Living Wittily

Jesus shows us how to turn food into a means of grace....

Cooking is a humanising activity. Yesterday I spent a couple of hours preparing food for other people. Buying the ingredients, gathering everything together, using a trusted recipe for a dish I already know they enjoy and anticipate, adds to the sense that, in cooking for other people, we offer a different kind of gift. The cost of the ingredients, the time and energy preparing and cooking, the setting of the table (or trays), and the clearing up and doing the dishes afterwards. A meal to the grateful recipient is like a package holiday. You arrive, enjoy, and there's no tidying up before you go. 

I've always been moved and intrigued by the way Jesus handled food, welcomed guests, arranged meals and parties, and knew what to do with loaves and fishes and hungry folk. When he took bread and blessed it, poured wine and gave thanks, he was doing something deeply characteristic. That particular gesture of inclusion was enough to open the eyes of two disciples who couldn't see past their own sadness. But the Word who became flesh understood the wonder and fragility of human flesh. Through bread and wine He was respecting and caring for human bodies, serving and nourishing human beings, using food as a sacrament. Jesus shows his followers how to turn food into a means of grace, a tangible blessing which tells the other that they are welcome to this space, and to this food, and that the trouble gone to is a privilege, inconvenience being willingly enjoyed for the sake of blessing these others.

Celebration doesn't have to be tied to a special occasion; the coming of a guest is occasion enough. Not extravagance and anxiety to impress, but the simple offering of who we are and what we have, but with trouble taken to make the occasion happen as a memory in the making. And hand-made memories of food shared are later powerful evocations of gratitude which nourish the roots of friendship, making hospitality an essential activity in any community intentionally shaped around Jesus and his table. 

So two hours of my time, making Italian meatballs in a home made tomato and olive sauce and served with spaghetti and garlic laden buttered bread is the spiritual equivalent of attending serial prayer meetings. The sacrament of hospitality, the grace of welcome, the joy of food, the companionship around a table, the gratitude of friends in conversation and laughter accompanied by the clink of cutlery and glass, these are experiences impossible to replicate in any other way. A meal cooked and shared and enjoyed fills the stomach, but in so doing it courses through us to those deep places where life obtains its equilibrium, and roots itself in substance and builds sources of hope. Food does that. It instils hope.

Conversely, hunger undermines hopefulness, and those who have no food are often also those who have no friends to cook, share and welcome. A proper Christian theology of cooking presupposes food is for sharing, and will insist that we incorporate and embody, companionship. Com panus - sharing bread with; and I wonder what the consequences might be if Christians in their neighbourhoods were known as companions of the community, people who make and buy and share and eat bread with others.

A favourite poem is a reminder that bread is sacred as well as staple, and that the One who taught us to pray for our daily bread, also teaches us reverence for food;

Be gentle when you handle bread.

Let it not lie uncared for,

taken for granted or unwanted.

There is such beauty in bread,

beauty of sun and soil,

beauty of patient toil.

Wind and rains caressed it.

Christ often blessed it.

Be gentle when you handle bread.

The life enhancing secret in the photograph!

Well finally someone asked. I wondered how long it would take, and it has taken three months. But finally someone needed to know. The photo of me on the home page.

Why am I looking so delighted and pointing enthusiastically at a plate of lentil soup?

Sure health food is good for you - there are those who do indeed get enthusiastic about lentil soup, though I doubt they feel the need to take a picture of it!

The dress code is a clue - and the tie is seriously making a statement ( I love ties!) - so this is me in Vienna as a guest having a meal out in one of its best Italian restaurants.

The fork is also a clue - lentil soup can be thick, but doesn't usually need a fork to eat it.

The reason for the beatific grin and the pointing finger and the need to have a photographic record is - I am about to enjoy the biggest creme brulee I've ever seen in my life. That large oval dish with its acres of brown caramelised sugar is a dream come true. After the photo shoot, I remember slowly making my way across the plate oblivious of all dietary consequences and aware only of finally knowing how loosely I'd previously used the adjective delicious. This creme brulee recalibrated the word for me. Once I thought I knew what it meant - now it is defined and its colour is yellow beneath caramelised sugar - and is not small :))

Arch-episcopal fun, local authority foolishness, and food to restore the soul....

