food

l o g o s

Yale’s Undergraduate Journal of Christian Thought

food

Volume 11 . Issue i

Fall 2020

on the issue

MISSION

λ ο γ ο ς is Greek for “word.” The disciple John used logos as an epithet for Jesus, invoking

language as an image of incarnation, the Word made flesh. In Christianity, Logos

became personal. Because Christ clothed himself in flesh, he became a life giving light

to us, revealing the truth of all things. The Yale Logos takes on this name because our

mission is also personal and incarnational. We believe that by loving Christ and our

fellow learners passionately, with our whole heart, soul, and minds, we align ourselves

with Yale’s pursuit of truth and light.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Logos receives funding from the Yale University Undergraduate Organizations Funding Committee

and from Christian Union Lux. The Logos team gratefully acknowledges the support of the Elm Institute,

Dr. Norman Wirzba, and the coaches and members of the Augustine Collective. We invite you to

get to know our wonderful staff here: https://www.yalelogos.com/who-we-are.

DESIGN

Photograph credits: https://tinyurl.com/FoodImageCredits.

Food Design Team: Daniel Chabeda, Bella Gamboa, Timothy Han, and Raquel Sequeira.

SUMBISSIONS & INQUIRIES

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2 . Food: Fall 2020

letter from the editor

Dear Reader,

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells a parable about a great banquet. The master and host

of the banquet sends his servant to invite an initial group of guests. Everyone who was

invited refuses the invitation, citing busyness and immovable commitments. The master

decides instead to people his bountiful banquet with the poor, crippled, blind, and lame

from the inner-city to its furthest outskirts. They feast and know goodness. Those who

refused the invitation lost their ability to do so.

With the dominance of factory farming and other means of mass food production, we

have forgotten the trials of a life dedicated to growing and harvesting food. Today, we

hardly dedicate time exclusively to a meal. Increasingly, our default is to forgo cooking,

smelling, and savoring food for the sake of convenience. We take lunch on the go or work

while we eat dinner. We skip meals. The everyday of eating too often leads to passivity

of consumption, and in that passivity food––sacred and symbolic in many cultures––is

reduced to a mere chore. As a result, we miss the joy, nourishment, and community that

comprise the fullness of the experience of eating.

The staff of The Yale Logos is excited to serve the Food issue to you. Food is a meditation,

undertaken alongside the reader, on the formative exchange between food and

our culture, food and our loved ones, food and our planet, food and the Christian faith.

Though this journal is by no means comprehensive, our hope is that this sampling

begins to restore eating from an everyday task to a small, daily celebration: a celebration

of the life and death required for our sustenance, the people with whom we share

and to whom we serve meals, and the intelligent creativity behind a delicious bite of a

well-conceived dish. Ultimately, Food is a testament to the pervasive goodness of God,

which finds a form even in the smallest crumbs left on a plate.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

– J.R.R. Tolkien

In Truth and Love,

Jadan Anderson

Editor-in-Chief

logos . 3

4 . Food: Fall 2020

contents

8

culture

8 Food Porn: A Desolate Cornucopia

Sharla Moody

11

14

18

22

25

30

34

37

40

42

46

48

52

55

11 Consider Fruit

Bradley Yam

14 A Taste for Transformation

Raquel Sequeira

18 Roiling Boil

Jason Lee

22 Investigating Hunger

Hannah Turner

25 Depart with Dignity

Ashley Talton

communion

30 The Altar Is Not a Stage

Justin Ferrugia

34 Richness in the Desert

Bella Gamboa

37 Honey and Holy Men

Timothy Han

40 Elevating Work, Prayer, and Potatoes

Ally Eidemueller

42 Even Now He Harvests

Luke Bell

46 Death in the Pot

Shayley Martin

48 The Scandal of Real Food

Bradley Yam

community

52 Tasting Eden

Se Ri Lee

55 Taste and See

Shi Wen Yeo

58

58 If You Give a Man a Kit-Kat

Daniel Chabeda

logos . 5

6 . Food: Fall 2020

culture

logos . 7

Food Porn: A Desolate Cornucopia

Sharla Moody

With the inventions of television and

the internet, virtually everything can

be photographed, videotaped, and

uploaded for viewing and enjoyment.

In some cases, this advent has ushered

in important artistic innovations, like

the Golden Age of Hollywood, which

produced some of the most important

films and artistic endeavors in centuries.

Television and the internet have

served as democratizing tools, making

even niche educational subjects widely

accessible. Some things primarily

aimed at instruction, like cooking

shows, have become a television staple,

and others aimed at entertainment

and pleasure, like pornography, infiltrate

nearly every corner of the internet.

On the surface it may seem like

food and pornography are the most

dissimilar subjects, but Kurt Vonnegut

humorously paralleled the two in his

1973 novel Breakfast of Champions:

And Trout made up a new novel

while he sat there. It was about an

Earthling astronaut [Don] who

arrived on a planet where all the

animal and plant life had been

killed by pollution, except for humanoids.

The humanoids ate food

made from petroleum and coal.

[….]

They asked Don if dirty movies

were a problem on Earth, too, and

Don said, “Yes.” They asked him

if the movies were really dirty, and

Don replied, “As dirty as movies

could get.” This was a challenge

to the humanoids, who were sure

their dirty movies could beat anything

on Earth. So everybody

piled into air-cushion vehicles,

and they floated to a dirty movie

house downtown. [….]

So the theater went dark and the

curtains opened. At first there

wasn’t any picture. There were

slurps and moans from loudspeakers.

Then the picture itself appeared.

It was a high quality film

of a male humanoid eating what

looked like a pear. The camera

zoomed in on his lips and tongue

and teeth, which glistened with

saliva. He took his time about eating

the pear. When the last of it

had disappeared into his slurpy

mouth, the camera focussed on

his Adam’s apple. His Adam’s apple

bobbed obscenely. He belched

contentedly, and then these appeared

on the screen, but in the

language of the planet: THE

END. [1]

While Vonnegut seems to prophesy environmental

disaster that could cause

a perverse, sexualized view of food, he

also foretold the creation of food porn,

or food media that features decadent,

glamorized shots of food. The term

“food porn” clearly links it to pornography,

though it need not be—and is

almost never—actually sexualized;

rather, the comparison stems from the

decadence and extravagance in food

media. Videos and photos that can be

categorized as food porn glut social

media feeds. If you logged onto Instagram

today, you’d likely encounter it

at some point: a video of a seriously

underbaked cookie being torn in half

to reveal a deluge of melted chocolate,

photos of greasy burgers stuffed

with bacon and far more cheese than

would taste good, chocolate shaped on

a potter’s wheel to make artistic shapes

and statues. They’re fun clips to watch,

especially if, like me, you’re prone to

procrastination.

The idea of food porn dates to 1977,

when leftist journalist Andrew Cockburn

wrote that “[t]rue gastro-porn

heightens the excitement and also the

sense of the unattainable by proffering

colored photographs of various completed

recipes.” [2] Today, food porn

usually refers to images or videos of

glamorized, overextravagant food, in a

style similar to glamour photography

or sexual pornography.

Other types of food media might fall

under the food porn category, like

mukbang, which means “eating show,”

a trend that originated in South Korea.

In Korean culture, eating with

family is at the center of meals. With

the rise of divorce, single households,

and excess work, it’s become less of a

reality and more an artifact of cultural

history to eat together. In turn, mukbang

began, “in which a person eats

enormous servings of food in front of

a webcam, while conversing with the

people watching.” [3]

On the surface, there doesn’t seem to

be anything wrong, per se, about food

porn, though instinctively something

does feel wrong about it. Aesthetic appearance

is certainly of some importance

to food, especially in the professional

cooking world, but the primary

end of food is—or should be—to be

consumed. Food, after all, is produced

to be eaten, to taste good, to provide

our bodies with needed nutrition. We

do not consume food with our eyes;

we chew and digest it. While the term

“culinary arts” implies an aesthetic

importance, the aesthetics of appearance—rather

than those that contribute

to taste or smell—do not directly

contribute to our enjoyment of food

for its proper end, which is to be eaten.

Food is scripted to be eaten, simply

because it is a thing that is made to

be consumed. Food is perishable and

cannot stand as a piece of art forever.

If food is to meet its primary end, it

must be eaten at some point. We do

not, after all, plow fields, harvest vegetables

and fruit, and butcher animals

simply to make a visually-pleasing dish

8 . Food: Fall 2020

to sit in a gallery for a day before being

emptied into the trash. We make food

because we need to eat it. This will always

be food’s primary purpose.

Food porn, like sexual pornography,

reduces or makes us forget the stakes

of what is being depicted. Food requires

sacrifice. Animals are killed––

and often treated in atrocious ways

in the meat industry––and countless

people toil over crops, often laboring

for little pay, to provide us food. When

food is presented as a glamorized item

chiefly to be salivated over, no consideration

is given to the actual effort

and work needed to provide us with

sustenance. Sexual pornography, on

the other hand, reduces sex to a physical

act documented and viewed for

the sake of voyeurism and temporary

gratification. Abuses in the porn industry

are well documented, but even

beyond these considerations, the objectification

of people into mere sexual

objects strips them of personhood. [4]

When we view people as instruments

to be used for our pleasure, we selfishly

fail to recognize people as individuals

worthy of dignity, with full personhood

outside of their capabilities in

relation to our own utilities. Likewise,

when we view food as an item to be

salivated over rather than actually consumed,

we strip eating of the sacrifices

that make it possible: all the animals

raised for slaughter, the workers who

slave on farms to pick fruits and vegetables,

the cook who may barely scrape

by working in a restaurant. When the

chief end of food becomes visual rather

than edible, food ceases to exist.

Instead, what was meant to be eaten

becomes an intangible flicker on a

screen. Voyeurism in all forms reduces

things to utilitarian items, separating

personhood from people turned into

sexual objects, nutrients and sacrifice

from food turned into entertainment.

logos . 9

Food has secondary ends, of course. I

like food that tastes good. I like food

that smells good. The sensory experience

of eating directly correlates to

our enjoyment of food. Cooking and

eating have also been ritualized. Quality

time with loved ones, dates with romantic

partners, and celebrations are

all centered around food. Food is at the

center of culture and our interactions

with people.

But food porn defamiliarizes food and

separates it from all its natural ends.

Food in videos or photographs cannot

be eaten by viewers, and it’s not always

clear whether food in food porn should

be eaten by anyone. Some media features

obscenely greasy, overstuffed,

undercooked food. In one viral video

that debunked glamour shots of food,

glue was drizzled around the edges of

a pizza slice to give the effect of gooey

mozzarella cheese, while rendering it

physically unsafe to eat. Food in videos

cannot be smelled or tasted, only

viewed. Almost always, these videos

are watched by individuals scrolling on

social media, meaning there isn’t even

a communal experience of watching a

video with another person. This media

also presents food without any context:

food is removed it from the culture of

its origin and packaged neatly for solitary

viewers to gaze upon during their

social media scrolling. Philosopher Sir

Roger Scruton wrote,

Eating has in every traditional

society been regarded as a social,

often a religious, act, embellished

by ritual and enjoyed as a primary

celebration of membership.

Rational beings are nourished on

conversation, taste, manners and

hospitality, and to divorce food

from these practices is to deprive

it of its true significance. [5]

What does it mean for food to be a

social media trend rather than a tool

fundamental to our human needs of

nourishment and community? When

the nutrition and the sensory experience

of eating are subjugated to the

visual aesthetics of food that viewers

will never consume, we convince

ourselves that extravagance serves a

purpose greater than that which is

dictated by God and nature. A culture

primed to objectify—food as well as

people—trades intended goodness for

commodification, reducing all that

makes life meaningful into impersonal

items only appreciated for their utility

in immediate, temporary gratification.

When people are objectified, they are

stripped of their human dignity. When

we objectify food, we deprive ourselves

of the dignity that comes from eating

and fellowship.

Notes

[1] Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions.

New York: Delacorte Press, 1973.

[2] Cockburn, Andrew. “Gastro-Porn.”

The New York Time Review of Books, 8 December

1977.

[3] Holmberg, Christopher. “Food and

Social Media—A Complicated Relationship.”

HuffPost, 5 May 2014, https://www.

huffpost.com/entry/food-and-social-media-a-c_b_4898784.

[4] Kristof, Nicholas. “The Children of

Pornhub: Why does Canada allow this

company to profit off videos of exploitation

and assault?” The New York Times, 4 December

2020.

[5] Scruton, Roger. “Eating our Friends.”

Right Reason, 26 May 2006.

10 . Food: Fall 2020

Consider Fruit

Bradley Yam

In an effort to restore a sense of optimism

in these trying times, I offer

a meditation on fruit. Yes––apples,

pears, plums, bananas and berries

aplenty. Fruits have not only fed, nourished,

and pleased humankind with

infinite color and variety since the beginning

of history, but they have also

offered wisdom that has largely been

forgotten in the modern industrial

food system. In other words, when you

might be feeling down, there’s nothing

quite like thinking about the goodness

of fruit. [1]

It is generally agreed in the folk wisdom

of most cultures that fruits (and vegetables)

are good for you. The science

on this topic can hardly agree more. In

various meta-analyses, fruits (and vegetables)

have been shown to be good

at reducing your chances of cardiovascular

diseases, certain types of cancer,

and even depression. [2, 3] But fruits

are not only good for you, they are

also good for the environment. In general,

fruits grow on trees, which store

carbon, help to maintain clean air,

provide wildlife sanctuaries, and improve

soil quality. They come in their

own biodegradable, edible packaging.

Fruit by-products are often extremely

useful, producing dyes, oils, textiles,

insulation, and let us not forget, alcohols.

They are the ultimate sustainable

product and the original, millenia-old

player in the “circular economy.” In

fact, fruits are a key part of the plant’s

reproductive process––in other words,

fruits help to make more trees and also

more fruits. It is no wonder that the

ancients often used fruit as imagery for

the sexual and romantic. [4] And, to

top it all, fruits are delicious.

But fruit is not simply the bounty of

nature’s cornucopia, lest we bow in

idolatrous worship to Pan. Beyond

the blandly-lit Stop-And-Shop fruit

aisles lies a long and wondrous history

of humankind’s co-development with

our fruity cultivations. Each civilization

often had their own defining set

of fruits that produced the unique flavours,

customs and economies of the

region. As with many stories (think The

Odyssey), this one begins with home.

Fruit orchards were arguably the first

capital-intensive goods. Unlike grains

or vegetables, fruit grows on trees that

often require a long period of pre-pubescence

before maturity. This implies

a commitment to a piece of land, often

requiring its protection and constant

irrigation. Some scholars posit that

this may have been the genesis of territoriality,

urbanism and the formation

of complex societies.

Consider the date palm, the poster-boy

of Mediterranean fruit. The

palm itself was esteemed for its wood

and leaves and longevity, but the

dates that it produced were sweet and

could be consumed fresh or preserved

through drying or the production of

jams. The palm itself is able to grow

in the harshest of desert conditions as

long as a steady supply of irrigated water

is provided. This interesting duality

gave rise to the Arab proverb describing

the date with “its feet in running

water and its head in the fire of the

sky.” Cuneiform records from ancient

Ur (where Abraham, father of many

nations, originated), indicate a deep

knowledge of date horticulture, even

describing the process of artificial pollination

and the cultivation of “male”/

staminate dates for the purposes of artificial

pollination.

