A Feast for One

The title of this post may seem a bit oxymoronic. Can one really feast? Can you feast alone? I'm reading a fascinating history of feasting called Charlemagne's Tablecloth by Nichola Fletcher, and this is a point she briefly addresses, commenting that while by definition a feast does imply a group of people (and I should hope so--one feast she cites, given by the Archbishop of York in 1465--included over 41,000 items of meat, ranging from wild bull, to venison, to rabbit, to swan), there have been times in history, though rare, when feasts have been given for one. Usually, however, as in the case of the Roman Apicius, he feasted and then ended his life by swallowing poison.

Although I had no plans of ingesting poison, a feast for one was sounding pretty darn good. At least a mini one.

As always happens when I read books about food, I began to get intense cravings for, well, food (another book--highly recommended that induced the same feeling can be seen here). My cravings ranged from miso soup, to chicken mole, to kibbeh nayeh (raw ground lamb with bulgher), to flatbread. And these weren't even the dishes I was reading about. This is often the problem when I try to piece together a meal--my mind is so muddled with a variety of dishes, that I can never organize my thoughts to choose one. And there's also the obvious problem that all of these dishes come from different parts of the world. Take my initial craving--hummus. That was the first food that I began dreaming about, but I was picturing myself eating it slathered on...naan. Normally, I try to cook all my food from the same general country/region, so this was a bit of a mental stumbling block for me.

Well, after much contemplation, agonizing, and a phone call to my mother, I decided to run with it. India may not be part of the Middle East, but at least it's in the same general latitude. And so, regional differences aside, my personal feast began to grow, and evolved to this:

There's the naan front and center, and the little bowl of hummus in the back. The olives and feta make Greece represented at the meal, there's a salad of oranges and red onion, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt and pepper, which is probably best described as Italian, and that blue bowl in the back is a dish from the wonderful Olives and Oranges cookbook--raw julienned turnip, marinated in sea salt, lime juice, and harissa (a spicy pepper paste--I didn't have any, so I made my own mock-up of it with some chili powder, olive oil, and a dried red chili). This dish is from Tunisia. (To drink, I had an Argentinian Malbec) So there you have it, a feast from many nations. For one.

You may notice that the food is all spread out on the floor, and that's exactly when I ate it. On the floor, in front of a fire, and...with my hands. There something very sensual about touching your food as you eat it, and since I had the naan to serve as a utensil, this worked very well. The oranges were probably the most fun. I took a slice, and folded it up like a taco, with some of the onion inside. So delicious.

Note: I had never made naan before last night, and I was pleased with how it turned out. I used an amalgam of recipies, so, for any interested, here's what I did:

You'll need:
1 1/2 c flour
~1 tsp. sugar
~1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking powder
~1/4 c of plain Greek yogurt (I used Oikos brand, and almost all of a 5.3 oz. container)

Put all of the dry ingredients into a bowl and whisk to mix. Whisk in the yogurt, incorporating as much of the flour mixture as possible. Once the yogurt is incorporated (there will be a lot of flour left), add water, two tablespoons at a time, until all the flour is mixed together to form an elastic dough. Kneed dough until smooth, adding more flour if needed. Let the dough rest, covered in a dish towel, for at least ten minutes.

To my understanding, naan is usually cooked on the inside of a heated clay drum. As I don't have one, I just used a cast-iron skillet. Heat the skillet, and take a piece of the dough (a little bigger than a golf ball). Roll out the dough. You want it to be pretty thin, as the naan will puff up some while cooking. Cook until browned (unevenly) on side and then flip, really only a minute per side. Keep the naans warm on a plate under a dish towel while you cook the rest.

Mystery

"The Christian mysteries are an indivisible whole. If we become immersed in one, we are led to all the others" ~Edith Stein

We can find rest in mystery. The place of mystery is somewhere real that we can live, if only we let our hearts truly settle down into mystery as reality and escape the need for explanation. Interestingly, this a truth I have discovered mainly through women writers. Men want to explain things. Think of Lewis, of Chesterton--delightful men of mighty faith who are perhaps best known for their apologetics.