OK. This photo has come by a convoluted route, latterly via Maggi and Ben, and it's just too good to not post on every blog hosted by admirers of the finest Archbishop for yonks. Those who criticise Rowan Williams for being too intelligent to be an Archbishop, for being out of touch and having no idea about the life of ordinary folk, could do with some of the unself-conscious playfulness on display here. "Except you become as a little child..." is an appropriate admonition that comes to mind. I wonder how some of the more rasping journalists would have coped with the serious reality of children's play in a way that both enjoys and affirms the life of the child.

And then to another kind of foolishness altogether. You know how we are all to become energy conscious, climate change aware, careful where we put our big stomping carbon footprints? So yesterday driving down near Braehead and we observe the Council workers cutting the roadside grass with muckle big flymos, wearing the regulation fluorescent orange overalls. It was drizzly wet and windy, and the massacred grass lay in green clumps and apparently needed tidying up. So behind the flymo operator came another toiler in the rain - not with a grass rake to gather it into compostable organic stuff. Naw, naw. Nothing so environmentally responsible. he was sporting one of the big petrol fuelled blowers with which he was blowing the slaughtered grass into the adjoining fields, and doing so against the prevailing stiff breeze! Apart from the obvious non composting policy, here we have a machine that cuts but doesn't collect the grass (petrol fuelled), and one which blows grass against the wind, using petrol to disperse what the wind would disperse in half an hour.

The aforementioned drizzle, pushed into our faces by a stiff breeze, tried its best to waste our walk around the Mugdock reservoir. Nae chance! We knew that when we got back home some of Jim's magnifique home made French onion soup, along with a smoked applewood cheese toastie would restore that inner sense of wellbeing that only comes to those who do the walk and wallow in self-righteousness over a large bowl of immodestly described consummate cuisine.........

Victoria Plums - a prelapsarian fruit and reminder of Eden?

Victoria plums are back in the shops. As a boy I helped pick several varieties of plums in the orchards which ran the length of upper Clydeside in Lanarkshire - and you were allowed to eat as you picked. The sensible psychology was that a picker would soon have had enough. A theory which worked even for me - there are only so many plums even greedy connoisseurs can eat and enjoy. But I haven't yet encountered a fruit I enjoy more.

Those orchards are long gone - either garden centres, road upgrading or housing developments have removed all but a couple which are now neglected. The season is late August to mid September so it isn't long to enjoy your favourite fruit. And maybe the sheer enjoyment of them is because they are only available once a year, and not for long. The imported other kinds of plum don't come near British Victorias. You can find out why over here.

William Carlos Williams has this delightful poem about eating cold plums from the fridge, and about the temptation to eat them before anyone else does:

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

A land flowing with porridge and cream.

Just been out walking in the fresh air - that would be the -5 degrees fresh air. Decided that today was a porridge day. Somewhere from the dim recesses of childhood memory, the advert jingle is still on my inner memory stick, "Scott's porridge beats the cold". At my aunt's funeral earlier in the week catching up with cousins we were remembering our days on the farms in Ayrshire when my dad was the dairyman. And most mornings we had cream from the milk left overnight which kind of neutralises the cholesterol lowering properties of the porridge - but there's nothing like it. A couple of years ago I posted a panegyric on porridge as health food. You can read it on the Feb 1, 2007 post over here.

Don't usually repeat posts - but that one just seems to say something essentially sensible - and daft. I like the poem too much to only ever post it once! And the Scott's Porridge packet is so cliched it should be run past the trade description and advertising standards - I've never seen someone in a white vest, wearing a kilt, in shot putt throwing stance, on the edge of a cliff, looking down on a Scottish Loch, with the sun shining! It isn't our porridge of choice anyway. The big chunky jumbo rolled oats ("gently milled to retain the nutty flavour" - aye right!), from Sainsbury's are the ones that do it for me. Whatever - I've just had some and only the good people at the church were I'm preaching soon will know if it did me any good.