The fact that date horticulture required

artificial pollination gave rise

to an even more interesting social dynamic:

probably the first recorded instance

of sharecropping. The owner

of the date plantations often had too

many dates to pollinate by himself,

so he would hire labourers to tend

logos . 11

to the plantations for him. But renting

out the land itself was a complex

social arrangement that faced many

complex questions: what would happen

if the crop failed? Who owns the

ploughs and the hoes (expensive capital

equipment)? The legal innovations

to deal with these situations were first

detailed in the Code of Hammurabi,

from Babylon in 1700 BCE. Sharecropping

was an arrangement between

the tenant farmer and the landowner

that involved splitting the harvest in

some ratio between the two of them,

which also divided the risk. The Code

of Hammurabi details how to split the

payments to repair damages from natural

disasters, how to split pre-harvest

storm losses, and how to accurately

judge a tenant farmer’s effort (from the

harvest of his neighbours). [5] It was

also a cooperative arrangement that

incentivized both tenants and owners

to not defect on their agreements to

maximize the long-term gain of both

parties.

Turn your attention to the olive, perhaps

the most useful fruit in all of history.

Like the date palm, the evergreen

olive tree, one of the most fire-resistant

trees in the world, is uniquely suited to

its mediterranean climate. Knobbled

and gnarly, olive wood is extremely

hard and good for furniture. In myth,

Odysseus and Penelope’s bed was

made from olive wood, indeed built

into an olive tree, a symbol of the immovable

and unshakeable domestic

foundations of their marriage. It is the

most mentioned fruit (along with the

grape) in the Hebrew Bible. But perhaps

the most useful product of the

olive is its oil, which can be used in

cooking, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals

and medicinals, fuels for lamps and for

sacred purposes such as for “anointing”,

in the Jewish tradition. In Hebrew,

“Christ” or “Messiah” literally

translates to “the anointed one.” The

oil is an important marker of authority

and spirituality. The notion of anointing

is deeply intertwined with peace,

harmony and unity of the people. For

example, in Psalm 133, the psalmist

waxes lyrical about how good and

pleasant it is when “God’s people live

together in unity.” This unity is compared

to the anointing of Aaron, the

old chief priest of the Hebrew people.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the

connection between fruit and unity

can be found in the cooperative nature

of olive farming. [6] In other words,

the hope for the peace and unity that

the Messiah is supposed to restore is

evoked by the precious oil of the olive

fruit cultivated by a peaceful and united

community.

Like any other fruiting tree, olive trees

take time to mature, between 3-12

years. For this reason, the Torah (Hebrew

Law) prohibits the cutting down

of fruiting trees, even in warfare. The

olive tree itself grows extremely slowly,

making its wood very valuable. Olive

farming can yield benefits from cooperation

for two reasons. First, olive

yields usually increase with irrigation,

irrigation being a capital and labour

intensive job, usually requiring the cooperation

of multiple smaller farms.

Second, olives are usually propagated

via grafting, that is, taking a high-yielding

olive species and grafting it onto

all of the existing olive trees, thereby

also making them high-yielding. Cooperation

can thus increase yields by

encouraging the selection of preferable

traits in olive trees. Olive trees are

also extremely long-lived, often being

hundreds or even thousands of years

old. Tradition has it that the olive trees

in the Garden of Gethsemane were

the same trees that hung sadly over

Christ in his moment of crippling,

blood-dripping despair. It is no wonder

then that one of the first Christian

apostles, Paul, used olive tree grafting

as his central metaphor for the uniting

of the Jew and Gentile cultures.

Now consider parthenocarpy. Parthenocarpy

refers to a mutation that produces

seedless fruits. They are often

selected together with strains of fruit

that are sweeter, instead of bitter or

starchier. These mutations alone do

not make for a viable species, simply

because they cannot reproduce on

their own. However, together with

human cultivators and the use of offshoots,

these have become some of the

most successful fruit species today. Bananas

and plantains fall into this category.

Wild species of bananas are full

of seeds and contain very little sweet

flesh. By the time bananas entered into

historical consciousness, they were already

domesticated and exhibited parthenocarpy,

but bananas found in the

wild are still extremely seedy. Nature’s

sweetest fruits would not be so sweet

without human cultivation.

And if one were to think that fruit

horticulture is a closed book, they

would be mistaken. Cranberries were

famously difficult to cultivate and pick

because they usually grew in shrubby,

thorny bushes in the middle of bogs.

However, since their introduction to

the American Northeast in the 1850s,

various methods of wetland cultivation

have been developed. Popularized

by Thanksgiving and the purported

medicinal properties for urinary tract

infections, cranberries are now harvested

en masse by flooding cranberry

bogs and allowing the cranberries to

float on top of the water, where they

are then collected. Humanity continues

to find new ways to cultivate and

consume fruit for all their goodness.

And this is not to mention pineapples,

which are really clusters of berries, or

Japanese persimmons, which have preservative

properties due to their high


levels of tannin, or the combinatorial

varieties of citrus hybrids. Consider

also the various fruit-related gift-giving

cultures across the world, like how

mandarins are a gift symbolizing prosperity

and longevity during Chinese

New Year, or how Sembikiya in Japan

has popularized artisanal fruit with

melons auctioning up for as much as

$45,000.

If the reader at this point has obtained

some relief, and perhaps some wonder,

at the goodness of fruit, then this article

has succeeded. But if curiosity permits

the reader to wonder about why

fruits are so good, they may find that

this is actually a deep philosophical,

almost religious inquiry. Fruits have always,

in every culture, been considered

the gift of the divine. It is not hard

to understand why. In the very first

chapter of Genesis, God proclaims

“Behold, I have given you every plant

yielding seed that is on the face of all

the earth, and every tree with seed in

its fruit. You shall have them for food.”

In the very last chapter of the last book

of the Christian bible, in the middle

of the new city, there appears again

“the tree of life with its twelve kinds of

fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The

leaves of the tree were for the healing

of the nations” (Revelation 22:2,

ESV). In a time where many of us are

praying for the healing of the nations,

the goodness of fruit is a useful meditation,

and may well lead to more fruitful

meditations on the goodness of God.

Notes

[1] I will say, right from the beginning,

that most of these wonderful bits of information

were provided by the paper “The

Origins of Fruits, Fruit Growing, and Fruit

Breeding” by Jules Janick.

[2] Meta-analyses are academic papers

that summarize the literature put out by

other papers. Each of these meta-analyses

summarizes up to 100 papers at a time, giving

an impressive sense of a wide breadth

of literature.

[3] A good meta-meta-analysis: https://

academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/77/6/376/5474950

[4] Song of Solomon 7:8 “May your

breasts be like clusters of grapes, and the

fragrance of your breath like apricots.”

[5] From https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.

edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3022&-

context=cklawreview, it is interesting that

this article also notes that the Hebrews

did not seem to have a sharecropping arrangement,

because it seems like they had

other economic mechanisms for risk pooling,

including the “bondsman redeemer”

concept and community support, and the

gleaning laws.

[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/

science/article/abs/pii/

S0264837716311589

logos . 13

A Taste for Transformation

Raquel Sequeira

The cover of Wired magazine’s March

2020 issue featured a scoop of fluorescent

sherbet ice cream floating like a

strange new planet amongst the stars.

In the first month of the coronavirus

pandemic, the piece zoomed out from

earth: “Humans are headed for the

cosmos, and we’re taking our appetites

with us. What will fill the void when we

leave Earth behind?” [1] MIT’s Space

Exploration Initiative, preparing for

interplanetary colonization, wants to

let space travel transform the human

experience of food.

While it might seem like culinary culture

would be low on NASA’s to-do

list, the Space Exploration Initiative

makes a strong case for why space

food is a crucial area for investment

and research. [2] Current space food

merely squeezes Earth food into a

spaceflight-efficient mold: maximal

compressibility, minimal crumbs. But

perhaps, as the founder of the Space

Exploration Initiative argues, “it’s possible,

even essential, to imagine an entirely

new microgravitational culture,

one that doesn’t simply adapt Earth

products and technologies but instead

conceives them anew.”

Conceiving anew is the essence of

what philosopher Margaret Boden

called “transformational creativity.”

[3] If “exploratory” creativity is composing

a new song, “transformational”

creativity is rethinking what music can

be. (Imagine the invention of atonal

music, or even rock and roll.) The

products of transformational creativity

may be controversial, since by definition

they break the rules. Yet they

also elicit “amazement,” according to

Boden, because “some deep dimension

of the thinking style, or conceptual

space, is altered—so that structures

can now be generated which could not

be generated before.”


Long before astronaut ice cream, food

has been fertile ground for transformational

creativity. The earliest humans

to cultivate the earth enacted a

completely new relationship between

the consuming creature and the producing

land, fundamentally changing

our species. An innovation as simple

as clay pots transformed food “from a

public resource to private property” to

be stored and traded, from a mere nutrient

source to a sensual and creative

object to cook and ferment and flavor.

[4]

The beauty of transformational creativity

in food, as in music, is that it

allows us to create something uniquely

suited to a given form and its constraints.

By seeking a “best fit” between

a concept and the way we express it,

we can fill up every nook and cranny

of a form’s constraints. Allowing bacteria

to grow in grain or fruit may have

seemed absurd, but this made it possible

for bread to be fluffy and fruit to

make you tipsy. Even now, people are

still exploring the use of fermentation

to create previously impossible food

experiences.

In many ways, the modern food industry

cuts off consumers from producers.

It is rare and in some cases nearly impossible

for the average eater to know

deeply the potential of their ingredients.

Yet consider the incredible variety

of dishes and flavors that has become

standard to the modern palate:

all come from different contexts with

unique constraints and possibilities for

food. Characterized by a cultural history

of vegetarian religions, Southeast

Asian cuisine excels in the flavoring

of veggies and grains. In Peru, topographical

constraint of mountains

abutting coastline resulted in strange

and marvelous mashups of starches

with seafood. For me, understanding

the relationship between constraints

and creativity in my favorite foods elicits

wonder and delight.

In contrast, there is something unsatisfying

when creativity fails at a best fit

between form and content. Consider

how piano reductions of orchestral

pieces—or even orchestral versions

of pop songs—often feel hollow or

comical. Or consider the recent development

of “Impossible Meat.” Environmental,

nutritional, and even ethical

constraints on meat consumption

have been stretched to their breaking

points, and one solution has been to

create plant-based meat simulacra.[5]

Impossible Meat gives you the “content”

of meat flavor (essentially the

flavor of blood, mimicked by the molecule

heme) without the true “form”

of meat. At the same time, it masks the

flavor content of the plants that are

the actual substance of the non-meat.

While an innovative way of salvaging

our cravings, this decoupling of form

and content diminishes our experience

of both meat and plants. Transformational

creativity, however, can expand

the space of our relationship with

food. Instead of mimicking the flavor

of meat, we might search for hidden

gems of flavor and texture in the flora

of our individual environments to

serve as the medium for new culinary

creations.

When new constraints are imposed

on us, transformational creativity becomes

not a luxury but a necessity. The

ability to reimagine the foundations of

an art form, a technology, or even a

cuisine allows us to move forward by

creating something new rather than

squeezing the old way into frustrating

new constraints. If we value a best fit

relationship between a concept and

its expression, then new constraints

on our forms of expression require

exploring a new best fit. More importantly,

seeing new possibilities rather

logos . 15

than grasping after what has been lost

is what saves us from despair.

In a not-so-hypothetical future, space

travel could impose even more radical

constraints on our food than we are

facing on Earth. But the Space Exploration

Initiative seems to look on these

constraints as a chance for transformational

creativity. They want to help

space-faring humans not just survive,

but thrive. For the Space Exploration

Initiative, this means designing “embodied

experiences’’ that are both

humanly fulfilling and uniquely suited

to space travel—zero-gravity-only

meals, clothes, and instruments, for

example. As creatively interesting as

these ideas may be, why would they be

necessary to our thriving? The point

of the Space Exploration Initiative is

not just that space food will taste better

in space than freeze-dried Earth food,

but that creating itself is part of what

makes us human.

True human thriving, according to

both ancient and modern philosophers,

depends on the ability of individuals

and societies to identify

their purpose as human beings.[6]

Just listen in on almost any conversation

among Yale undergrads during

shopping period to find the implicit

belief that finding and fulfilling one’s

purpose is necessary to the good life.

Creativity—especially transformational

creativity—seems to be an essential

part of our purpose.

Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain

asserted that a “creative intuition”

is part of what makes humans unique.

Thus, exercising our creativity “brings

us closer to the truth of our humanity.”[7]

J. R. R. Tolkien, author of

The Lord of the Rings, dubbed us

“sub-creators”:

Although now long estranged,

Man is not wholly lost nor

wholly changed.

Disgraced he may be, yet is not

de-throned,

and keeps the rags of lordship

once he owned:

Man, Sub-creator, the refracted

Light

through whom is splintered

from a single

White to many hues, and endlessly

combined

in living shapes that move from

mind to mind… [8]

A literary world-builder goes beyond

mimicry to create new and abundant

life, god-like. Similarly, transformational

creativity—whether it produces

a radically new style of painting, a revolutionary

scientific theory, or a new

way of baking—gives life to previously

unimaginable creative worlds.

Tolkien believed that our sub-creative

power comes from God, the prime

Creator, and so must be enacted in accordance

with His intention.

…Though all the crannies of

the world we filled

with Elves and Goblins, though

we dared to build

Gods and their houses out of

dark and light,

and sowed the seed of dragons—’twas

our right

(used or misused). That right

has not decayed:

we make still by the law in

which we’re made.

In Biblical terms, we are called to the

imitation of our Creator in the use

of minds made “in [His] image” for

sub-creation (Gen. 1:26).

Compared to literature and poetry,

food is a more understated form of

creativity that fills our bellies as well as

our souls. Yet, like Tolkien’s sub-creation

of fantastical species, creating

with food fulfills the Creator’s mandate

to be “fruitful” (Gen. 1:28). The

food we make and eat today is the result

of centuries of transformational

creativity—a unique capacity of the

species made in the image of a Creator

who gave Himself as “the bread

of life” (John 6:35). The incarnation

of the Creator is the most radical “rule

change” imaginable. Yet Jesus, with

an author’s knowledge of the form of

Mosaic law and content of God’s covenant

with Israel, defined a new best

fit, reframing humanity’s relationship

with the divine. That space He created

is the Kingdom of God.

The transformational creativity exemplified

by the Space Exploration Initiative

may help humanity reinvent itself

and our relationship to food, cleanse

the planetary palette and start afresh.

But unforeseeable messes will surely be

made on a new Martian Eden. Indeed,

the Mars escape route is a response to

the same problem that separates modern

humans from food production:

industrialization, which itself arose

out of an incredible period of transformational

creativity in science and

technology. As far away as we fly from

Earth, transformational creativity cannot

help us with true self-transformation.

Christ, at once human and God, intimately

and essentially relational, is

both the model and the means of our

reconciliation to the created world. If

in humility we embrace our role as

sub-creators in the Kingdom of God,

then whatever space we find ourselves

in—whatever chaos or crisis, whatever

threshold of transformation—we will

refract the true light of the Creator

over the void.


Notes

[1] Twilley, Nicola. “The Food We’ll Eat

on the Journey to Mars (Algae Caviar,

Anyone?).” Wired. Conde Nast, February

11, 2020. https://www.wired.com/story/

space-food-what-will-keep-us-human/.

