THERE are many who insist on all that was dark or gross or negligent in the conditions of early barbarism, so that modern civilization may for one wild moment take on a fanciful semblance of decency. But old things have to be made very black indeed, if modern things are not to look blacker.
-G.K. Chesterton in Generally Speaking, 1929
I owe you something more, however — something darker — on the subject of meat: The minor leads inexorably to the monumental. Lamb has set our feet in a large room indeed. Man not only dines: he also kills and sacrifices. The room in which he relishes the animal orders lies between slaughterhouse and temple. There are death’s heads at each end of the table of the world.
In The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection Robert Farrar Capon introduces what is perhaps the most poetic chapter with this paragraph. He explores our human proclivity to hunting and butchering and the Jewish temple sacrifices in a long poem that I mostly didn’t have the patience for, though I liked its division into sections named for the categories of the car game:
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral;
Testing the textures of creation,
savoring the styles of its coinherence.
After describing the neat and clean Mineral parts of our world, he moves on to the Vegetable, “the kingdom of seed, birth, life….And for the first time,/ the reek of death.” But
Onions die quietly,
Cabbages shed no blood;
All plants forgive:
By the waters that comprise them
They wash man’s hands
And let him walk away.
Eating vegetables is so innocent. But Capon doesn’t want to ignore the reality of our place as carnivores, so he unapologetically moves on to the Animal kingdom
each man owning the honest interchange by which he steals his livelihood; each woman’s hand intimate with the crack of wrung neck and severed spine….
It is not possible or even desirable to distill the writer’s poem into a fully satisfying theology, but I wanted my readers to know that he does satisfy himself with the mysteries of God’s plan of salvation, of which the temple sacrifices were a foreshadowing of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.
The world awaits
The unimaginable union
By which the Lion lifts Himself Lamb slain
And, Priest and Victim,
Brings
The City
Home.
Other posts in this series are:
RFC is the man we need.
RFC begins with the meat.
In a Valentine’s Day e-mail letter, Touchstone Magazine editor James Kushiner comments on the news from Belgium. After the general greeting for the day, here is the rest of the letter:
…we live in time when the love of many has grown cold. How else to explain what has happened in the West? Most have heard that Belgium has passed a law [updated link 2023] allowing the ‘euthanization’ of children. With their kind permission, of course. We wish we did not have live in such times. But we do.
Many have seen such things coming, for decades. But warnings, debates, arguments have been to no avail. Books will continue to be written on why it has come to this and how to argue against the slide down the slippery slope (is there any doubt that this slide has been going on?).
Maybe it’s time to recognize that one cannot argue rationally with a demonic spirit. In the United States, some 55,000,000 children in utero have been murdered under the inspiration of this spirit–over the past 41 years, a biblical generation of death in the wilderness. There is no Promised Land waiting for this unrepentant generation. We’ve been killing children without their permission already. Now, Belgium wants to kill adolescents if they are persuaded it would be better for them to go to sleep and never wake up.
I write to name this as the spirit of iniquity that it is. I am reminded of a scene in one of the greatest American films, “The Night of the Hunter.” Two young children, John and Pearl, are running for their lives from a deranged and murderous false preacher, Harry Powell (played by Robert Mitchum). Escaping down the Ohio River, the exhausted children spend part of a night in a barn, but they are awakened by the approaching sounds of Powell on horseback. John says to his sister, “Don’t he ever sleep?”
Exactly. The devil stalking in our midst is a ravenous adversary, always looking for someone to devour. He does not sleep. And his staunch ally, Molech, has devoured little children since biblical times.
The Lord Jesus Christ, to whom all authority in heaven and on earth belongs, has said, “Woe to them who cause these little ones to stumble. It would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened to his neck and be cast into the depths of the sea.” Woe to the nation that does these things. One does not have to be a prophet to see this. God will not be mocked.
In the film, a courageous witness to the Lord delivers the children from death. She is a magnificent heroine, played by Lillian Gish. She loves truly, without fear, with courageous compassion. We must continue to shine the light, like the magnificent witness Valentine.
We in the arid parts of the West have been exulting in rain the last week or so. It’s so comforting and even glorious to wake in the night and hear the rain still coming down. Then to wake in the morning and see it is still falling. We had puddles in the back yard! Thank you, Lord!
Mr. Glad and I do live in northern California, but daughter Pippin lives even farther north in the state, and we drove there early this week for a short visit. Often February is a very snowy month at her place, but this year they’ve had more dry weather and rain than snow, and even the rain stopped while we were there, so we could get outdoors easily for work and recreation.
One day we made a family project out of pruning old apple trees that Pippin and The Professor are trying to revive from years of neglect. I floated back and forth between lopping branches and swinging the kids.
I would get Scout and Ivy going and then run over
to take a picture of the adults on ladders.
Another day we took a short trip to Castle Crags State Park and walked a trail alongside the Sacramento River. Considering the dryness of this year, I was amazed at the thick moss and ferns.
yew trees on the riverbank
Everything was wet from the recent rains, and many times our feet slipped on the invisible mosses — or was it algae? — growing on wooden bridges or river rocks.
Ivy practiced throwing pebbles into the river, and once she got the hang of it she did not want to do anything else. The supply of rocks was endless.We went to the confluence of Castle Creek (in the foreground below) and the Sacramento River, from which you can get great views of the jagged rocks above, called the Castle Crags. They are high enough that the recent precipitation there was in the form of snow, and some was still unmelted and visible.
My dear husband showed me this large and artsy rock, which you can also see in the photo at the very top of this post, in its original setting. I wanted to take it home. It was a little too heavy for me to carry, so The Professor hauled it back to the car. It came with us on our journey home and is now living by our house. Mr. Glad classified it as a confluitic rock. 🙂
Winter days are short enough that at the end of our busy days there was plenty of time for cozy gatherings in the kitchen or by the wood stove. I read many books to the children. Scout’s current favorite, which I read about on a blog before Christmas and gave to him, is Bumblebee at Apple Tree Lane, and we read it several times.
Ivy likes The Little Fur Family best right now. We danced to the children’s favorite recordings, and also listened to bird calls on the Stokes Field Guide to Bird Songs CD. After ten minutes of loons and other waterfowl, Ivy must have deduced that those bird songs were some kind of dance music, too, and she started twisting and prancing around.
Hot soup is what you need on a winter’s night, so Pippin and I learned how to make French Onion Soup, using the recipe in The New Best Recipe: All-New Edition by Cook’s Illustrated Magazine. The secret that the Cook’s testers learned is that red onions give the best flavor. Our result was sooo good.
And cookies! Pippin had some dough left in the freezer from her Christmas Peppernuts, the recipe that I concocted a long time ago but haven’t made for years. We like our nuts to be nut-sized, so we always cut the frozen dough into little cubes and bake them long enough that they come out crispy. Next Christmas I’ll give the recipe.But for now, since I do love cookies, they make a good ending to my story of a wintry family visit that was warm and sweet.