And though their clever explanations have proved helpful to many (including myself), Christmas is not the time of year for them. It is too miraculous. We cannot explain God becoming a man and, furthermore, being born--of a virgin. We cannot explain the Creator having a mother, angels appearing to shepherds, or the compulsion of a few scholars to follow one lone star such a distance.

At Christmas, accept a miracle. In the words of a woman who seems to understand mystery (even if that is an oxymoron)--"Don't try to explain the Incarnation to me! It is further from being explainable than the furthest star in the furthest galaxy" ~Madeleine L'Engle.

"Capable of being truly shocked"

"What if, instead of doing something, we were to be something special? Be a womb. Be a dwelling for God. Be surprised." ~Loretta Ross

Today I will meditate on two readings, one from Alfred Delp, a Jesuit priest was imprisoned in a Nazi prison and eventually hung for his opposition to Hitler. The other, from Loretta Ross, a minister in the Presbyterian church, and founder of the Sanctuary Foundation for Prayer. Although on the surface these two writers seem quite different, their Advent message is much the same--which can be summarized, as Delp says, "It is time for a waking up to begin somewhere." And so, we celebrate this coming year after year, we fallen humans needing a constant reminder--or "waking up" to--of reality, that is, the message of the gospel.

But do we even allow ourselves to wake up? Perhaps we drown out the message of Advent--and even blessings from God--by busying ourselves with the season. Our assumption is that celebration and grandeur go hand in hand, and so we put up lights, bake dozens of cookies for people we hardly see all year, bring out the wreaths, and empty our bank accounts. We celebrate Advent by preparing--not our hearts, but our homes. How can Christ possibly break in through the tinsel and mistletoe?

Delp says that "Advent is a time when we ought to be shaken and brought to a realization of ourselves." The realization is that we need God's love. We need Christmas, the arrival of our Savior. Ross points out that we might miss this arrival as we hurry around fulfilling Christmas traditions. But, more importantly, Christ comes anyway.

The challenge from these readings is to examine not only how we celebrate, but what. Ross challenges us saying that "God asks us to give everything of ourselves." Mary, after all, gave her womb (and also her willingness, her belief).

What does all this mean? I confess, I don't plan on giving up Christmas traditions. I probably won't give up any of them (even that silly pickle ornament). But I hope--I pray--my focus will be right. That I will not be thinking about all the things that go into this season, but my own poverty, and how desperately my heart needs to dwell in this special arrival.

The darkness shall not overcome it...

Today's reading, by Isaac Penington, is a meditation on one of the Christian ideas that I most resonate with--Christ as light in the darkness. I've always loved this imagery, but I first realized its power when studying Asian literature in college, and read about Surya, the Hindu sun god, or god of light. Reading poetry on him, I was struck by how meaningful the image of light would be to any person, no matter their race or culture. The God of Light is universal.

And Christ claims this truth. He is the light--a substance so infinitely attractive.

Penington muses, "But of what nature is this light which shineth in man in his dark state? It is of a living nature; it is light which flows from life." And so in Jesus, true life is found. When we receive his light, we receive life.

Penington points out that this light is life-giving, opposed to just knowledge-giving. We usually associate illumination with the acquisition of some new information or even wisdom. But as Paul points out in 1 Corinthians,

Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?...Christ [is] the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishess of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength. (1:20,24-25)

This is the light of God. I have always thought of the light in the darkness primarily in aesthetic terms, but also as a sort-of guide. But Christ's light is more than that. It is beyond this world.

And so, he who came into this world will give us life beyond it.

The Divine Dawning by Karl Rahner

Today's reading takes the form of a prayer, as Rahner rambles at length to God on the topic of Advent. It seems that Rahner covers all the bases, including, what seems to me, doubt, as here:

"Are you the eternal Advent? Are you he who is always still to come, but never arrives in such a way as to fulfill our expectations? Are you the infinitely distant One who can never be reached?"

Rahner is wondering what the Advent of God really means. What does it mean that we wait, and what does it mean that God himself--he who has no beginning and end--has an arrival? Surely God can't just show up on the scene--he's been here all along.