[2] In fact, it’s not! NASA recognizes the

huge importance of food to astronauts’

morale, and of crew morale to the success

of any mission. See:

Gohd, Chelsea. “The Space Station May

Soon Smell like Fresh-Baked Cookies,”

July 2, 2019. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-space-station-maysoon-smell-like-fresh-baked-cookies/.

[3] Boden, M. “How Creativity Works.”

Creativity East Midlands for the Creativity:

Innovation and Industry conference,

December 6, 2007. https://pdfs.

semanticscholar.org/120e/b04b9b69b-

5f892904a2f6870b8c04cb33f82.pdf.

[4] Graber, Cynthia, Twilley, Nicola.

“Outside the Box: The Story of Food

Packaging.” Gastropod. Podcast audio, June

27, 2016. https://gastropod.com/outsidethe-box-the-story-of-food-packaging/.

[5] “Impossible Foods.” https://impossiblefoods.com/.

[6] “Telos and Eudaimonia.” Web log.

Philosophical Ethics (020) @ Fordham (blog).

Fordham University, February 22, 2010.

http://phru1100-020.blogspot.com.

[7] Mooney, Margarita. “History of Art

as Philosophy of Humanity.” Margarita

Mooney, September 30, 2020. https://

margaritamooney.com/2020/09/historyof-art-as-philosophy-of-humanity-maritains-creative-intuition-in-art-and-poetryas-a-guide-in-our-desiccated-culture/.

[8] Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy-Stories.”

University of St. Andrews Andrew Lang

Lecture Series. Lecture, March 8, 1939.

https://fairytalebooks.org/fairy-tales/uploads/2017/01/Tolkien_On_Fairy_Stories.pdf.

logos . 17

Roiling Boil

Jason Lee

In my mother’s house, buddae-jiggae

is always served with a side of spinach.

If any meal she made lacked

vegetables, the spinach was how she

compensated. Most stews come with

seaweed or daikon or bean sprouts or

long, spindly mushrooms simmering in

red broth. In those cases, there is no

need for spinach. Buddae-jiggae, however,

does not contain anything green.

It contains meat, ramen, and kimchi,

it is 800-1000 calories a bowl, and it

is delicious. Compared to our family’s

monstrous serving sizes, the little

floral dishes of spinach were more for

my mother’s comfort than any real attempt

at nutritional balance.

Buddae-jiggae is an unconventional

stew. An oxtail or chicken broth is

filled first with sliced pork belly, since

it takes the longest to cook. Then the

kimchi is added, then the ramen. The

components that follow—vienna sausages,

beef franks, Spam, sometimes

even shiny slices of yellow American

cheese—are unique to buddae-jiggae.

All manner of processed meats and

cheeses are stirred into the pork and

noodles and left to simmer until soft.

My family often adds rice.

The name means army-base stew, after

the primary supplier of its imported

ingredients. During the Korean War

and the years that followed, impoverished

South Korean citizens and refugees

from the North stewed and boiled

whatever they could find for food. Oftentimes,

this included the discarded

rations of American soldiers stationed

on the peninsula. Koreans lined up

to purchase or beg for bags of scraps

from the army, and they scrounged

leftover Spam, ham, and hotdogs from

base dumpsters. These first army-base

stews, cooked over streetside fires, were

said to contain cigarette butts.

While some restaurants nod to its

history through names such as DMZ

soup, these days buddae-jiggae is regarded

as a wholly Korean dish. [1]

It retains some historical elements,

namely Spam, but an array of Korean

spices and higher quality ingredients,

thanks to post-reconstruction wealth,

have mostly erased the collective memory

of stewed garbage. It’s a bit of an

institution now, and I recommend it

on winter days when you have the

time for a nap after.

Yet there are those, especially

among my grandparents’

generation, who cannot embrace

buddae-jiggae as their descendents

have. It was a dish they

stomached while spooning out dirt

and paper from the broth. It was a dish

for which their parents begged. They

begged in the glare of protected stores

called post-exchanges (PX), which sold

meat and supplies but were reserved

for Americans. Americans, that is, and

those close to them. The restrictions on

who could buy from a PX engendered

a range of dubious relationships between

Korean women and American

men. Women, once connected to soldiers,

could purchase from PX stores

for their own families, sell products to

wealthier Koreans at a premium, and

smuggle imported meats to the populace

once Dictator Park outlawed their

trade. The necessity of such arrangements

remains a smoldering source

of resentment among many from that

time.

One generation removed, my parents

do not feel the same aversion. Nor do

I. Time has filtered any fury that used

to spill from the stew’s dolorous origin.

I am left with a rich, meaty dish which

I adore but my elders reject, whose associations

for me consist of big bites

and self-conscious spinach, but consist

of poverty and humiliation for

thousands of

people in my

nation’s

history.

How

do I en-

gage

with an

institution

that has

loved and

fulfilled me, yet is built upon

a legacy of grief ? This surfaces

questions not only of time and history,

but also of identity, responsibility,

and repentance. I can’t ask a bowl

of buddae-jiggae, “Who am I?” (at

least, I won’t). But then, I am no longer

talking about buddae-jiggae. I am

talking about the church.

Though it may seem a little stilted to

compare the Christian faith to a bowl

of pork, my relationships with both

are similar. My faith and its community

of believers are outlined in great

love. My mother conveys her love for

me in three ways: in speech, in food,

and in prayer. My relationship to God

and the universe, to the people I do

and do not care for, to my purpose in

life (whatever that means)—I have explored

in faith, struggled with in faith,


severed and reconciled in faith. Whatever

maturation and suffering and elation

I have experienced in life has been

wholly entangled with the church.

On the other hand, the church has

been wholly entangled in a multitude

of violent and oppressive systems. It

has directly advocated for the colonization

of African, American, and

Asian lands. It has annihilated native

and indigenous cultures and forcibly

converted their populations not out

of love, but from arrogance: not with

respect for life, but on pain of death.

It has served as a passive and active

agent in the calcification of white supremacy

and as a vehicle for European

hegemony.

It was a

tool for

the enslavement

of

Black

peoples and a

justification for their

continued servitude. Believers

have massacred Jews out of hate and

distorted theology and replicate these

persecutions against LGBTQ+ communities

through conversion camps

and social rejection.

I do not hate my faith. I do not derive

any pleasure or status from recounting

the depraved aberrations of what is

meant to be a divine mission, nor from

reducing or concealing the complexity

of the church’s involvement with the

violence above. We have done good

work. Christian abolitionists helmed

various efforts across Europe and the

US, and isolated Catholics families

smuggled Jews out of Nazi Germany.

Starting in the 1920s (some) missionary

work peeled (slowly) away from

empire and towards social service,

while Black churches have served as

both the staging grounds and expressions

of liberation.

However, these accomplishments are

irrelevant to my question. I know

we’ve done good. I am concerned with

how we are meant to engage with our

great evils. Yet so often when I ask other

fellow Christians, they rehearse the

church’s worthy deeds, as if, by some

moral arithmetic, these erase the numerous,

unqualified acts of Christian

wickedness.

Those who believe that rights expunge

wrongs must review their theology.

Those who do not I nevertheless cannot

entirely blame for their defensiveness.

While Korean youth swallow

army base stew having forgotten the

dish’s demeaning origin, the contemporary

church evangelizes and moralizes,

having forgotten its predecessors’

grievous sins. In both contexts, subsequent

generations have inherited a

sanitized history, but for Christianity,

the price of this forgetfulness has been

the loss of our understanding of collective

responsibility.

Biblical figures such as Ezra, Daniel,

and Achan represent but a few

of many instances in which believers

were held accountable for the sins of

their forebears. Christians are meant

to believe that we are responsible not

only for our own conduct, but for those

with whom we share a relationship––

accountable not only for our own uncleanliness,

but for the uncleanliness

of those with whom we dwell. Yet we

have narrowed our standards of righteousness

until each individual conveniently

need only concern themselves

with themselves. We have forgotten

that both our most damning sins and

our most sublime joy are collective.

Neglecting the corporate aspect of our

existence has left the church speechless

as believers and nonbelievers alike

come to new consciousness with respect

to racial justice, gender equality,

climate change, and poverty. Each topic

raises genuine questions regarding

how people are knit to their communities,

to their past, and to each other.

Yet many have, in the name of our

faith, branded feminism as an excuse

for pagan immorality and Black Lives

Matter as a violation, rather than an

affirmation, of the equality of life before

God. They recast attempts at repentance

and restitution as liberal seduction

and communist propaganda.

Throughout it all, the house of God is

silent.

In our inarticulacy, we have also abdicated

a critical mission. “Learn to

do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed.

Take up the cause of the fatherless;

plead the case of the widow.”

This was the task, among many others.

Among many commandments, we

were to demonstrate and reify a kingdom

where the meek inherit the earth,

and where fields and homes are set

aside for the impoverished, the immigrant,

and the stranger.

logos . 19

When the church has so abandoned

this mission that its primary advocates

in modernity are nonbelievers,

when the church is so unfamiliar with

the character of its mission that it no

longer recognizes it under new names,

not only have we lost our flock, but

we have lost ourselves. The “radical”

has become something foreign and

corrupting, instead of a prefix to our

convictions. The Christ has become a

Savior who wills the poor and weak to

save themselves—and who excuses his

followers for willing the same.

Liberation, vindication, reparation,

healing, punishment, and redemption

are topics to which our faith has

much to offer. However, we have lost

the opportunity to lead society in their

pursuit. A plurality of the church, in

its hostility towards this era’s reinvigorated

movements against police brutality

and white supremacy, has withered

any ethos we may have had.

This does not absolve us of our responsibilities.

That is why this article

is written here, towards campus, and

not solely towards the internal Christian

body. We are inexcusably late, as

much of the world is, to these racial

and social justice movements that are

only now entering the public eye despite

generations of relentless organizing.

But I have hope that this can be an

opportunity for the church to recover

its collective spirituality, repent of its

legacies, and reconcile itself to the

good work being done.

In many ways, intellectual traditions

such as critical theory and the vast array

of intersectional studies have become

both a refuge and an indispensable

tool for what should have been

a pursuit of justice shared between

believers and nonbelievers. They have

expressed certain truths to which our

faith also attests. For one, the reality


of structural racism substantiates our

belief that the world is fallen. It refers

to how present and historic decisions

have accumulated to invent race and

subsequently privilege white culture,

language, aesthetics, and values. It affirms

that the discriminatory outcomes

have proliferated throughout all of society.

Christianity goes so far as to say

all of our relationships, and all of our

systems are, without exception, cut

off spiritually, ecologically, economically,

and socially from an equitable,

just existence. It should not come as a

surprise to Christians that racism pervades

all aspects of our fallen world. It

should spark not rebuttal but grief and

righteous anger that creation’s many,

splendorous colors have been twisted

into a vile hierarchy.

It is all the more disappointing, therefore,

that the most unified clarion from

our church has been for protestors to

muzzle their rage, to be patient, to be

courteous. It is one thing to pray that

victims find peace. It is another to ask

that they bury their conscience for our

comfort. Christians believe that sin—

brokenness, if you will—must be actively

combatted, in ourselves and in

our world. Only an unfaithful reading

could interpret the command to turn

the other cheek as a command to suppress

the widow and the orphan.

To be anti-racist, not merely non-racist.

To heal brokenness, not merely

disavow it. Believers and nonbelievers

alike are called to an active pursuit of

justice. What can be unclear, especially

to those who are just now coming to

this awareness, is what we can do as

individuals to contribute to the work.

While I urge you to consult the vast

repository of wisdom compiled by the

many organizers in the field for specific

actionables, the Christain faith’s

concept of tzedakah can, I believe, provide

the necessary posture.

Though it is a rather billowing concept,

a fundamental aspect of tzedakah

is being right with God. It is

relationally defined, because being

right with God means being right with

ourselves, our strangers, our ancestors,

and our offspring. Much more than

merely interpersonal, this means just

verdicts, dignified living, and reorganizing

systems to cultivate grace in a

broken world. Thus, our posture is one

in which we are urgently setting right

relationships between people and the

world around us—so urgently that it is

one of few instances where God tells

us to leave the church and go.

I recognize that there are many who

have suffered because of my church,

my faith––suffered and lost enough

that we are, in their eyes, unredeemable.

Reader, if you are one such person,

yet have stayed, you have expressed

a grace that we can only hope to emulate.

I am not asking you to forgive

us. In the end, I am still answering my

own question—how do I reconcile the

potential for love that I see in my faith

with its many horrors? Buddae-jiggae

will always be a soup born of shame.

Yet my mother and its other inheritors

have refired it to be an expression of

greasy triumph. The church cannot be

severed from its murderous ancestry.

Yet I and its other inheritors can still

serve—not in some impossible notion

of redemption by works, but out of an

ethic of radical love.

I say radical, because we must go beyond

what is expected. Both Christianity

and a secular pursuit of justice

can be allied in their effort against the

oppressions of the world. Both hosts––

by demolishing the systems that crush

the human soul, by breaking the fangs

of the wicked and plucking their victims

from their teeth—are reclaiming

space. Space for the full expression of

human beauty, for more fulfilling ways

of being and systems of governing.

Space borne of radical freedom, radical

liberation, and radical hope.

Yet Christianity has tzedakah. Tzedakah,

which is righteousness, spiritual

unity, interpersonal integrity, virtuous

society, justice-as-love, all interdependent

and codefined. It is in tzedakah

where I think the Christian faith begins

to leap ahead of a secular pursuit

of justice, and where we can begin to

offer more-than-overdue backline support.

The role faith can play is one of

vision. Freedom and liberation founded

on unconditional love, mercy, and

forgiveness. Identity that is universally

accepted yet as varied as the million

faces of the divine. Dignity wrought

into our most basic construction as images

of God.

Perhaps that is the answer that I am

looking for. My faith’s potential for

love can be made manifest, not in spite

of, but in comparison to our history, by

showing that there is more to be had.

That even now, all of us are aiming too

low. That the steam from this roiling

boil rises to a place beyond the horizon,

beyond human imagination, beyond

the radical, into something transcendent.

Notes

[1] DMZ referring to the demilitarized

zone separating North and South Korea.

logos . 21

Investigating Hunger

Hannah Turner

24 hours. No social media.

I constantly find these challenges all

over social media, ironically. To forgo

prominent desires of our daily lives in

pursuit of something else––to fast––

seems like the new trend. Has online

social interaction become a necessity to

our modern lives? I’d say the answer is

yes—yes, and maybe even as much as

food.

The mental attachment to social media

can be just as strong as our physical

need for food. This attachment grows

as a casual scroll through Instagram

in the middle of the day becomes the

primary motivation to wake up in the

morning. Because of our increasing dependence

on social media, engaging in

a “social media detox” challenge can be

considered fasting.

But what is fasting? Fasting is the purposeful

denial of a physical necessity

in order to attain greater spiritual clarity.

The physical aspect of fasting is

straightforward, and you can sacrifice

anything from food to water to social

interaction. Traditionally, fasting is abstinence

from food; in a fast involving

food, you temporarily surrender the

nourishment required for physical sustenance.

Fasting has been a common Christian

practice since the first century, though

it might be somewhat intimidating to

contemporary Christians, and it remains

prominent in other Abrahamic

traditions. I think of Jewish practices

during Passover or Shavout, or the fasting

of my Muslim friends during Ramadan.

In these periods, the religious

adherent understands that fasts affect

more than their bodies––abstinence

from food carries spiritual significance

and can lead even to spiritual

revelation.

