer full-time childcare for a whole week. I’m still sneezing from the germs they gave me, and there are still stray cheerios turning up under the couch cushions, but it was a wonderful experience.

It takes a village. How well-worn these words are, and how true. In our (especially white) society where families are typically isolated into nuclear units, we need more villages. White Americans have not yet escaped the myth of settler-colonialism, where a “family” is just a man and a woman and their kids setting off to create their own little kingdom on stolen land. This is a terribly dysfunctional model that robs us of the richness of multigenerational relationships and the beauty of a wide web of support. It also bankrupts parents who have to strive to meet all their children’s needs themselves – not just financially (a huge burden in this competitive economy) but also emotionally, as they suffer isolation, worry, and stress.

There are so many things we can do to make society friendlier for parents and especially mothers – from paid parental leave to affordable daycare and sensible healthcare reforms. Many of them need to go to City Hall – or to Sacramento or to Washington – but some of them can happen at your local church, and I see them happening. I saw three family units fold together for fellowship after church on Mother’s Day, a day that can be particularly difficult emotionally if your unit doesn’t match the settler-colonial-Hallmark model. I saw the youth of our youth group embrace and include the littlest kids. The youth of our church practically fought over the children who came on our last retreat, putting them right in the center of the community where they belong. At Sunday Celebration, by welcoming children into the service and not insisting they stay in the nursery, we all do our best to follow the call of Jesus. We remember that Jesus put a little child in the center of the crowd and said, “whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” Caring for children is at the heart of the gospel, and this call is laid upon us all, no matter whether your “family unit” includes children or not. If your unit doesn’t include children, I’d like to challenge you to expand your unit. Think bigger. Include your neighbors; include nieces and nephews and niblings of any gender; include your church family. Extend some support to them, whether that be a game of tag, a tea party, or a favor done for their parents, or advocating for better parental support on a local or national level if you prefer the political approach. Whatever you choose to do, choose it as plain good sense; or as an act of resistance against the white-settler-colonial myth; or as an act of devotion in following Christ’s call.

A Perfectionist goes to the Nutritionist

I'll try to write this in a way that will make sense to those of you who aren't enneagram geeks, but Enneagrammers, have fun with it - I'm a One. =)

A perfectionist goes to the Nutritionist

Today I went to see a Registered Dietician, which is a covered benefit of my health plan (thanks, Board of Pensions!), and she welcomed me and sat me down and asked me why I was there. 

Well, the entire drive over I'd been thinking of how to answer that question - "why are you here?" - so I was well armed. I don't know why I thought she would ask it with sharp hostility, or why I needed to use the "well armed" metaphor for my answer, but I'm always ready for a battle, so I had great answers to all her questions. I wanted to see her so that I could learn all kinds of ways to eat Better and optimize my health and be a nutrition ninja and experiment with rigorous diets like going gluten-free or dairy-free or sugar-free or anything else appropriately extreme. Because I am good - in fact, I'm pretty terrific - at trying harder and smarter and more intensely... so all she'd need to do would be to give me big assignments, and then she could sit back and be impressed as I delivered results in the form of Perfect Health. In two months or less, I'm sure. 

She didn't say yes to any of those ideas. 

We had a baffling experience, instead, where she asked me lots of detailed questions about what I eat and in what amounts, and then she repeatedly told me that I was doing a great job. Baffling, I tell you, because other than the suggestion to eat more Omega-3s (which, she said, everyone in America should eat more of) and drink an occasional kombucha, she didn't actually think I needed to improve my diet. What?? And my perfectionist mind kept popping back in with reasons why I wasn't doing good enough -- isn't there a lot of cholesterol in all those eggs I eat? -- and she kept answering with these soft, kind, supportive answers. It wasn't baffling in the puzzled sense, but more like an acoustic baffle; you know, like those soft tiles on the walls of recording studios that take all your noises and gently make them disappear. She warmly and calmly dismissed objection after objection and told me I was doing great. 

Finally she found the prescription that I needed. She recommended more Vitamin P... as in, p for pleasure. I'd never heard of such a thing, but apparently it's important. Vit.P. might be found in generously buttered toast for breakfast, chocolate chip cookies for afternoon snacks (they could be proteiny cookies, or they could just be cookies), and bowls of ice cream after dinner. Coconut milk in your oatmeal, and ricotta cheese on your pancakes. More goat cheese on your salads. All good sources of vit. P.! The curious thing is that guilt has an inhibiting factor on the absorption of vit. P., but when you have enough vit. P. it actually can enhance the absorption of all other nutrients by enabling relaxation of the digestive system as a whole. She gave me a good long spiel about how other countries can be so much more relaxed about their diets (take France or Italy) and here in America we're always chastising ourselves for enjoying anything, or worrying about things we shouldn't worry about. 

