Today we had our annual birthday party for the Virgin Mary. Did you know her birthday is September 8th? It is one of the Twelve Great Feasts that we Orthodox Christians celebrate, and today, when it fell on a Sunday, several of us baked birthday cakes to eat at the agape meal. Even I baked one! I will try to post the recipe soon.

I guess that festivity put me in the mood to publish this post that I’ve had hanging around for five years. Back then I’d written several on The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farrar Capon, and was working on a few more. Then, as they say, Life Happened, and RFC fell gradually down to the bottom of the drafts pile.  But he’s back, and I hope you feel the richer for revisiting his delightful book.

“A calorie is not a thing; it is a measurement. In itself, it does not exist. It is simply a way of specifying a particular property of things, namely, how much heat they give off when burned. Only things, you see, are capable of being eaten or burned, loved or loathed; no one ever yet got his teeth into a calorie.

“….How sad, then, to see real beings…calorie counters — living their lives in abject terror of things that do not even go bump in the night. What a crime, not only against hospitality, but against being, to hear him turn down homemade noodles in favor of idols and abstractions — to watch him prefer nothing to something. And what a disaster to himself! To have capitulated so starchlessly before the the devil’s policy of desubstantialization! His body may or may not lose weight; his soul, however, is sure to wither.”

-Robert Farrar Capon in The Supper of the Lamb

Other posts in this series:

RFC is the man we need.
RFC begins with the meat.
RFC considers blood and sacrifice.
RFC makes one of nature’s marvels.
RFC for Butter Week
RFC drinks in graces