This spiritual aspect of fasting challenges

the common worldview that staunchly

divides the physical and the spiritual.

The idea of the spiritual describes what

is beyond the merely physical and emotional

aspects of an individual’s life.

The spiritual is distinct from what, as

a Christian, I call the Holy Spirit: one

of the three persons of God, whom I

believe to be the indwelling presence

of God in my life. From my point of

view, the Spirit is very different from the

spiritual. [1] But regardless of beliefs,

everyone has a relationship with their

spiritual self which can be explored

and sharpened. The relationship between

our body and spirit while fasting

is clear: when fasting, we give up our

physical desires to pursue deeper spiritual

understanding and development.

You can be simply searching for clarity,

or, as in my case, to find yourself closer

to God, the Creator of the universe.

Fasting carries unfamiliar religious

overtones, but you might already fast in

your everyday life. For example, you’re

fundamentally fasting when you deny

yourself that cup of coffee because you

want to find a better source of energy.

When you “quit” social media for a

week, you are fasting, too. Though social

media does not provide essential

energy like food, it instantly gratifies

our desires for social interaction and so

increases the release of dopamine

in the brain. [2] Fasting from social

media denies your brain that instant

gratification and can offer spiritual revelation

in the form of renewed energy,

clarity, or greater closeness to God.

…

During the day, I spend over three

hours on social media alone. My screen

time has only increased during the pandemic.

I give too much attention to the

phone I carry around with me all day,

everywhere I go.

So, my first fast was from social media.

Before my abrupt week away from

social media, I would spend hours

on my phone consuming content. I

could recognize the immediate but

temporary joy I felt from logging into

Instagram. Soon, social media’s comparison-drenched

environment overwhelmed

me to the point of physical

exhaustion. I needed a break. I used the

week I spent away from social media for

reflection. After abruptly giving it up, I

began to purify my love for social media

by investigating why I felt the need

to create and consume. At the end of

the process, I was no longer exhausted

and overwhelmed. Thinking about my

relationship with social media made me

think about my relationship with food.

I thought maybe I needed to purify my

love for that, too.

My second fast was from food. I fasted

for three days. My primary concern

in this fast was that food is a physical

need. Food is life-giving: chemical

bonds in my food are broken down to

create ATP that fuels my body, and the

things I eat keep my body functioning

and strong. And, just as daunting,

fasting and I do not seem compatible

at all: on average, I eat three meals a

day, have snacks whenever I feel like

it, and always drink a cup of coffee.

The fast was difficult. I was hungriest

at the beginning and at the end of my

fast. The entire time, the knowledge

that I was not eating loomed over me,

and my stomach perpetually growled.

I experienced moments of dizziness

and had to sit down. However, I spent


my

time

fasting

from food with

intentionality, being sure to seek the

spiritual benefits of fasting by praying

and reading the Christian scriptures.

I learned about God’s character and

about what He did for His people. I

learned to prioritize my faith over my

physical hunger. As a result, like after

my social media fast, I was left more

patient and empathetic, especially toward

my family. I wasn’t trying harder

to be more Christ-like––slower to anger,

quicker to kindness––but seeking

God through fasting naturally allowed

for this change in character.

…

Fasting is a test of will. It is also a test

of priorities, and a chance for us to realize

what is most nourishing to us. For

me, fasting is also a test of faith. My

fasts symbolized my relinquishing of

control to God, who promises an enlightened,

guided, and fully satisfied life.

[3] This was no small feat: a sense of

control

gives

me peace,

while lack

of control gives

me anxiety. During

my time of fasting from

social media and food, I was

relieved from the burden of control.

Non-Christians, too, can reap the benefits

of fasting. Fasting produces humility

as we face our weaknesses––dependence

on everyday luxuries, like social

media or an extra cup of coffee in the

morning. Fasting also cultivates discipline.

When you fast, you practice (inconveniently)

giving something up and

delaying gratification for something

better in the long term. As confidence

in the value of discipline grows, the discipline

developed through fasting can

be executed in other areas of life, from

fitness to school work. Most importantly,

non-Christians can also experience

some of fasting’s spiritual rewards.

Anyone who desires a clearer sense of

purpose or peace would benefit from

the clarity that results from fasting. Using

extra time and mental space to reflect

and focus on our emotional, communal,

and spiritual needs can help us

increase our motivation and resolve.

…

In the fight between physical and spiritual

hunger, I’ve concluded that one will

inevitably be stronger than the other.

Giving up an absolutely necessary component

of my life to attend to my spirit

was almost unfathomable. It seemed

that the strength of my physical hunger

far outweighed my spiritual hunger. I

thought that my physical hunger would

be unbearable.

But growth does not occur within our

comfort zones. I had the desire to be

focused, disciplined, and gain spiritual

strength, and it became stronger as

I disciplined myself through fasting. I

had to do something about the hunger

in my spirit, so I slowly surrendered my

control. I became completely full. I did

not hear even a faint cry of my physical

hunger because it, too, was full. The

lessons and the change I experienced

were the most difficult but necessary

things I’ve learned in a while. I need to

control my feelings so they don’t control

me. I need to be in a closer relationship

with God. The key is to have constant

reminders that the spiritual, as well as

the physical, is an absolutely necessary

component of my life. Others who fast

may need to be reminded of the value

of the quality of humility. Whatever

your goal, committing to a fast is just

a start to the long, fulfilling journey of

refining your spiritual life.

Notes

[1] Evans, Jimmie H III. “The Third Person

of the Trinity: How the Holy Spirit

Facilitates Man’s Walk with God.” Fidei et

Veriatis 1, no.1 (2016). https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1027&context=fidei_et_veritatis.

[2] Krach, Soren, Frieder M. Paulus, Maren

Bodden, and Tilo Kircher. “The Rewarding

Nature of Social Interactions.” Frontiers in

Behavioral Neuroscience (May 2010). https://

doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2010.00022.

[3] Isaiah 58, New International Version.

logos . 23


Depart with Dignity

Ashley Talton

Many of the people in the Zen Hospice

end-of-life care facility, such as

Mrs. M, are unable to eat. And yet,

the most popular room in the house is

the kitchen, where the aroma of freshly-baked

cookies can be found, while

people are chatting around the table.

[1] Even though the people there can’t

enjoy the taste of the cookies because

of illness or decreased taste sensitivity

from age, the joy that the smell of the

cookies provides is unmatched.

Speaking from a strictly scientific perspective,

eating is “nothing more or less

than a transfer of energy between two

organic systems.”[2] However, viewing

the act of eating in this reductionist

way strips away the essence of a meal.

Food brings people together around

a table, laughing. Food brings people

dignity through the privilege of making

decisions about what we eat, who

we eat with, and when we eat. Food

is a medium for compassion when its

provision meets someone’s tangible

needs. Food is not simply an essential

of physiological survival; it is so much

greater than that. Food provides “sustenance

on several levels.”[3] Eating

is a multi-sensory experience. Taste is

not the only thing that is valued about

food, but the holistic experience of the

occasion of a meal is highly valued,

too. Food is fellowship, compassion,

and, most of all, dignity––the very elements

that contribute to our humanity,

our connections with one another, and

what every person deserves.

As a thirteen-year-old, Mrs. M had

found joy in laughing and reminiscing

over a celebration dinner with her

friends after the soccer district championship

game. During this period, she

had more choices about what to eat,

but less control over with whom she

shared meals. In college, Mrs. M took

time out of her busy schedule between

classes to catch up with a friend over

a meal, instead of spending that extra

time working on a p-set. This was

one of the first times in her life that

she had complete control over where,

with whom, and what she ate. Ten or

twenty years later, she shared a meal

around the table with her kids, asking

about their day at school and discussing

what happened at work with her

spouse. As Mrs. M grew older, the

number of choices she was able to

make regarding her food increased

abundantly. Volition, the power to

make choices for yourself, is the core

of what food provides for us when we

choose when, when, where, and with

whom to eat. Volition implies dignity.

Eating alone in a hospital room is very

different than meals surrounded by

friends and family at earlier stages in

life. Physical challenges from aging or

severe illnesses make the act of eating

more difficult. Taste buds have atrophied

and become less sensitive, and

chewing is not as easy as it once was

and may even cause discomfort. Food

is also connected with memories, and

a particular dish that once brought joy

may bring pain forty years later.[4] A

milkshake that reminds Mrs. M of the

happy first date with her deceased husband

now symbolizes an experience

that she’ll never have again.

Choices that may have been taken for

granted have now vanished, rendering

the experience seemingly similar to life

as a small child. The days of choosing

to eat whatever you want at whatever

time you please are long gone, as mealtime

is whenever the food is served to

you. In certain cases, medical interventions

with artificial nutrition prolong

the life of a person at the cost of their

increased suffering because we are unable

to accept death.[5]

Food is a way we show our love for

one another—starting at birth when

our parents and caregivers provide us

necessary nutrition as we are unable

to help ourselves. As we age, food remains

a popular way to show how

much we care for someone, whether by

taking someone out to dinner or baking

goods for them. Jesus recognized

the power that a meal has, and He can

be seen time and time again providing

for people out of love. Mark 2:15

says, “And as he reclined at [the] table

in his house, many tax collectors and

sinners were reclining with Jesus and

his disciples, for there were many who

followed him.”[6] The scribes and the

Pharisees, those who valued religious

traditions and the law, criticized Jesus

for whom He chose to dine with.

[7] Yet Jesus’ love extended to the tax

collectors and sinners, those whom the

Pharisees despised, because He had

compassion on them.

Since food is a way in which we show

our love for others, it is hard for us to

stop providing for our loved ones with

food. However, an essential aspect of

loving someone means preserving their

dignity, even at the end of life, when so

many choices they previously had with

food have now disappeared.

In 2 Samuel, Barzillai approached

King David, saying “I am this day

eighty years old. Can I discern what

is pleasant and what is not? Can your

servant taste what he eats or what he

drinks? Can I still listen to the voice

logos . 25

of singing men and women? Why

then should your servant be an added

burden to my lord the king?”[9] King

David’s reply honors his request to live

out his days on his own land and blesses

Barzillai. King David indicated his

love for him and links this love with his

request for dignity.

Dave, a forty-two-year-old suffering

from pancreatic cancer had been receiving

intravenous feeding. His wife,

Sharon, was hesitant to stop his intravenous

feeding, afraid that it would be

akin to starving him, as the fluids were

his only source of nutrition.[8] However,

the hospice staff recommended

the withdrawal because his body was

no longer absorbing any of the fats,

sugars, or proteins from the fluids.

The fluids were only serving to make

his symptoms worse, with skin swelling

and trouble breathing.

Though decisions regarding medical

interventions are ethically complex, we

must not solely consider the benefits of

providing nutrition to the person. We

must remember the entire significance

of a meal, because its value is not necessarily

in the physical act of eating

but also in the flavor, community, and

choices that meals come with. If prioritizing

the richness and fullness of

life is at the center of what is desired

for a loved one as they near the end of

their life, one must entertain the idea

that this may not include artificial nutrition.

Sharon decided to discontinue Dave’s

artificial nutrition, and he was able to

eat a few bites of food, purely to enjoy

the taste.[10] These last few days of

enjoyment would not have been pos-


sible had the family not realized what

they wanted to prioritize.

The importance of dignity, particularly

at the end of life, cannot be denied.

Although it is difficult to pin down an

exact definition, dignity can be categorized

into areas like communication,

autonomy, respect, and empowerment.[11]

What does dignity look like

when considering all its aspects in relation

to food? Communicating clearly

with someone what their options are

for eating and food. Giving someone

autonomy to make choices instead

of assuming what is best. Respecting

someone’s decisions that they make regarding

food: empowering and affirming

them.

After a long night of unsuccessful

fishing, Jesus appeared to his friends

and invited them to breakfast.[12] He

knew exactly what they needed, and

He understood that food can be used

to give people a fuller experience of

life. Perhaps the invitation is where

our dignity is retained, in knowing that

someone else desires to spend time

with us, to talk, and to listen. Surely,

the taste of food matters, but it isn’t everything.

The sooner we realize that,

the sooner we may be able to accept

our mortality. Taking away someone’s

volition for the sake of helping them

fails to recognize one of the core aspects

of food — that it is dignity. Preserving

dignity means having not only

a holistic understanding that sees the

food experience as more than simply

a chemical exchange, but also an understanding

of how the preservation

of dignity and love go hand in hand.

Notes

[1] Miller, BJ. “What Really Matters at

the End of Life.” TED. Accessed October

16, 2020. https://www.ted.com/talks/

bj_miller_what_really_matters_at_the_

end_of_life/.

[2] Rappoport, Leon. “The McDonaldization

of Taste.” In How We Eat: Appetite, Culture

and the Psychology of Food. Toronto: ECW

Press, 2003.

[3] Miller, “What Really Matters at the

End of Life.”

[4] Rappoport, Leon. “You Are What You

Eat.”

[5] Zitter, Jessica Nutik. “Food and the

Dying Patient.” The New York Times, August

21, 2014. https://well.blogs.nytimes.

com/2014/08/21/food-and-the-dyingpatient/.

[6] All Biblical quotations from the ESV.

[7] Mark 2:16

[8] Gawande, Atul. “Letting Go.” In Being

Mortal. Toronto, Ontario: Anchor Canada,

2017.

[9] 2 Samuel 19:35.

[10] Gawande, “Letting Go.”

[11] Kennedy, Grace. “The Importance of

Patient Dignity in Care at the End of Life.”

The Ulster medical journal 85, no. 1 (2016):

45–48.

[12] John 21:12.

logos . 27


communion

communion

logos . 29

The Altar Is Not a Stage

Justin Ferrugia

As is the case for many American

towns, driving around my hometown

on a Sunday morning, one is guaranteed

to see families dressed in their

“Sunday best” walking down the

street, crowded church parking lots,

and groups gathering and mingling

around an ornately dressed figure.

To this day in America churches are

the focal points of Sunday.

But why? Why are some members of

the community so tied to this seemingly

antiquated and allegedly cult-like

ritual? At the end of the day, isn’t it

just to be social? Why can’t people just

socialize in a “normal” way?

I personally have never encountered

a moment of doubt so severe as to

lead me to those questions. But I do,

at times, struggle to keep at bay the

(incorrect) assumption that forms the

foundation of contemporary culture’s

misunderstanding of religious ritual.

This assumption is that religious ritual

is inherently performative. The performative

view of faith focuses on others

rather than God: faith becomes more

show than substance.

That is to say that when I go to Mass,

when people gather outside church,

we are doing it primarily for others

to see and to remain members of our

community. This means that acts of

the faithful—prayer, devotion, and

participation in the sacraments—are

outward demonstrations of our own

possession of faith. To put it simply,

this assumption posits that ritual is a

means by which we prove our righteousness

and holiness.

In Luke’s parable of the Pharisee and

the tax collector, the performative view

of faith is that of the Pharisee. In the

time of Christ, Pharisees were learned

Jewish jurists and theologians. They

were in the upper echelons of Jewish

theological and legal authority. Tax

collectors, to use a hip priest’s analogy,

held a similar place in Jewish society

as the IRS does in American society.

They were the lowest of the low.

The parable is written as such. “The

Pharisee took up his position and

spoke this prayer to himself, ‘O God,

I thank you that I am not like the rest

of humanity—greedy, dishonest, adulterous—or

even like this tax collector.