I'm really good at chastising and worrying. Kind of amazing, actually. I've internalized all of America's social conditioning around food. So this assignment isn't the easiest for me. I'm glad and grateful that it came as an assignment from a person with a degree, and diplomas on the wall, because I respond well to assignments from authority figures. Vitamin P, here we come! 

Kick those cans

Bold statement of the day: storing up too much extra food can be theologically dangerous.

I’m talking about those cans and boxes in your pantry. Yes, you. Your little Annie’s Mac & Cheeses, lentil soups, refried beans, ricearonis, whatever it is you store up. Theologically dangerous. Yes, I said it. Watch out.


I wouldn't counsel utter foolishness, of course. I know a good deal when I see one. As a matter of principle I won’t say no to 75% off. And certain places can really get me going. When I’m house shopper (we divide it up – one person to the farmer’s market, one to TJ’s, one to Safeway) I find it much harder to shop at Safeway than the farmers’ market. At the farmer’s market, you look around and see what’s good, and guess how much a hungry household will eat in a week, and I almost never have a problem with going over budget. We can only eat so much in a week. At Safeway I’m constantly tempted. They know how my brain works. They offer 50% off sales, or even worse, they say “buy one get one FREE” and my brain sees “free” and says “well it would be a sin to leave that to go to waste, I’d better help them out here.” I end up spending way over the weekly budget and we end up with stacks and stacks of 60-percent-off pasta. We eat it, eventually, of course.

There is a theological side of this story. Ellen Davis talks about the “manna economy” of the desert, and the “empire economy” of Egypt. When the Israelites were enslaved, they looked around and saw silo after huge silo of stored grain. They may not have had direct access to it, but it was there in case of famine, courtesy of Pharoah’s food policy programs. In the desert it was the polar opposite – their manna was not physically capable of being stored. It would rot overnight. Forget building a silo – you'd have to live day to day. The manna story shows the economic implications of relying on your food directly from the hand of God – if there is no storing it up, there is no taxing it either, or running an overpriced supply chain out of Pharoah’s silos. Everyone gets what they need - no more, no less.
The manna economy does not come easily in the real world. We are keepers, storers, hoarders - and recently TV shows have shown us the dark underside of that strain that runs through our culture. It is not that unusual for people to have cans in their closet that end up expiring before they can eat them all – because so many sales have convinced them they absolutely MUST take this cheap little can of food home with them, store it up, feel secure against potential disasters.
It’s a funny philosophy… to think that God would somehow love the perishable food more than the imperishable… and might even want us to face the world without a prudent reserve… but it must come from something like the same theology that says “blessed are the poor” and other such backwards things.
What is your personal food theology? What does your pantry or fridge say about your relationship to God? Or have you intellectualized it out of that realm completely?

Eco-nut

I'm feeling hedged in, a bit. Partly I think it's a case of Nature Deficit Disorder. Normally during this time of year I cope with the shortened hours of the day by spending plenty of time well-bundled up and working up a sweat on the hiking trails... but my ankle is still healing and it's hard to keep warm when you only go about 1.5 mph. I have a longer leash, now that I can walk nearly 1/2 mile per day, but that doesn't quite do the trick.

Partly, though, it's the seminarian's conundrum: so much thinking, so little action! Our ethics class (on food systems) read Animal Vegetable Miracle together and I am practically hopping up and down with the pent-up desire to DO the local-eating, mad-farmer-for-fun thing, but hopping is hard on one foot, and gardening is hard work too, and I'm barely finding the time to keep my basil plants trimmed.

On Sunday I preached yet another incarnation of my manna sermon, going off script to tell stories from last summer's Presbyterian Hunger Program Roadtrip. I compared the US' food system to Egypt and the food movement (an amalgam of the locavore-gleaner-community-gardening set) to the Hebrew people setting out into the wilderness. I want it too. I want OUT of the enslavement of Egypt, the cheap bad food that's poisoning us. I want to no longer have any complicity in the enslavement of my immigrant brothers and sisters in unspeakable field labor conditions, or in the dumping of cheap corn on the international market, destroying traditional agriculture worldwide.
But it's nice in Egypt, because my food is delivered to me by the industrial food complex. It's convenient. I don't have to get my hands dirty. So i'm still here, idly wondering when I'll get around to getting the heck out.