Making light bigger

Looking through the new Eerdmans catalogue I came across New Tracks, Night Falling, a new book of poems by Jeanne Murray Walker. Walker is the author of six previous collections of poetry, including A Deed to the Light and Coming into History. She is Professor of English at the University of Delaware, where she has taught for thirty years. Among her awards are an NEA Fellowship, an Atlantic Monthly Fellowship at Bread Loaf School of English, (how good is that for the name of a school!), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and the Glenna Luschi Prairie Schooner Prize for Poetry.

There's an effective oddity about some of her homespun images, and as a connoiseur of pizza my mind and heart (and maybe stomach) immediately resonated with her use of spinning pizza dough as an image for stretching out light and hope.(See the publisher's blurb below.)

I also like the image on the book cover. Gonnae get this so I am!

.......

"The poems in New Tracks, Night Falling acknowledge that we are people driven and divided by fear. They talk about racism, war, loss, greed, alienation, our disregard of the earth, and our disregard of each other.

Sometimes we feel like night is falling in the bright light of day. Yet we get glimpses of hope, of what could be:

In this dark time I want to make light bigger,
to toss it in the air like a pizza chef,
to stick my fists in, stretching it
till I can get both arms into radiance above the elbow
and spin it above us.

Hope continually threads its way through these poems. We hear its voice as Walker writes about choices — both those we make and those beyond our making.

And we feel hope rising like bread when Walker focuses on the gifts of potential, resolution, mercy, joy — the new tracks that we can make in fresh snow, on old paths, along the roads more or less traveled. These are stays against the falling night.

With a keen eye for both physical and emotional detail, Walker explores a journey that all of us are on, and she does so in a way that speaks to our deep fears and deeper joys, that engages and inspires. Tempering somber notes with more joyful ones, she reminds us of the good things, great and small, that are still possible in this world."

Brussel Sprouts, sceptical shoppers and a poem

At the farmer's market in county square, Saturday morning.

Elderly sceptical shopper picks up a 2 foot long brussel sprout stem laden with dozens of fat healthy sprouts.

Asked "Whit ur ye supposed tae dae wi this"?

Clyde Valley farmer, "Some folk are cuttin back on Christmas trees and puttin' lights on them, by the way."

Can't convey on this blog the exact content of the sceptical shopper's even wittier muttered suggestion about alternative uses for a brussel sprout tree with electrical potential!

But the score was Sceptical Shopper 1 - Clyde Valley Farmer 0. Not so much an own goal as an attempted clearance by an over-confident defender that was hammered back into his own net by a far too quick striker.

Made a dreich december morning considerably brighter.

On a more Advent note I came across this quizzical short poem in First Things, who allow this reproduction provided it's acknowledged and not commerically used.

The Annunciation

by Samuel Menashe

Copyright (c) 2008 First Things (August/September 2008).

She bows her head
Submissive, yet
Her downcast glance
Asks the angel, “Why
For this romance,
Do I qualify?”

Honey from the lion's belly.......?

Honey is one of my favourite foods. There are those who are connoiseurs, who distinguish flavours, regions, species of bee, thickness and texture. And though i wouldn't call myself a connoiseur quite, I do know what I like. And I like honey - most kinds. I haven't tasted one yet that I don't like. I've never left a jar unfinished. Whether it's the runny honey that can make eating toast a form of extreme risk sport if you wear a shirt and tie, or the solid light brown stuff that bends the knife as you hack it out and spread it on the scone, or the honey on the comb which gives you hoeny in the raw, with some of the wax, I love them all. Greek Mountain honey that has a tang of liquorice; acacia honey that requires pouring over hot pancakes; Australian eucalyptus which unmistakably conjures images of koala bears; and Scottish Heather honey, none of your blended cheap stuff, the real rich natural coloured honey that was (I'm sure) in the mind of the biblical writers who dreamed of a land flowing with it, and called it the promised land.

Obviously I love sweetness. Syrup and honey - yes and condensed milk, maple syrup, Scottish tablet.  I don't just have a sweet tooth, I have a mouth full of them. Maybe because I grew up in a home where my mother baked often, and there was always a Tate and Lyle syrup tin in the house. Those who remember the green and gold tin with the black print, and the small oval panel with a picture of a dead lion, and underneath the biblical riddle, 'Out of the strong came forth sweetness', will now share in a moment's nostalgia.