I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on

my whole income” (Luke 18:11-12).

Here, we see the Pharisee using the ritual

in which he participates as justification

for his righteousness and holiness

with respect to the tax collector.

I slip toward this trap more often than

I should. But when a culture allows this

view to cloud its perception of all religious

ritual, it allows the aberrant to

become the norm. When the aberrant

is the norm, it leads to the exasperated

question: why participate in this ritual?

…

The answer to this question lies in resolving

this perceptual aberration and

exploring the act that Christian ritual

sustains: faith. Too often, we forget

that faith in God is a paradox, a struggle,

and a fight. We do not have faith,

we do faith.

Ritual, far from being performative,

is the sustenance—the food—fueling

the ongoing, constant, and concerted

struggle (though full understanding of

God can never be had in this life) towards

faith.

St. Thomas Aquinas, a prominent

figure in the Christian intellectual tradition

to which I subscribe, describes

faith as “a mean between science and

opinion.” [1] (ST II-II q.1 a.2). This

six-word-story of faith encapsulates

the truth that faith cannot be described

as static—at rest. Rather, faith is a constant

activity.

To understand how St. Thomas and

many theologians both before and after

him view faith, I find it helpful to

consider a question with which many

of us grappled in middle school geometry.

When presented with an idea, say

a triangle, I can easily form the opinion,

because my teacher proclaimed it

as truth, that its interior angles sum to

180 degrees. Once I form this opinion,

I can hold it as long as I want and it

takes no additional work to do so. If I

want to reach full understanding, however,

I need to complete a geometrical

proof. This state of full understanding

is also static. But what happens in between?

It takes work to move from opinion

to understanding, described by St.

Thomas (and St. Augustine in a slightly

different way) using the Latin verb

cogitare. St. Thomas says that this cogitative

act, “…properly speaking, [is]

the movement of the mind while yet

deliberating, and not yet perfected

by the clear sight of truth.”[1] This

cogitative act is the mechanical crux

of Christian faith. It is not something

possessed, but an action partaken in or

lived—a habitus, as St. Thomas would

say. This constant state of active deliberation

is necessary to achieve stability

in the middle region between science

and opinion.

In the deliberative act of faith, one

stands in a paradoxical position. We

are able to experience a certainty (usually

promised by science), even if we

only possess the limited understanding

of opinion. This is not full sight or full

comprehension. Rather, it is a delicate

state of the intellect held in balance


through a constant act of the will—a

constant state of thinking.

For some, this account of faith might

be overly logical. To understand why

faith is not, indeed cannot be performative,

I find it helpful to clarify the

mechanics of faith and the necessary

spiritual and intellectual exertion it requires.

It’s hard and it requires great

courage. Only through this lens can

one understand why Christians are so

wedded to ritual. The faithful are constantly

in need of the nourishment and

sustenance that Christ, through his

death on the cross and the institution

of the sacraments, gives us. Like water

stations at regular intervals of a foot

race, Christ, through the sacraments,

gives us not ways to demonstrate our

faithfulness, nor a list of requirements,

but rather the fulfillment of our foundational

necessities when running the

spiritual marathon that is a life of faith.

In its true state, Christian ritual, far

from being performative, is instead a

humble acceptance of Christ’s sacrifice.

The reason this performative

view of ritual is so insidious and has

the ability to corrupt not only those

who partake but the perceptions of

those who do not, is because it perverts

the accepting of a gift that is necessary

for our survival in a life of faith into

something worthy of praise.

…

There is no more concrete way to apply

the Christian concept of ritual to

St. Thomas’s account of faith than

through the Eucharist or Holy Communion.

St. Thomas himself acknowledges

that “…spiritual life has a certain

conformity with the life of the body.”

The Eucharist is unique because it is

nutritive both in the corporeal sense,

and in the spiritual sense.

In Catholicism, the celebration of the

Eucharist is one of seven sacraments.

It culminates the sacrifice of the Holy

Mass, which is the most well known

and commonly celebrated ritual

among Catholics. It is easy to see how

an observer may misconstrue the celebration

of the Mass as a spectacle. Af-

logos . 31


ter all, the Mass takes place on an altar

that often resembles a theater. Many

people also point to the perceived

opulence of churches as evidence of

self-aggrandizement.

However, in the realest sense possible,

the celebration of the Eucharist is no

more than an invitation to a meal. As

Catholics, we believe in transubstantiation,

which simply means that when

we consume that wafer of unleavened

bread we are, in the realest sense, consuming

the body, blood, soul, and divinity

of Christ.

In a corporeal sense, this wafer of unleavened

bread provides us with real

caloric nutrition. In a spiritual sense,

this meal gives us the nourishment and

energy we need to continue the marathon

of faith that St. Thomas describes.

This spiritual nourishment is anything

but small. Every time the Mass is celebrated,

we are invited to the last supper

of Christ and given what we need to

survive, indeed to thrive in the paradoxical

life of faith.

The Pharisee would accept this invitation

and gift with self-serving thanksgiving.

If the Pharisee were invited to

share a meal with a friend, he would

give thanks that he had the opportunity

to show everyone around him how

good a friend he was by accepting a

gift necessary for his survival. When

he walked in the door he would say

“Thank you, not for the gift you have

given me, but for allowing me to show

those around me how important I am

to you.”

This is the danger of viewing Christian

ritual like the Eucharist as performative.

We instinctively feel that the

Pharisee’s attitude is wrong—it is not

something that we would ever consider

doing. That is why it is so essential for

us as Christians both to guard against

the view of faith as performative in our

own minds but more importantly, as a

culture, to not let this aberrant idea of

ritual obscure the norm.

I want to make explicit that agreement

on correct ritual is not necessary to reject

the view that Christian ritual is performative.

I do not want to convey the

relativistic idea that everyone of every

faith or no faith must see all religious

rituals as equal. I do not, and plenty of

people would say the same about me.

But, what I can say, and what I hope

we as a culture can say, is that even if

we do not see all rituals as equal, we

understand their very real necessity.

Even if these ideas about Christian

rituals might seem irrelevant, the idea

of ritual itself is foreign to no one. The

rich stereotypes of American suburbia

yield an abundance of examples of the

American sacred liturgy. These daily

rituals are the parts of our lives that

corporeally sustain us. Perhaps you derive

great peace from your NPR-filled

commute, or perhaps your daily trip to

Dunkin’ Donuts provides some necessary

predictability in your life while giving

you the energy to begin a new day.

Whatever they are, our rituals, our routines,

sustain us. If this current world is

any indication, we see that many people

are willing to risk their lives—crawl

over broken glass—to continue with

their ordinary rituals. Even if we cannot

agree, many can empathize with

this feeling. Why must we view Christian

ritual differently?

What starving person would not crawl

over broken glass to a thanksgiving

feast? What parched person would

not climb a mountain to reach a lake

on top? What Christian would not risk

their life, endure suffering, or encounter

hardship to attain the one thing

necessary to sustain the real marathon

that is faith?

Notes

[1] Aquinas, Thomas. Summa theologica.

Translated by Fathers of the English

Dominican Province. New York: Benziger

Brothers, 1911-1925. II-II q.1

a.2.

[2] Aquinas. Summa theologica. II-II q.

2 a.1.

logos . 33

Richness in the Desert

Bella Gamboa

O God, you are my God;

earnestly I seek you;

my soul thirsts for you;

my flesh faints for you,

as in a dry and weary land where

there is no water.

- Psalm 63:1

Longing is a familiar feeling. We miss

those we love who are far away from us;

we yearn for a return to normalcy and

the end of this pandemic; we literally,

physically hunger as every few hours

our bodies require additional sustenance.

In Psalm 63, King David of Israel, the

psalmist according to the psalm’s title,

captures in beautiful but fraught language

his longing—for God. David

desperately thirsts for God, as he would

for refreshment “in a dry and weary

land where there is no water.” Certainly

David, whether in his youth as a

shepherd, or later in his life as a king on

military campaigns, was familiar with

physical thirst and the desolation of a

dry desert; indeed, the title tells us that

this psalm is from when David was “in

the wilderness of Judah.” Even if most

contemporary readers aren’t so familiar

with such conditions, David’s simile remains

evocative, and we understand his

feeling of dehydration and thirst.

But what does it mean for David to

thirst for God? Such an idea can feel

frustratingly nebulous; God is not a sip

of water from an animal skin (or Hydroflask).

Though we might not always be able

to identify the object of our desires as

readily as David does, I do think that

we hunger and thirst for God. Various

human longings which we do not even

associate with God might make David’s

words more palatable: his experience of

hunger can matter to people who have

never encamped in the Judean wilderness,

or even thought about desiring a

God who may or may not exist.

From a Christian perspective, a longing

for God can be quite easily explained:

we are God’s creation, made in His image,

according to the creation account

in Genesis. Yet as a result of our human

imperfections, we are not the best

versions of ourselves, and we are not

connected to God as we ought to be.

We experience a sort of God-shaped

hole—the result of separation from the

One who made us, and of the original

perfection of creation.

The silhouette of this God-shaped

hole results from God’s character and

nature, which shapes human longings.

Our need for relationships is consistent

with the Christian Trinity. If God is

three Persons in One, Father, Son, and

Holy Spirit, He has been in relationship

within the different Persons of the Trinity

for all time, before there were angels

or humans or anything other than

Himself. (The Trinity is really hard,

perhaps even impossible to understand,

but one can try to envision this intrapersonal

and interpersonal relationship

without trying to detangle the Trinity.)

Made like God, humans naturally desire

companionship and intimate relationships.

And if we are created by but

distanced from a God who knows us so

intimately that “even the hairs of your

head are all numbered” (Luke 12:7),

we understandably long to be known

deeply—in ways that are often elusive

in relationships with humans as limited

as ourselves, rather than an omniscient

Father.

Likewise, people hunger for beauty—a

natural impulse if we are children of

the Creator of a beautiful, complex,

and creative world. That God is a God

of abundance and beauty is apparent in

the lovely language of Psalm 65:


You water [the earth’s] furrows

abundantly,

settling its ridges,

softening it with showers,

and blessing its growth.

You crown the year with your

bounty;

your wagon tracks overflow with

abundance.

The pastures of the wilderness

overflow,

the hills gird themselves with

joy...

they shout and sing together for

joy. (Psalm 65:9-13)

The Lord’s bountiful provision and the

verdant loveliness of the natural world

reflect His nature as well as our own.

We are made for the fullness of hills and

valleys that “shout and sing together for

joy,” yet are so far from that reality;

longing and dissatisfaction are a natural

result of this disparity between what is

and what ought to be.

But for one who, like David, believes

in and is in relationship with God, how

can that hunger for Him be so acute?

Perhaps conversion or Christian life

evokes an image of sudden fulfilment

and rosy, uncomplicated perpetual contentment—but

that is a superficial and

inaccurate expectation.

Mother Teresa, the iconically self-sacrificial

nun, experienced a profound

sense of God’s absence for decades; in

one letter, she laments “Where is my

faith?—even deep down, right in, there

is nothing but emptiness & darkness.

My God—how painful is this unknown

pain. It pains without ceasing.—I have

no faith. – I dare not utter the words

& thoughts that crowd in my heart—&

make me suffer untold agony.” [1] She

seems to have felt stranded in “a dry

and weary land where there is no water,”

distant from the refreshment of

faith, a sense of God’s love, and relief

from her agony.

Mother Teresa’s words recall those of

another psalm, in which the psalmist (in

this case, not David), addresses God:

As a deer pants for flowing

streams,

so pants my soul for you, O

God…

When shall I come and appear

before God?

My tears have been my food day

and night,

while they say to me all the day

long,

“Where is your God?” (Psalm

42:1-3)

Even the deeply devoted experience

spiritual droughts and doubts; at times,

God’s living water feels absent, and only

our own tears and pain seem to remain.

So I have looked upon you in the

sanctuary,

beholding your power and glory.

Because your steadfast love is better

than life,

my lips will praise you.

So I will bless you as long as I live;

in your name I will lift up my hands.

- Psalm 63:2-4

David responds to his thirst by seeking

out an oasis. Even as he internally experiences

a desert, he enters into “the

sanctuary,” where God is present regardless

of his internal state, and there

“behold[s God’s] power and glory.”

Sometimes, actions do what feelings

cannot, and are themselves an important

part of a life of faith; emotions are

slippery and difficult to control, but our

feet are much more easily directed. David,

despite his internal drought, goes to

the sanctuary, as Mother Teresa continued

to serve and love others even when

she did not feel God’s love.

In seeking out God in His sanctuary,

David—and, in her way, Mother Teresa—responds

to a divine invitation: “I

logos . 35

am the Lord your God, who brought

you up out of the land of Egypt. Open

your mouth wide, and I will fill it.”

(Psalm 81:10) The Lord tells His people,

whom He has provided for and

protected in the past, to open their

mouths to receive His fulfillment. David

and Mother Teresa acted in response

to God’s promises and their understanding

of His character, even if their

feelings did not match their minds and

deeds. David, with parched lips, praises

God not out of upwelling emotion, but

from his conviction that God’s “steadfast

love is better than life.”

My soul will be satisfied as with fat

and rich food,

and my mouth will praise you with

joyful lips,

when I remember you upon my bed,

and meditate on you in the watches

of the night;

for you have been my help,

and in the shadow of your wings I

will sing for joy.

My soul clings to you;

your right hand upholds me.

- Psalm 63:5-8

In a striking reversal from the opening

lines of the psalm, David exclaims

that his formerly famished “soul will

be satisfied as with fat and rich food,”

and his longing is replaced with joy.

Though he anticipates such satisfaction

in the future tense, leaving his current

state ambiguous, he seems confident of

this fulfilment and joy. David opened

his mouth wide and anticipates God’s

filling it. Proverbs offers some insight

into the change David has experienced:

“From the fruit of a man’s mouth his

stomach is satisfied; he is satisfied by

the yield of his lips” (Proverbs 18:20).

In making God’s praise the yield of his

lips—in acting and praising regardless

of how he felt—David’s words produced

Godly fruits that fill him.

David acts out of his confidence in

God’s promises, even when they were

not apparently fulfilled. But God has

not left those who long for Him—that

is, all of humanity—without hope of

satisfaction or fulfillment, the fruit of

His promises. God commits to sating us

with His Son, Jesus, who calls Himself

“‘the bread of life…. I am the living

bread that came down from heaven. If

anyone eats of this bread, he will live

forever. And the bread that I will give

for the life of the world is my flesh.’”

(John 6:48, 51)

It does seem incredibly nebulous and

unapproachable—the idea that this

intangible God allegedly sent His Son

(whatever that means) a couple millennia

ago and now expects us to be filled

by Him. Indeed, following Christ does

not always provide perceptible feelings

of satisfaction and plenty, as Mother

Teresa and David indicate. But that

hunger for God feeds our curiosity

about Him; a sense of His distance or

a longing for Him can, paradoxically,

draw us closer to God. Learning more

about Him in turn makes us increasingly

aware of imperfections in ourselves

and our world and can increase

our longing for what is lacking. Thus,

thirsting for God creates a sort of positive

feedback loop, increasing both our

longing for and closeness to Him.

