inside: dull food and christians
The place I work is extremely particular about the quality and flavor of the food we serve. Not many establishments I know of go to the lengths we do to insure the food we serve is the absolute best available no matter what it costs. From the sea salt harvested on the shores of France and Wales, to the peppercorns, to the bread and cheese. Even the milk is tasted each delivery to make sure the stringent standards are maintained. Acorn fed hams, grass fed beef, free range chickens etc.
The owner travels to Italy each year to look at the grass the cows eat that produce the milk used to make the Parmigiano Reggiano. We don’t serve this cheese if the cows eat the straw in winter because the spring and summer grasses produce a sweeter cheese. We also make sure the cheese is aged for at least two years once it is made, which enhances the flavor. My point is not to promote the place I work, but to point out how we have lost the art of taking our time to insure quality.
Compare for yourself. Try this little experiment. Go to a grocery store that will have real Parm. cheese cut from a wheel, you don’t need to spend to much. I have seen it at Hiller’s fairly inexpensive. Buy a small amount whole (not the pre-grated stuff in a plastic tub. Then find the grated stuff in a green can. Go home. Unwrap the block of cheese put it on plate and let it rest for an hour or so. Flavors are better at room temp. After it sits, grate some on a plate and give it a good sniff…now taste it. Let it sit in your mouth and enjoy the progression of flavors.
Now drink some water and do the same with the green can stuff.
You can do this with any food. We have been fooled into believing that just because the flavorful food is more expensive initially we should buy the cheaper easier to produce food, primarily because of the cost. This recent article in Time Magazine points out the high cost of cheap food. Time Magizine August 2009. Then there is the politics of what has been done to our food to make it easier to package and ship which has robbed us of the nutrition and flavor. Then there is the meal. it has become hurried harried, and something we tolerate instead of a pleasure we enjoy together, don’t even get me started on diet food.
We have settled for cheap faith too, No not Bohnhoffer cheap grace faith, but 7-11 cheap faith, Walmart cheap faith. Mass produced packaged Mc Church convenience driven. In a sad way many churches have done the same with our discipleship. We opt for easy cheap, something which requires little and still gives us time to catch the game on TV. What if God showed up? “Fifteen minutes Lord, kick off is at one.” When the Mormon guy at your door gives you the Book of Mormon and his argument for the reality of the book is based upon a subjective feeling. We have allowed the lie of a subjective God to let us live through tapes and other folks experiences, We serve the objective Living God.
Seems we christians still don’t get the completeness and richness, or even the reality of the gospel. Church is aboutliving out passionate “Utmost for His Highest” Not necessarily in behavior but in complete abandon and love. Discipleship costs us our all.
It is difficult for me to understand why we have made christian expressions of worship, culture and art so flaccid and dull. I know people like to eat cheese spread, the processed cheese product wrapped in thin plastic we use for grilled cheese sandwiches, the flavorless tomatoes of winter. I know a hershey bar is most folks idea of good chocolate. Mc Nuggets are chicken which is flaked and formed then molded into uniform shapes for dipping. But we have been fooled into accepting the mediocre and mundane as if it were the highest good.
Christian music used to be the state of the art. Christian painting, music, theater was the standard for beauty as it should be. We have moved so far from passion or even the reality of a Living God who is active in the whole world. We are in danger of becoming apathetic because we don’t know any better.
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied…but written off as trash.
The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing. John Berger