The connection between syrup and honey, between Greenock (the town where sugar was a major product in Scotland's recent industrial story) and Timnah (the village where Samson killed a lion and later found bees making a hive in the carcass), is the relation of sweetness to power. The riddle Samson told was a taunt to the Philistines; the sugar industry in this country was founded on slavery across the Atlantic. Makes it interesting that in ancient times when refined honey was greatly valued, it could be used as a form of diplomatic gift. The connections between honey and politics, between the sweetness of power and the bitterness of oppression, isn't as fanciful as it first sounds.

Makes it interesting that Doug Gay entitles the lecture he will give in Paisley "Honey from the Lion's Belly.' The biblical allusion is impossible to ignore - but what does it mean? Come along and spend the evening with Doug, and take time to explore together the implications of nationalism as a feature of contemporary Scottish life that could do with some serious theological reflection. Honey from the lion's belly is an allusion that could point discussion in several directions. The reason we've invited Doug to come is to enable us to think carefully and responsibly, about nationalism and national identity, about cultural distinctives and theological perspectives, and to do this from a Christian standpoint. Doug is a practical theologian, and that means he is committed to connecting theology with our lived experience, in our nation and communities. If you are interested and free, it'll be a good night, and an important discussion. Details are on the Scottish Baptist College blog - click on the name on my sidebar of blogs I regularly visit!

Dr Who and Chocolate Gu

I don't usually watch Dr Who, but since our Christmas meal was around our usual tea-time and I needed an interlude between Main Course (which I cooked) and Dessert, I joined the hardened fans in our family and watched the Christmas Special. Glad I was using it more as a mere background context during which to savour and relish and generally appreciate the warm gooey Gu chocolate souffle accompanied by luxury custard, which was entertainmemnt enough and more. In contrast to the rich, life affirming inner glow created by this well conceived coincidence of ingredients, warm soft chocolate and custard you stand a spoon in, the Dr Who episode was an ill conceived coincidence of cliches that did little to divert my attention from the main feature of my early evening, the aforementioned dessert.

Knowing the nutritional information on both the pudding and the custard it would be a bit rich to claim that the dessert did my heart good in any literal, physiological sense. But in the figurative and emotional well-being sense, it did indeed do my heart good; it was deeply comforting, therapeutically life enhancing, and spiritually formative - cos I  now know what it would be wrong to have too much of, and I'm off to knock off twice the number of calories consumed in said dessert on the exercise bike - Oh but it's worth it, every laborious minute sat on the cycle seat..............it is, indeed, worth it!

Tradition and Sausage Rolls

Every family has its traditions, and Christmas is one of the best times to have them. One of ours is about home made sausage rolls for our Christmas Eve savoury supper around midnight. Now sausage rolls can represent the lower end of the gastronomic food chain. We've all been at those functions where you're not sure if it's wise to actually eat the grey paste encountered under a tube of glutty pastry. Or we may even have bought those solid little wodges of amorphous protein wrapped in a blanket of flaky but elasticated dough, purchased in bulk from the various supermarkets, and wondered afterwards if these sad objects closely or remotely resemble what any of us envisages by the term sausage roll. Now to avoid ambiguity, I don't mean a sausage ( flat or round or link) in a roll / bap - a kind of burger or hot dog kind of thing. No. Not that.

I mean a sausage roll, real sausage meat, mixed with bacon, herbs, mustard, Worcester sauce and spices, wrapped in puff pastry, cut into medallions and brushed with egg-yolk, and cooked for 45 minutes in the oven until the house is pervaded by the smell of cooked bacon, mustard and herbs de provencale, and the inhabitants are queueing up at the kitchen waiting for the oven beeper to beep. Ours is one of the few places I know where serving sausage rolls requires mild forms of crowd control!

In keeping with tradition - I'm away to make the sausage rolls, which we'll cook later. And if we can work the technology, I'll even post a picture of what REAL sausage rolls look like. Can't show you what they taste like though - typepad doesn't do smells yet.

More seriously, and equally joyfully, a very happy Christmas to all those who make a habit of coming past this blog, and to those who happen by over Christmas. May you know the peace of God, the love of Christ and the renewing life of the Holy Spirit. And may our world be touched again by the Advent God who comes to us as Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father and Prince of Peace. Emmanuel - God with us.