Our thirst for God propels our steps to

His temple, even when our hearts do

not viscerally rejoice in His love. Even

small, seemingly undivine moments of

goodness and fullness—when the “hills

gird themselves with joy” in the New

England autumn, when laughter or a

good conversation with a friend provide

some glimpse of God’s ever-present,

even if not always felt, love—provide

an appetizer for our ultimate satisfaction

“as with fat and rich food.” These

breadcrumbs, sacralized by the Bread

of Life, feed our hope of finally sitting

at God’s table.

Notes

[1] McGrath, Sheila and Harrington, Teresa

Ann. “The Doubts of a Saint: Mother

Teresa’s Unfelt Faith.” Sisters of St. Benedict,

St. Mary Monastery. Accessed December

4, 2020. https://www.smmsisters.org/

who-we-are/sister-stories/86/the-doubtsof-a-saint.

[2] All Biblical quotations from the ESV

translation.


Honey and Holy Men

Timothy Han

In 1909, Ezra Pound published “The

Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” a retelling

of the Christ story in epic tone. In

Pound’s proto-fascist reading, Christ becomes

not a sheep led to the slaughter,

but a warrior-martyr in the tradition of

William Wallace, Joan of Arc, or John

Brown. The Christ figure is all-powerful,

“a master of men.” Pound’s Christ

is not the chief priest whom the Book

of Hebrews described, but rather akin

to the warlords of Israel’s ancient

mytho-history. He is not Melchizedek

offering (or receiving) prayer over

Abraham, but rather Abraham himself,

still bloody from the warpath. In his

poem’s last couplet, Pound makes the

warrior-martyr analogy explicit by using

the image of the honeycomb to link

Christ to Samson, Jonathan, and John

the Baptist:

“I ha’ seen him eat o’ the honey-comb

Sin’ they nailed him to the tree.”[1]

Ezra Pound’s politics were thoroughly

repugnant and un-Christian, but

it is worth examining the connection

he drew between the three aforementioned

Hebraic figures. Why do the

Biblical writers use an image so tame as

the honeycomb, symbolic for the sweetness

of God’s law, to link together a violent,

warrior tradition in Biblical literature?[2]

And what is John the Baptist

doing next to Samson and Jonathan?

Samson was one of the great judges of

Israel, a warrior who stood up for the

oppressed Hebrews against their foreign

oppressors. Unique among all the

chieftains named in Judges, Samson

commanded no warbands, but fought

alone. Raging crazily like a lion in the

hills, Samson prowled the rugged, Judean

countryside. The author(s) of

Judges make(s) Samson’s leonine metaphor

explicit in an early episode.

Journeying to meet his bride for the first

time, Samson briefly leaves the company

of his parents and encounters a

lion in a vineyard. In a fit of bestial passion,

Samson tears apart the lion with

his bare hands, and leaves the carcass

to rot. A few days later, while traveling

to meet his bride again, and bring her

home with him, Samson walks past

the same carcass. He notices a swarm

of bees have used the rotting husk as

a shelter to create a beehive. Scooping

honey out of the corpse with his hands,

Samson returns to his parents and offers

some to them, but never tells them

how he got the honey.

The previous chapter, Judges 13, describes

the painstaking care Samson’s

parents took to keep him holy and pure

throughout his childhood. Consecrating

their heaven-sent child according to the

Nazarene rite, Samson’s parents made

sure he never drank wine, ate unclean

food, or cut his hair. After that prefatory

chapter, Judges 14 reads like another

fall of man: teenage rebellion, youthful

indiscretion, and temptation culminate

in a tragic and horrifying saga.

The premise itself of Judges 14 is an act

of lust: Samson, desirous of a Philistine

woman, disobeys Hebrew tradition and

his parents’ advice, deciding instead

to intermarry with a foreign people.

On the journey to meet the Philistine

woman, Samson runs off. Escaping the

watchful eyes of his parents, he flees

into a vineyard, presumably to find a

winepress and drink. Maybe it had long

been his habit to drink whenever he

could slip away from his parents. Maybe

he was just curious what wine tasted

like. The next scene––Samson tearing

apart a lion with his bare hands––suggests

that he is already inebriated. And

finally, after the whole encounter, Samson

decides not to ritually purify himself

after killing a beast, but immediately

goes, bloody and drunk, to meet his

betrothed for the first time.

Samson’s parents resolutely do not react

to this entire ordeal. Somehow, his

parents cannot smell the blood on Samson

or his clothes. They cannot smell

the alcohol on his breath. They ask no

questions about where he has been;

apparently, it is quite natural for their

strictly-raised son to run off for hours

at a time without saying anything. The

mum resignation of Samson’s parents

suggests that he has always been a rebellious

child.

Nevertheless, it is on the subsequent

journey to bring Samson’s betrothed

home that the Nazirite monk commits

his greatest sin.[3] On the way back,

Samson runs into that same vineyard––

again, without his parents, again, to

drink. After becoming intoxicated,

Samson finds his lion’s carcass, and

scrapes out honey from the corpse to

eat. This accomplished, Samson goes

one step further by giving that sullied

honey to his parents to eat. Not only

does he know it is against Hebraic divine

law to interact with a corpse, every

sensible human knows that it is against

natural law to scoop out honey from an

unburied, decomposing body, and eat

it. But in addition to sinning himself,

Samson also induces his unsuspecting

parents to sin. At least in the Garden

of Eden, Adam understood the circumstances

of the situation and knowingly

made his choice to eat the forbidden

fruit. Samson’s parents, by contrast,

have no idea that they are eating forbidden

food.

The seductive sweetness of honey is

an apt analogy for the pride and ruin

of Samson. A man too powerful to

be bound by God’s law and too weak

to resist the temptations of the flesh,

Samson lived too much on the side of

greatness. He was a freedom fighter

logos . 37

for an unfounded nation, the liberator

of an ungrateful tribe, surrounded by

enemies, betrayed by those he loved. A

man of sorrows, Samson sat impotently

as his best man cuckolded him, then

days later held the charred corpse of

his first wife in the ruins of her home,

burnt alive by her own people. Hunted

like a beast, he was a renegade outside

the law, beyond the law, bound by no

law––divine or mortal. With the jawbone

of a donkey, he made asses of Israel’s

oppressors. In the wilderness of

Judaea, Samson slaughtered Philistines

like sheep.

Samson’s birth was not only a gift to

his barren mother, but God’s answer

to the prayers of oppressed Israel;

Send us a savior, they prayed, and God

sent Samson. But ultimately, the liberator

was too free-spirited to obey even

God’s law, and like an unwieldy blade,

failed to accomplish his task. Samson

died like he lived: a danger to all. Betrayed

to the Philistines by his second

lover, his captors put Samson up for

show in their great temple of Dagon.

Humiliated and scorned, the Hebrew

warrior-martyr used his great strength

to shake loose the very foundations of

the building, and crushed all the scoffing

Philistines under the weight of their

temple.

If Samson was the antithesis of the

law, a free spirit who lived to uproot the

very foundations of a tyrannical empire,

then Jonathan, Crown Prince of

the Kingdom of Israel, was the embodiment

of royal authority. Like Hector or

Edward the Black Prince, Jonathan is

one in a long tradition of warrior-princes

who never ascended to the throne.

Groomed as the heir-apparent from a

young age, Jonathan demonstrated every

princely

virtue:

martial

prowess, restraint,

humility, and love for his people.

At a time when Israel was so impoverished

that only two swords or spears

could be found in all the kingdom (one

for King Saul and one for Jonathan),

the prince led raiding bands against

the Philistines. In one feat of martial

glory, Jonathan routes an entire Philistine

garrison by charging them, nearly

by himself.[4] Hot on the chase like a

lion who has spotted his scattering prey,

Jonathan speeds after the fleeing Philistines,

slaughtering one after another,

and leaving a trail of dead bodies

to mark his brutal ascent. Spurred on

by divine favor, Saul follows his son’s

charge, and an Israelite warband hunts

down the scattered remnants of the

Philistine army.

Late in the day, bloody from the pursuit,

Jonathan comes across honey in

the forest. Famished, Jonathan dips his

staff in the honey, and takes strength

from it. His horrified companions reveal

that Jonathan’s father Saul had

issued a royal

decree earlier

in the day

that no

Israelite

should

t a s t e

food until

they had

thoroughly

destroyed the enemy.

Rebuking his father’s

foolishness, Jonathan

remarks how hunger

had prevented the Israelites

from turning a

small, tactical victory

into a devastating rout.

But the next day, when

King Saul inquires again

of God what to do, the Lord

refuses to answer. Stunned by

this divine reproach, Saul swears

that whoever had eaten the forbidden

food must now surely die, even

if it be his own son. Eventually, God

judges Jonathan sinful, and picks him

out of the entire country to blame. But

Saul, reluctant to kill his child, allows

the army to beg for Jonathan’s life and

spares him, reneging on all his royal decrees

and oaths.

The immediate lesson of 1 Kings 14,

wherein this story unfolds, is the foolishness

of monarchs. King Saul displays

his stupidity and stubbornness

in making rash proclamations, and his

impotence and illegitimacy in refusing

to carry out his threats. Nevertheless,

somehow, God found that it was not

Saul, but Jonathan who had sinned.

When the bloody prince first tasted

the honey, he had no idea he was disobeying

his father: too far ahead in

the pursuit, Jonathan had never heard

Saul’s command. Even if Jonathan had

no knowledge of the law, could he still

have sinned?

God could have found Jonathan guilty

either for eating the honey, or for disparaging

his father, perhaps both. It is


ultimately unclear whether God judges

Jonathan guilty for the act of eating the

honey, although the text strongly suggests

so. However, it is clear that Jonathan

did sin when he stated the obvious:

his father was wrong. This story, written

and promoted by court composers, argues

that the king is always right, even

when he is wrong. Saul, who made a

stupid law, is not guilty. Jonathan, who

unknowingly disobeyed a stupid law, is

guilty.

But for the purposes of Ezra Pound’s

analogy, the comparison between Samson,

a warrior-monk who sinfully ate

honey at the spot of his martial triumph,

and Jonathan, a warrior-prince

who sinfully ate honey in the midst of

his victory, is obvious. Like Samson,

Jonathan would ultimately die fighting

in the Philistines. In the tragic battle of

Mt. Gilboa, the Philistines killed Crown

Prince Jonathan, two of his brothers,

and King Saul, shattering the Israelite

monarchy and plunging the disunited

tribes of Israel into civil war for a decade.

Finally, one arrives at the outlier: John

the Baptist. The great herald of Christ,

John appears in every gospel text, but

perhaps features most prominently in

the opening chapters of Mark. The

first to write a gospel book, Mark begins

the New Testament by introducing

us to a primitive desert prophet, alone

in the wilds of Judaea. This holy man

named John eats honey and wild locusts,

clothes himself with camel’s hair,

and baptizes his followers in the waters

of the Jordan.

Even if he was not a warrior like

Samson or Jonathan, John the Baptist

demonstrates a number of similar leonine

qualities. Mark’s decision to open

his New Testament with “the voice of

one crying in the wilderness” imitates

the mighty roar of a lion. In fact, when

Jerome sought to assign each gospel

writer a symbolic cognate from the

four living creatures of Ezekiel 1, he assigned

the lion to Mark. By comparing

John, Christ’s herald, to a lion, Mark

also makes the argument that Jesus is

the heir to the throne of Jerusalem. The

kings of Judah had adopted the Lion of

Judah as their royal mascot: what better

argument for Christ than to depict

his herald as a lion in the wilderness of

Judah?

But unlike Samson, John the Baptist is

a holy man untainted by temptation.

Unlike Jonathan, John has rejected society.

A Levite by lineage, John is no

prince, but a desert seer and holy man.

In many ways, John closely resembles

Adam in the Garden of Eden: alone,

constantly in communion with the divine,

and subsisting only on that which

God has naturally provided for him.

John even dresses like his primordial

ancestor. Just as God made clothes out

of animal skins for Adam and Eve, John

makes clothes out of animal hair and

skin.

Mark explicitly depicts John like Adam

in order to make the point that his

book is a new Genesis for the human

race. When one opens up the gospel of

Mark, one opens up a story about the

beginning of the Christian world. John

heralded the fulfillment of the old order,

and the revelation of the new.

Here was a holy man who, instead of

liberating his people from a foreign occupier

through his terrible, swift sword,

liberated his people from the oppression

of sin through the sword of truth.

John preached about the coming of the

Messiah that his disciples might know

the truth, and that the truth might set

them free. Here was a monk set apart

from all others, who, instead of falling

into material temptation like Samson or

Jonathan, faithfully lived by the Lord’s

righteous creed. John defended his flock

not against the slings and arrows of

Philistine armies, but the scoffing contempt

of Pharisee scribes. John used his

leonine ruggedness not to win political

power like Samson the Judge or Prince

Jonathan, but in order to humbly surrender

his disciples to Christ.

Most importantly, just as honey functions

as a plot device to reveal the sinfulness

of Samson and Jonathan, in Mark,

honey demonstrates the faithfulness of

John the Baptist: a holy man who actually

obeyed God, even unto death. A

drunk, bestial Samson disobeyed divine

and natural law by eating honey and––

foreshadowing his own temptation––

tempted his parents into unknowingly

eating forbidden food. Jonathan, prideful

after a great victory, ate honey in

violation of his father’s law and, when

confronted with his sin, chose not to

repent but to rebuke God’s anointed

king. But John the Baptist, instead of

succumbing to temptation or vanity,

meekly went into the wilderness to obey

God’s calling. In Mark, the poverty of

John’s diet––honey and locusts––emphasizes

the severity of the Baptist’s

obedience. At the outset of a book of

new beginnings, Mark juxtaposes John

against the honey-eating, holy men who

came before him, and uses the Baptist

to herald the new glories of the Christian

gospel.

Honey works as a plot device to reveal

the all-too-human glories and sins of

three Biblical holy men, revealing the

intemperate indulgence of Samson, the

rebellious pride of Jonathan, and the

meek submission of John. And finally,

in the new Genesis found in Mark,

Scripture transforms honey from the

reward of self-aggrandizing victors, to

the sweetness found in obedience to

Christ’s Law.

Notes

[1] Ballad of the Goodly Fere, Ezra Pound,

New Directions Publishing, 1909, https://

poets.org/poem/ballad-goodly-fere.

[2] “How sweet are your words to my taste,

/ sweeter than honey to my mouth!” - Psalm

119:103.

[3] The word monk is both anachronistic

and an exaggeration, but the connotation

of someone uniquely and distinctly set apart

for a holy lifestyle appropriately describes

the Nazirites.

[4] Jonathan’s armorbearer joined him in

the assault.

[5] Mark 1:3.

logos . 39

Elevating Work, Prayer, and Potatoes

Ally Eidemueller

The painting The Angelus by Jean-

François Millet depicts a man and a

woman praying over their potatoes

in the evening. The shaded silhouette

contrasts the sun’s setting rays on the

horizon. Over the man’s right shoulder,

the sun engulfs the image, which

draws the mind to something greater

than the pitchfork and meager harvest,

which represent the simple but inherently

good livelihood of the pair. Behind

the woman, almost resting on her

back, is a church steeple, which pierces

the sky, connecting Heaven and Earth.

In the silence of the painting, we hear

the tolling of the bells.

Three times a day the bells chime: 6am,

12pm, 6pm. At the joyous prompting

of the bells, the people in the painting

replace their thoughts with prayers towards

Heaven. They stop their work

and pray the Angelus, which reflects

on the Annunciation and the Incarnation.

In the beauty of the painting,

we are elevated above the simplicity of

daily work through prayer.