What's interesting is how much my ethics professor's prodding DOESN'T affect my desire to get out of Egypt. She writes long lists of things we should feel guilty about on the board, and I get stubborn and reactive and dig my heels in. Don't you dare try to guilt-trip me out of my time-honored ways. When I leave, I'm running not away from guilt but toward a better life. When I leave, I'm leaving for love and joy.

Grounding - part 3

In my favorite class this semester (philippians philemon and colossians) I encountered an idea that belonged in my second-favorite class (material theology & consumer culture) and my brain just about EXPLODED with major ideas.
So the Paul/Pauline class had an essay on ritual in early (pauline) christianity which dealt with that religious (spiritual) experience in which, practicing a ritual such as baptism, Lord's Supper, fasts or feasts with your religious community, you all feel as if you have entered "mythic time," leaving the ordinary everyday behind and entering the realm of your God. This is, if not a universal experience, at least one common to most religions, and labeled as "experiential transcendence." It helps us all feel closer to our God and to immortal life, but also ties us together as a people who have experienced this together.
Experiential transcendence is linked to a reordering of the dominant symbols and images by which one lives, and this in turn can lead to greater integrity and more courageous moral actions." *
Thus helping the early and persecuted Christians to live radically, sharing all their possessions, serving one another without regard to status, gender, or race, NOT TO MENTION surviving as a persecuted minority under an unhospitable (to say the least) Roman empire. If you agree with this analysis of what it is experiential transcendence could do for people, it must have done a LOT for the early Christians.

Fast forward to today, and I think we are experts in experiential transcendence. At least, Californians are, judging from the per-capita consumption of tibetan prayer bowls, yoga pants, and spirituality books. In the Christian world we are no less experience-oriented. You can go shopping for church-experiences and monastic retreats (and I have). There are fields of scholarship and books written for pastors about how to maximize the "worship experience" for everyone involved, through musical changes, more focused architecture, methods of preaching, and methods of prayer. But the "reordering of the dominant symbols" of our lives? Not quite. Our dominant symbols, before spiritual awakening, were clothes and appearance. Our dominant symbols post-ashram are yoga pants and appearance. Post-youth-group-retreat, your symbols are probably going to be a WWJD bracelet, and maybe even a fish tattoo if you're REALLY hardcore. Some modification, yes, but seldom quite at the level you could call "reordering." Why is there such a disconnect?
In the context of Marin County's conglomerate religion of eco-simplicity and spiritual serenity, I ask WHY do we buy a $4.50 cup of purifying herbal organic African tea (sereni-tea), sip it meditatively, and then walk out the door into our SUV stickered "diva going green"? (I kid you not - you can't make this irony up). Where did we disconnect our spirituality of purity from our actions of consumption?
In the context of Christian sacred practices, and the untouchably holy Service Project Trip, I ask WHY do we buy a dozen plane tickets to Mexico, get "outside ourselves," serve and worship with the poverty-stricken... and coming home (with tourist crap and a vague intention to "be more grateful") proceed to pass by Mexican day laborers in our own neighborhood? How did we disconnect the spirit of service there from the spirit of justice here?

Every once in a while someone actually does something somewhat approaching the ideal of "following through." But for the most part we put our donation in the monk's bowl, walk out the door of the retreat center, and get on with our lives. Preachers and yogis alike.

In Consuming Religion, Vincent J Miller contends we are "spiritually... trained to seek, search, and choose but not to follow through and to commit" (142). We don't know how to Stay, to let our religion have its implications on our life, and to be transformed.
I'd call this one out as a dangerous failure of community. With church compartmentalized into a once-a-week experience (in the early days, "church" used to be your new family, political identity, and social position i.e. lack thereof) it is something you can leave and come back to, and we no longer hold one another accountable to what we profess. Yoga classes are a perfect example of a spiritual tradition turned into a commodity -- where you pay $10 for an hour of elevated consciousness, and never need to have anything more to do with those people or even with those principles -- but do we do much better in the church? Many people come, put $10 in the offering plate, and consider themselves spiritually full for a week or so. Do we offer a life of the imitation of Christ every day of the week? I know I want to live it more than once a week, which of course is why I'm going to be a pastor, but I bet that won't be enough either. I want to sink my feet in, grow, and be completely transformed.




*quote: "ritual and the first urban christians" by Louise J Lawrence in After the First Urban Christians, eds Todd D Still and David G Horrell, p 113. the essay refers here to Robert J Lifton and Eric Olson, "symbolic immortality" in Antonius Robben, ed., Death, mourning and burial 2004. I used footnotes in a blog - I must really be a geek. At least I resisted the urge to use proper and complete bibliographical form.