Category Archives: church

RFC considers blood and sacrifice.

books, church, food and cooking, nature, poetry, quotes,

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.

RFC is the man we need.

books, church, food and cooking, quotes,

A few months ago I read The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection by Robert Farrar Capon, and knew before I’d got halfway through the book that I’d want to write a series of posts on this man’s extraordinary perspective. But then the Nativity Fast arrived, and it was unhelpful during that period to focus on food and its delights, so I put off the project until the new year, which for me seems to have begun in earnest only this month.

At the speed I customarily do anything, if I begin now I still won’t finish before Lent has arrived, but I am going to start anyway. For me the recipes and food itself are not the main thing in Capon’s book, and there are parts that tie in very well with transcendent aspects of food and even with fasting.

His thoughts and words are often so charming in themselves, I might not always have anything to add to the quotes I share. But the topics collaborate with a couple of other books that I find very provocative as well, so I’m hoping to bring more writers into the discussion. In the blog titles I will refer to Robert Farrar Capon as RFC so as to make room there for words other than his long name.

Though the first chapter starts right off with a list of ingredients, for me the recipes included in the book serve primarily to illustrate and demonstrate the author’s philosophy and love. He was an Episcopal priest who wrote other books as well, but this is the first one I have met, and I just now discovered that he died last fall, probably when I was just coming to the end of The Supper of the Lamb.

Also in the first chapter, he answers critics who might disregard him because he is not a professional cook, by pointing out that amateur is not exactly the same thing as non-professional. And he clarifies here at the outset that he is, more than anything, a Lover:

The world may or may not need another cookbook, but it needs all the lovers — amateurs — it can get. It is a gorgeous old place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries, and it has enough textures, tastes, and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have. Unfortunately, however, our response to its loveliness is not always delight: It is, far more often than it should be, boredom. And that is not only odd, it is tragic; for boredom is not neutral — It is the fertilizing principle of unloveliness.

In such a situation, the amateur — the lover, the man who thinks heedlessness a sin and boredom a heresy — is just the man you need.

And I ask you, with an intro like that, how can I not love him?

 

More posts on this book:

RFC begins with the meat. 

RFC considers blood and sacrifice. 

RFC makes one of nature’s marvels.

RFC drinks in graces.

 

How to become fresh and youthful.

church, quotes, saints, , , ,

“The Paschal season of the Church is preceded by the season of Great Lent, which is also preceded by its own liturgical preparation. The first sign of the approach of Great Lent comes five Sundays before its beginning. On this Sunday the Gospel reading is about Zacchaeus the tax-collector. It tells how Christ brought salvation to the sinful man, and how his life was changed simply because he “sought to see who Jesus was” (Luke 19:3). The desire and effort to see Jesus begins the entire movement through Lent towards Pascha. It is the first movement of salvation.”

This excerpt from our church bulletin explains why this date on the church calendar is a good one for someone to become a catechumen, as two people did on Sunday in my parish, and as I did seven years ago. It was not my first introduction to life in Christ, but it was definitely the time when I climbed up to the best vantage point to see Christ and His Church in all its fullness.

When I was a little child in Sunday School I learned some details of the story by way of a song:

“Zacchaeus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he.
He climbed up in a sycamore tree for the Lord he wanted to see.
And when the Savior passed that way He looked up in the tree;
And He said, ‘Zacchaeus, you come down, for I’m going to your house today.'”

In his Gospel homily Sunday our rector pointed out that the Lord also said, “Make haste.” In other words, “Get down here, man! Don’t be dilly-dallying about, but begin right now to mean business with God.” And this week St. Nikolai explains how this man and his experience are meaningful to each of us:

“Today, salvation has come to this house.”
(St. Luke 19:9).

“Thus it was spoken by the One Whose word is life and joy and restoration of the righteous. Just as the bleak forest clothes itself into greenery and flowers from the breath of spring, so does every man, regardless of how arid and darkened by sin, become fresh and youthful from the nearness of Christ. For the nearness of Christ is as the nearness of some life-giving and fragrant balsam which restores health, increases life, give fragrance to the soul, to the thoughts and to the words of man. In other words, distance from Christ means decay and death and His nearness means salvation and life.”
….
“Draw near to us O Lord, draw near and bring to us Your eternal salvation.”