Much like this painting, our daily life

is not static. In Ecclesiastes, we are reminded

of the variety of blessings at

different times in life. [1] There are

times for work, yes, but there are also

times for mourning, times for laughing,

and times for celebrating. Ecclesiastes

argues that a human life well lived does

not seek to escape all difficulties or

smother sadness, but instead embraces

each of these times, knowing that

goodness, truth, and even joy, underlie

the toils and triumphs of life. For example,

if the people in the painting put

their entire hearts, souls, and minds

into their potato harvesting, even when

difficult or painfully mundane, their

lives would have substantially more

meaning than if they remained indifferent

to their livelihood. But still there

is something more. The true purpose

of their work is only actualized when

it is offered in thanksgiving, when their

eyes look toward Heaven.

In the mundane and painful experiences

of the day to day, we search for

a deeper meaning that transcends our

reality: both to give meaning to our

sufferings and to elevate our joys. Our

sufferings unite us with Christ on the

cross; joy provides us a small taste of

eternal life, not as a fleeting instant,

but, by the grace of God, as a light

in the hiddenness of one’s soul. This

joy points toward, without satisfying

our desire for, Heaven. The ultimate

celebration brings together the human

and divine; the joy and sacrifice; and

the visible and invisible.

God created the world and “God saw

that it was good.” [2] Therefore, the

goodness of the things of the world

provide an avenue through which we

catch a glimpse of the greater reality

of the divine. George Weigel, author

and biographer, writes that the sacramental

imagination is the “conviction

that God saves and sanctifies the world

through the materials of the world.”

[3] In the world and all the things in it,

we experience the extraordinary work

of God’s grace.

Although we might not fully lose the

sense of goodness in our experiences

and the things we do in the day-to-day,

we take on a false persona when we

separate our daily toils from God. This

happens when we seek our fulfilment

through pleasures or refuse to search

for a deeper meaning in order to shield

ourselves from the painful realization

of our inadequacy without God. Further,

Kazimierz Brandys’ depicts this

modern life of detachment in “The

Defense of Granada”:

Tormented by a confused desire,

longing to forget the program

for its realization, the

crowd wants to discover the

flavor of life, which allows it to

taste the pleasure of the space

of existence. [4]

Originally written to describe a society

that numbs the search for life’s

meaning, this passage alludes to a life

without flavor—a life that is unable to

fully acknowledge the satisfaction of

existence. Thus, a world conceptually

detached from Heaven deprives man

of that which is fundamental to his

life. In the search for flavor and taste, a

life well-lived must surpass the abstract

and be grounded in something concrete,

like work, prayer, and potatoes,

without turning its back on mystery.

[5]

In order to grasp the search for meaning,

we must embrace reality rather

than shun it. The beauty of the world

around us is imbued by the grace of

God. In his book Orthodoxy, English

writer G. K. Chesterton beautifully

describes a life well-lived through a depiction

of Christ:

The tremendous figure which

fills the Gospels towers in

this respect, as in every other,

above all the thinkers who

ever thought themselves tall.

His pathos was natural, almost

casual. The Stoics, ancient and

modern, were proud of concealing

their tears. He never

concealed His tears; He showed

them plainly on His open face

at any daily sight, such as the

far sight of His native city. Yet

He concealed something. Solemn

supermen and imperial

diplomatists are proud of restraining

their anger. He never

restrained His anger. He flung

furniture down the front steps

of the Temple, and asked men

how they expected to escape the


damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained

something. I say it with

reverence; there was in that

shattering personality a thread

that must be called shyness.

There was something that He

hid from all men when He went

up a mountain to pray. There

was something that He covered

constantly by abrupt silence or

impetuous isolation. There was

some one thing that was too

great for God to show us when

He walked upon our earth; and

I have sometimes fancied that it

was His mirth. [6]

Simply, Christ wept. He expressed anger.

He ate. He drank. In concealing

His mirth, a joyous spring of laughter

gushing from an acute love in the

depth of His soul, we recognize this

bottomless joy of God as a gift we

can only receive from the Lord. The

greatness and hiddenness of this mirth

exposes to us the depth of human existence,

which can only truly be celebrated

when in union with God. As

people, we search for meaning in the

concrete. Because of this, God became

incarnate, and His Son, fully divine

and fully human, died on the cross

out of love for us. The ultimate celebration

brings together the divine and

the human, which is made possible by

Christ’s sacrifice. This is exemplified in

the Sacrifice of the Mass, by which we

partake in Christ’s sacrifice and receive

the Lord under the humble species of

bread and wine.

The tolling of the bells unceasingly

reverberated throughout New Haven.

The Saint Mary’s grey cobblestone

steeple towered above the surrounding

buildings and seemed to pierce the impenetrable

autumn sky, and the bells

enveloped the world around me as I

neared the church.

Clang, Clang, Clang

Inside the church, a priest celebrates

the Sacrifice of the Mass. We bow

and kneel, recite and sing, elevating

the toils of our daily lives. The priest

stoops over the bread and prays the

consecration… For this is My Body,

which will be given up for you. He holds up

the humble host that joins heaven and

Earth in God Incarnate.

Notes

[1] Ecclesiastes 3:1-13.

[2] Genesis 1:10.

[3] Weigel, George. Letters to a Young

Catholic. Basic Books, 2015. 92.

[4] Brandys, Kazimierz. Defense of

Granada. 1956.

[5] Read more on mystery in Luigi

Giussani, The Religious Sense. Mc-

Gill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.

Print.

[6] Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy. Ignatius

Press, 1995. Print, 167.

[7] All Biblical quotations from the

NAB translation.

logos . 41

Even Now He Harvests

Luke Bell

Farming is an expertise. Having lived

on a farm in northeast Georgia, I

speak from experience. Ever since I

can remember, Angus cows, Massey

Ferguson tractors, and southern rodeos

have always been as commonplace

to me as walking. Farming, however, is

more than animals and machinery. It’s

a mindset, a lifestyle, an art that takes

decades to master.

The media, through pictures and advertisements,

often portrays farming

as a sentimental pastime. They display

farmers fishing with grandkids against

the backdrop of a sunset; plowing

fields in air-conditioned cab tractors;

and harvesting perfectly ripe crops

from immaculate fields fit for the front

cover of Farming Magazine. I’ve never

known farming like that.

In reality, farming is hard. Really

hard. In commercials and advertisements,

the audience never sees the

arduous face of farming. They never

see the freezing February rain soaking

through your jacket as you work deep

into the night, desperately distributing

hay bales for your cows. They never

see the blistering July sun roasting your

back as you repair fences, hand-digging

fence post holes while tightening,

splicing, and cutting barbed wire that’s

liable to lacerate your hands in one

moment of inattention. They never

see the waking up before dawn, going

to bed after dusk, social plans cancelled

due to unexpectedly long hours,

and the emergency phone calls to impound

stubborn cows who view fences

as a suggestion.

No, farming is altogether a different

ordeal compared to media portrayals.

Without experiencing the toil

and exhaustion familiar to farmers

everywhere, people might construct

an incomplete picture of what farmers

really do and who they really are.

Knowing the stories they’ve lived, the

people they’ve touched, the scars they

bear, and dreams they chase is the only

way to know who a farmer really is.

It’s easy to make the same mistake with

Jesus––the mistake of buying into an

inaccurate and heavily doctored image

of him. Today, a stereotypical picture

of him looks something like this: long,

luscious hair, smooth, pale complexion,

perfectly groomed beard, and a

flawlessly white garment made of the

finest fabric. He is so ethereal and

mystical in these portrayals, almost too

aloof to concern himself with the affairs

of earth. We seldom contemplate

the raw humanity of his nature.

The more accurate picture would have

been this: cropped, curly hair; rugged,

dark complexion, a slightly undomesticated

beard, and a rough brown tunic

made of cheap linen. His appearance

was as average as a first-century Jew

could get. Nothing about him would

have disclosed his identity as God in

human form. Concealed under this

flesh and bone, however, was more

than a carpenter, good moral teacher,

or even an archetype of love and sacrifice.

He was a Savior on a divine res-


cue mission, determined to save and

redeem society’s most despised and

rejected.

…

The landscape: first-century Palestine.

The weather: scorchingly hot and arid.

Following numerous miles of hiking

through mountainous terrain, today’s

agenda is a divine appointment with a

most unexpected attendee.

In approximately 30 AD, Jesus is traveling

to Galilee from Jerusalem. The

typical journey can be made either by

hiking along the coastal route through

the Plain of Sharon or crossing over

the Jordan river and traveling across

Perea, later circling to the eastern side

of Galilee. Due to theological and racial

tensions, Jews fastidiously avoid

the shortest route between Jerusalem

and Galilee. That route passes through

Samaria, the region Jesus now seeks to

enter.

The Jews and Samaritans detest one

another. After the Jewish exile from

Israel in 722 BC, a remnant group of

Jews remained in Palestine and constructed

a hybrid form of Judaism.

They moved the official place of worship

from Jerusalem to Mount Gerizim,

discarded nineteen of the twenty-four

books of the traditional Jewish

canon, but, worst of all, they intermarried

with surrounding nations, diluting

their Jewish identity. This was social

(and religious) heresy in light of contemporary

Jewish laws. Seven hundred

years later, Jews view the Samaritans

as the contemptible race of defectors

who had betrayed their heritage. Samaritans

view the Jews as the self-righteous,

pious elite who spurn those who

fall short of their theological and ancestral

superiority. Violent confrontations

between both ethnicities are not

uncommon, so as Jesus travels into Samaria,

he enters a region of virulent

racial hostility. He is, in a sense, behind

enemy lines.

Having hiked nearly twenty miles

through mountainous terrain, Jesus arrives

in Samaria in a state of sheer exhaustion.

Sweating profusely, he comes

to the town of Sychar where he finds

a well, sits down, and rests. He looks

around. It’s noon, and the landscape is

desolate. He sends his disciples to buy

food from the nearby town while he

stays on the outskirts near the well. He

is all alone.

Several minutes later, a Samaritan

woman arrives to draw water. This is

very strange. At that time, women usually

gather together at dawn or dusk

to retrieve water. The timing of their

chore facilitates friendships among the

town’s women and avoids the heat of

the sun. This woman, however, comes

alone in one of the hottest hours of the

day. Her lone presence is unusual, and

it is likely indicative of her disrepute

among other women in town.

Fastening the pulley’s hook onto her

jar, the last thing she expects as she

lowers it into the well is to interact with

the mysterious man watching her. Jewish

men—especially Jewish rabbis—do

not publicly speak to women in first

century Palestine. Moreover, Jews and

Samaritans almost never interact due

to racial and theological tension that

conversation would exacerbate. That

Jesus, a male Jewish rabbi, would interact

with an outcast Samaritan woman

would have been unthinkable. Jesus

makes the first move to break the silence.

“Will you give me a drink?” he asks

politely.

“You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan

woman,” she snaps back. “How can

you ask me for a drink?”

She is stunned by his willingness to

break social customs. But Jesus is unfazed.

In fact, he uses her resistance

to introduce the real issue he seeks to

address.

“If you knew the gift of God and

who it is that asks you for a drink, you

would have asked him, and he would

have given you living water … Indeed,

the water I give him will become in

him a spring of water welling up to

eternal life.”

Pivoting on the concept of water, Jesus

calmly maneuvers from the physical to

the spiritual, from the seen to the unseen,

from the temporal to the eternal.

This is His classic conversational strategy.

Very carefully, He sows His words

with spiritual seeds designed to implant

a curiosity for the mysterious within

the listener. The water Jesus promises

alleviates spiritual dehydration. It

is the invitation to a relationship with

himself so that whoever drinks of His

water will satiate the deepest, yet often

repressed, thirst of the human soul––

to know God. The woman recognizes

the conversation’s paradigm shift, and

she investigates.

“Sir,” she says, “give me this water

so that I won’t get thirsty and have to

keep coming here to draw water.”

Stopping here, one would expect Jesus

to immediately give her the water.

She seems willing to trust Him, so it

only seems natural for Him to accept.

This however, is the opposite of what

Jesus does. Instead of offering the

woman what she asks for, Jesus steers

the conversation into a painful topic.

“Go, call your husband and come

back,” Jesus asks.

“I have no husband.”

logos . 43

“You are right when you say that you

have no husband,” Jesus says. The fact

is, you have had five husbands, and the

man you now have is not your husband.

What you have just said is quite

true.”

If a seed falls on cold, calloused soil, it

will never take root. It might as well fall

on concrete. To ensure the seed is not

wasted, farmers plow the ground until

it is tender enough to receive the seed.

This is exactly what Jesus does.

Jesus knows the baggage she carries

from being a quintuple divorcee and

current adulteress. He also knows

that the facade the woman wishes to

put up to conceal her guilt is the very

thing that will hamper her ability to

embrace his living water. So though

it seems painful and even pitiless, he

withholds his offer of eternal life until

she relinquishes her past. She cannot

have her shame and his living water

simultaneously. She must choose one.

Without opening her heart to embrace

the seed of truth Jesus offers, her heart

will never truly be at peace. And Jesus

won’t let her stay like that.

Now that she has been found out, she

deflects Jesus’ doctoral diagnosis with a

theological inquiry.

“Sir,” she confesses, “I can see you are

a prophet. Our fathers worshipped on

this mountain, but you Jews claim that

the only place where we must worship

is in Jerusalem.”

She hopes to redirect the conversation

into an abstract, impersonal controversy

regarding worship. But Jesus knows

exactly what she is doing. In fact, this

is the direction he wants to go. Despite

her resistance, Jesus has planted a seed,

and it has lodged exactly in the place

he sought to sow. He now waits patiently

for its fruition.

“Believe me, woman, a time is coming

when you will worship the Father

neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem…

The time is coming and has

now come when the true worshippers

will worship the Father in spirit and in

truth, for they are the kind of worshippers

the Father seeks.”

Once again, Jesus uses His technique

of transforming physical topics into

spiritual realities. True worship, according

to Him, is not about temples,

mountains, or even religious atmospheres.

True worship is to love God

with mind and with heart, in spirit

and in truth. That is what the Father

seeks. That is why Jesus has come all

the way to Samaria—to teach a lonely,

guilt-ridden outcast what true worship

really means. The seedlings are emerging,

but the fruit has not yet yielded.

“I know the Messiah is coming,” she

confesses. “When he comes, he will explain

everything to us.”

She is cornered. In a desperate attempt

to evade Jesus’ invitation, she

proposes one last excuse. She objects

that only the Messiah, the one who will

come with an everlasting kingdom, will

be the one she trusts. Until then, this

conversation is over.

This, however, is exactly what Jesus

wanted. In seeking to discontinue the

conversation, she inadvertently agreed

to trust the very person speaking to

her––the Messiah himself, and Jesus

takes this opportunity. The buds are

sprouting.

“I who speak to you am he,” Jesus declares.

As soon as he says this, his disciples

return from gathering food. She is

stunned. She cannot believe what she

just heard, yet in a strange way, she

does believe it. It is he, the Messiah,

the one she has waited for her entire

life. The sowing was successful; the

fruit has yielded.

Leaving her water jar, she runs into

town and begins exclaiming that she

has found the Messiah, the Savior of

the world. The disciples look over their

shoulders at the Samaritan as she runs

by, and then they turn to Jesus. They

are clueless, but Jesus doesn’t respond.

Instead, he watches the woman in the

distance as she rejoices after taking her

first sip of living water. A smile breaks

across his face.