Rahner's understanding--or faith--seems to grow as he prays, eventually saying,

"It is said that you will come again, and this is true. But the word again is misleading. It won't really be 'another' coming, because you have never really gone away. In the human existence that you made your own for all eternity, you have never left us."

Why then, do we celebrate Advent, why do we celebrate Christmas? Perhaps it is more about us drawing close to God. It is our arrival in relationship with him. He is already here.

Annunciation

Last year, I discovered a little book on the shelves in my family's study, called Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas. This book is a compilation of writings by various authors, one for each day of Advent. Glancing through the table of contents, I saw names like Henri Nouwen, Madeleine L'Engle, Gerard Manly Hopkins, C.S. Lewis, and even Sylvia Plath. I thought that this must be the best anthology in the world, and couldn't wait to dive in!

Sadly, I discovered it on Christmas Day.

So, this year, when Advent came around, I was ready. And I am still so excited to read what so many wonderful poets and thinkers before have had to say, and to contemplate what they mean in my thinking on the "arrival" of the Christ.

Today's reading was from a dearly beloved author, Kathleen Norris, an essay called, Annunciation. Norris begins talking about the importance of mystery, for isn't that what the Annunciation (or God's "announcement" to Mary) is?

Sometimes, Norris explains, Christians try to explain away all the mystery, all the unknown. In the name of apologetics, we want answers.

There doesn't always have to be an answer.

When we get rid of the mystery, Norris says that it, "reflects an idolatry of ourselves, that is, the notion that the measure of what we can understand, what is readily comprehensible and acceptable to us, is also the measure of God." Our minds do not and cannot reflect the measure of God. So perhaps we should rest in the unknown, knowing only that our ignorance is ok.

For Norris, she found this rest in poetry long before she found it in the Christian faith. Poets have a different view of reality than the rest of the world, and I, too, find it resonates with me. For some time I have felt that "metaphor is my reality," a sentiment Norris feels when she writes, "I am glad that many artists and poets are still willing to explore the metaphor (and by that I mean the truth) of the Virgin Birth." What else is a metaphor than the assertion of truth from a different angle? When Billy Collins says in his poem "Snow Day":

Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,

its white flag waving over everything,

we realize he is using a metaphor, equating the snow to a flag. But isn't snow a flag? That seems like a kind of truth to me.

At the risk of rambling, I'll continue, because Norris touches on another important facet of the Annunciation--virginity, though not in its traditional sense. She writes, "It is only when we stop idolizing the illusion of our control over the events of life and recognize our poverty that we become virgin..."

This makes sense to me--thinking of virginity as a giving up of control. I realize this is counter-intuitive--we usually think of self-control as the means through which we practice sexual abstinence, and therefore, remain virgin. But this is both a limiting view of virginity as well as untrue--in fact, if I really believed that I was in control of my own life, chastity would not be my sexual habit of choice.

Virginity, ironically, is a giving of ourselves, first to God, and incidentally, to others. In her book The Cloister Walk, Norris talks to celibate monks and nuns, who explain that the fruit of their virginity is hospitality. They have said "yes" to God, and so they say "yes" to others.

In meditation on the Annunciation, we remember Mary's virginity, and the miracle of the virgin birth. Her virginity is seen just as much in her willingness, her "yes" to God, as in her sexual state.

And what of the Christ? When remembering the Annunciation, we should remember that Jesus is a virgin, too. His was the ultimate virginity. He experience ultimate poverty--the lowering of God to man--and gave ultimately of himself upon the cross.

Advent Begins

You may be wondering what this Twilight poster has to do with Advent. At church today, my pastor quoted an author using the term "Vampire Christianity," as he talked about the fact that Christians often leave out a big part of what Christ does for us. We remember that he has offered salvation--forgiving all our sins in the past and our eternal life in the future, but we forget that he wants to sanctify us now. In other words, we just want some of Jesus' blood to cover us, but that's all. We don't let his Spirit in to make us more like him. It's a gritty thought, but it makes sense, and is a good reminder.

And timely, at the beginning of Advent, as we wait to celebrate Christ's nativity. Because the Christian faith is not only about Jesus' death, but also about his life. And our lives.