Sitting down near the well, the disciples

break and distribute the bread

they just bought from the village. They

also ask why on earth Jesus was talking

to a Samaritan. The bread makes its

round to Jesus, but he motions “No”

with his hand. Looking around and

remembering he has just hiked twenty

miles, the disciples become concerned

with Jesus’ health.

“Rabbi, eat something,” they plead.

“My food,” Jesus claims, “is to do the

will of him who sent me and to finish

his work. I tell you, open your eyes and

look at the fields! They are ripe for

harvest. Even now the reaper draws

his wages, even now he harvests the

crop for eternal life, so that the sower

and the reaper may be glad together.”

Spiritual harvesting is not easy. In fact,

without God’s intervention, it is impossible.

For just one person, Jesus hiked

over twenty miles, shattered contemporary

mores, and pried into the most

awkward and painful part of a woman’s

life just to offer her living water.

One person, one heart, one recipient

of his salvation is worth all that sweat

and toil.


As a child, I was captivated by my

dad’s farming expertise. Tractor, truck,

fence, or barn, he knew how to repair

any issue. I tried to help in these endeavours,

but I frequently exacerbated

the problem by mishearing his directions.

My dad, however, would calmly

walk over, explain the correct procedure,

and effortlessly undo the mess

I had made. I stood and watched in

wonder. Somehow, he would repair in

seconds what I thought impossible to

accomplish. Jesus’ mastery is the same,

though he works through spiritual

techniques.

He is the skilled locator of souls and

the master harvester––the expert

farmer who does not till fields with a

plow of iron but tills hearts with the

words of life. He doesn’t sow with

seeds of plants, but with seeds of his

own truth. He doesn’t harvest crops

for profit or gain, but He harvests people

for worship and relationship. And

until He redeems everyone willing to

become a true worshipper of the living

God, He will not stop tilling, sowing,

and harvesting so that the sower and

reaper may be glad together. Farming

is an expertise. One can only marvel as

they watch the expert Farmer.

logos . 45

Death in the Pot

Shayley Martin

You may know the God who led an

entire people out of slavery by splitting

a sea. Or who made a couple loaves

of bread and some fish into a meal for

more than 5,000 people. But there’s another

story that you don’t hear about as

often. It’s about the same God, but for

me it makes the whole rest of the Bible

hit different. I want you to meet the

God of exploding cucumbers.

The story is in 2 Kings. It’s only four

verses. There was a prophet in Israel

named Elisha, who lived during a time

when Israel’s king wasn’t really listening

to God. God did miracles through

Elisha that Christians usually only associate

with Jesus, like raising people from

the dead. And after one such passage,

in which he brings a foreign woman’s

son back to life, there’s this unassuming

little section:

Elisha returned to Gilgal and there was a

famine in that region. While the company

of the prophets was meeting with him, he

said to his servant, “Put on the large pot

and cook some stew for these prophets.”

One of them went out into the fields to

gather herbs and found a wild vine and

picked as many of its gourds as his garment

could hold. When he returned, he

cut them up into the pot of stew, though

no one knew what they were. The stew was

poured out for the men, but as they began

to eat it, they cried out, “Man of God, there

is death in the pot!” And they could not

eat it.

Elisha said, “Get some flour.” He put it into

the pot and said, “Serve it to the people

to eat.” And there was nothing harmful in

the pot.

– 2 Kings 4:38-41

Elisha had just come from a different

region—no famine is mentioned there.

But these prophets in Gilgal were probably

scraping by, tired and hungry.

They were desperate enough, at least,

to eat unknown wild gourds.

Around the Mediterranean there

grows a wild vine called the exploding

cucumber. When you press on an

exploding cucumber, its large seeds

squirt out in a “stream of mucilaginous

liquid” [1]. Every part of the vine is

toxic and causes vomiting, diarrhea,

and sometimes death [2]. It’s not certain

that the “gourds” in 2 Kings were

exploding cucumbers, but many commentators

think they were because the

Hebrew word used is paqqu’ah, which

comes from the verb paqa’ meaning

‘to split, spring off, burst’ [3, 4]. Either

way, that’s what the prophets were up

against: not an invading army or a gaggle

of demons, but a weird-looking,

noxious wild vegetable.

The passage doesn’t say outright that

God is the one who made the soup

suitable to eat, but that’s the clear implication.

Flour alone can’t neutralize

the poison in an exploding cucumber

(nor the other kind of gourd that some

scholars think the prophets gathered).

This particular reversal from deadly to

edible was a miracle.

Yet the gourd story stands in stark contrast

to the miracles on either side of

it. The previous miracle is about God

using Elisha to bring a woman’s son

back to life when he dies of a mysterious

sickness. In a dramatic scene, Elisha

lays himself on the boy, “mouth to

mouth, eyes to eyes, hands to hands”

(2 Kings 4:34). The boy revives and

sneezes seven times, and his grateful

mother falls at Elisha’s feet. That’s

the preceding story.

The next story is very short—a little

bit of bread becomes enough to feed a

hundred people after God says, “‘They

will eat and have some left over’” (2

Kings 4:43). And in the story after that,

God uses Elisha to heal the leprosy

of a foreign commander. He tells the

commander to wash seven times in the

Jordan River, and the commander gets

angry because that seems too simple.

But the commander’s servants convince

him to follow Elisha’s instructions. He

is healed and decides to worship only

God (2 Kings 5:1-15).

All three of those miracles would make

good movie scenes. God spoke; people

both cried out to Him and doubted

Him openly; healing was accentuated

with dramatic gestures. The gourd story

wouldn’t be nearly as fun to watch.

Besides the prophets calling Elisha

“man of God,” nobody invoked God at

all, and God didn’t speak aloud. And all

that Elisha did to fix the situation was

drop in a handful of flour. It probably

would have looked to a passerby like he

was just thickening the soup a little.


Yet because of God’s simple intervention

through Elisha, one hundred people

were saved from death, or at least

from terrible sickness.

This is the God of exploding cucumbers.

The prophets made a pot of soup that,

instead of filling their stomachs, would

have turned them inside out and emptied

them completely. They didn’t just

botch the soup—they reversed its original

purpose. But God, quietly and unceremoniously,

fixed it. They got to eat

a meal together without having to forage

and cook again, even though they

shouldn’t have been able to eat what

they had prepared at all. He took their

mistake, their ineffective and harmful

attempt at feeding themselves, and

made it into something good. There

was nothing harmful in the pot.

Many of us are lucky enough not to

lack food like the prophets did, but we

still lack things like time, energy, and

security, or we feel them threatened.

And like the prophets, we grab the first

thing that looks helpful, never

suspecting that it will turn us inside out

and scrape us dry. For me, I like to grab

onto the feeling that I’m being helpful,

that I’m needed. But instead of sustaining

me, that feeling gradually twists

my thoughts until I reorganize my life

around it and derive all my self-worth

from it. And that’s damaging. If I prove

unhelpful, if something or someone

fails despite having my help, I feel empty

and useless.

We all grab onto life-sucking solutions.

I used to think of Jesus’s horrible, people-inflicted

death as reflecting some sadism

that we all have in common. But

of course, the religious leaders didn’t

harm Him just for the sake of harming

Him. They harmed Him for the

same reason that most people do most

things—because they thought it would

help them. They felt their power and

security and sense of normalcy threatened,

and they grabbed what looked

like a good solution, for them and maybe

even for their whole nation.

Then the chief priests and the Pharisees

called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.

“What are we accomplishing?” they asked.

“Here is this man performing many signs.

If we let him go on like this, everyone will

believe in him, and then the Romans will

come and take away both our temple and

our nation.”

Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who

was high priest that year, spoke up, “You

know nothing at all! You do not realize that

it is better for you that one man die for the

people than that the whole nation perish.”

He did not say this on his own, but as

high priest that year he prophesied that

Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and

not only for that nation but also for the

scattered children of God, to bring them

together and make them one. So from that

day on they plotted to take his life.

– John 11:47-53

The religious leaders’ solution turned

out to be a nasty explod- i n g

cucumber. If Jesus’s death had somehow

been final—if we had really managed

to separate ourselves from God

completely—we would not only have

destroyed our chances of getting

the security and normalcy and unity

we were looking for, but we would have

emptied ourselves of everything good.

But then, God did more than just fix

our mess—He made it into the greatest

gift ever given! Just as He made the

purge-inducing stew into a meal that

the prophets could share, He used our

mistake to destroy the last barrier between

us and Him. When Jesus died,

he suffered the punishment that should

have been ours. When he came back to

life, he defeated death.

Here’s a much smaller personal example.

As I mentioned, too often I like the

feeling of helpfulness more than the

chance to help people for their own

sake. And sometimes that backfires because

I spend tons of time and effort

angling for that feeling, only to fail or

feel unappreciated or realize I haven’t

been helpful at all. About a month ago,

I stressed and scraped so much that I

got sick. I laid in bed for a solid two

weeks with the shades drawn, doing

nothing. And I realized that the world

didn’t fall apart. I realized that everyone

was fine. I moved to a spot by the

window, stretched out in the sun and

truly rested for the first time in a while.

That’s the God of exploding cucumbers—when

we cook up nasty things,

when there’s death in the pot and we’re

preparing to feast, He doesn’t just click

his tongue and throw our food in the

trash. He makes poison into sustenance.

Notes

[1] Barki, Beste. “Ecballium elaterium.”

The Nature of My Memories. Blogger, December

7,2015. http://natureofmymemories.blogspot.com/2015/12/ecballium-elaterium.html

[2] “Cucurbitaceae,” Meyler’s Side Effects of

Drugs, 16th ed. (Elsevier, 2016).

“2 Kings 4:39.” Bible Hub. Accessed November

1, 2020.

[3] “2 Kings 4:39.” BibleHub. https://biblehub.com/commentaries/2_kings/4-39.

htm.

[4] The New Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius

Hebrew-English Lexicon, 1979,

s.v. “ .”

[5] All All Biblical quotations from the

NIV translation.

logos . 47

The Scandal of Real Food

Bradley Yam

We do not presume to come to this

your table, O Lord, trusting in our own

righteousness, but in your manifold

and great mercies. We are not worthy

so much as to gather up the crumbs

under your table. But you are the

same Lord, whose nature is always to

have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious

Lord, so to eat the Flesh of your

dear son Jesus Christ, and to drink his

Blood, that we may continually dwell

in him, and he in us. Amen.

– Prayer of Humble Access

Acccording to a Chinese idiom ,

there is an ancient Chinese myth that a

filial son can cure his parent’s diseases

by cutting off meat from his leg and

feeding it to them. Over time, the idiom

has come to represent filial piety. This

practice might seem superstitious, medieval,

even barbaric to us, but it says

something about the hierarchy of value

in ancient Chinese society. It expresses

the primacy of progenitors because the

existence of their offspring depends on

them. Like most other hierarchies in

the world, Chinese filial piety is mediated

by food.

The food chain that we imagine is more

than an ecological description. It’s a hierarchy

of consumption that says who

gets to live at the expense of another.

We seldom think about eating as an act

of survival, but everything that we eat

was once alive. Then, to insist that we

should die a natural death is to place

ourselves at the top of that hierarchy.

That’s not too far off from implying

that to eat another human being is a

special kind of evil.

Montaigne famously used the cannibalistic

practices of the Tupinamba

people in Brazil as an example of cultural

relativism. But we shouldn’t be

too distracted by the exceptional cases

of cannibalism that do emerge in

history: the Tupinamba (supposedly)

ate the flesh of their dead enemies in

a ceremonial honor ritual, not for subsistence.

In contrast, the Christian sacrament of

the Eucharist ought to be understood

precisely as consumption from necessity,

as an act of survival. [1] This is the

essence of real food: that which sustains

and nourishes us.

It would be reasonable to a bystander

then to experience confusion, perhaps

revulsion, that a religion would

believe that they are subsisting on the

flesh of their leader. But it goes beyond

sacrilege if we are to take their claim

seriously that their leader is also their

God. This represents a complete contradiction,

even a reversal, in the hierarchy

of value that these religious folk

espouse. It ought to make us sit up and

notice.

The Christian scriptures are full of evidence

that the Eucharistic practice is

not anomalistic but central to understanding

the Christian faith itself.

In the creation narrative in Genesis 3,

it could be argued that death is introduced

not as a direct curse of God but

as a result of being separated from the

fruit of life. Mankind is banished from

Eden and is forced to produce his own

food “by the sweat of [his] brow,” but

this food was not meant to sustain him

indefinitely, hence it will only feed him

“until [he] returns to the ground.” In

other words, real food leads to real life.

Man’s need for real food continues to

echo through the biblical narrative.

God demands a child sacrifice from

Abraham, and it has to be his only

beloved son, Isaac, in a parallel to the

sacrificial practices of some sects in the

ancient near east. But this sacrificial

hierarchy is subverted when God interrupts

the sacrifice and provides a sheep

in place of Isaac. God implies that

the sheep is a mere stand-in when He

promises that He Himself will provide

the real sacrifice.

The Israelites wander through the desert

and are going to starve. In an act

of miraculous intervention, God sends

down manna, a bread-like substance,

to sustain them throughout their journey.

God’s only stipulation is that they

do not gather it on the Sabbath.

There are a multiplicity of laws relating

to food and food production in the

Levitical law, including sacrifices and

diet restrictions. It created the categories

of “clean” and “unclean” food.

The full meaning of this is not apparent

until Jesus, who bears the title of

the Son of God, later also comes to be

understood as the true sacrificial lamb

of God, who takes away sin once and

for all. His flesh and blood is (1) the

true sacrifice (2) the bread of life (3)

the food by which we are made clean.

To partake in the Eucharist then is to

intentionally embrace feeding on God.

In John 6:52, the onlookers argued

fiercely amongst themselves: “How can

this man give us his flesh to eat?” Instead

of watering down their supposition,

Jesus confirms it: “unless you eat

the flesh of the Son of Man and drink

his blood, you have no life in you.” Je-


sus describes the Eucharist as a necessary

act of survival.

“Does this offend you?” Jesus continues

to ask, “then what if you see the Son of

Man ascend to where he was before!”

Any offense at the consumption of His

human flesh can only be exponentially

multiplied by the revelation of his divine

nature. The act of the Eucharist

can only be understood as nothing less

than a scandal.

The Eucharist subverts the hierarchy

of consumption. But it doesn’t end

with a single twist: mankind does not

end up on top. The followers of Christ

were not called to take advantage of

his sacrifice but follow him in it. “The

disciple is not greater than his master.”

In Romans 12, the Christian apostle

Paul espoused the following dogma:

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and

sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer

your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy

and pleasing to God—this is your true

and proper worship.” The Eucharist

doesn’t just subvert the hierarchy of

values––it continuously transforms it.

The Eucharist reveals that the Christian

religion is deeply transformative.

It asks for nothing less than a revolution

of our entire understanding of

the nature of reality, and the reality of

nature. It asserts that the hierarchies of

value and consumption that we think

make sense in this world are actually

built around false notions and absurd

power dynamics. The Eucharist invites

us into a new world, a world of living

sacrifices, and it does so by asking us to

eat our God.

Notes

[1] Without getting into an endless controversy,

it suffices to say that many Christians

do believe that the “real presence” of Christ

is present in the elements of bread and

wine, which are subsequently consumed.

logos . 49


community

logos . 51

Tasting Eden

Se Ri Lee

My phone started beeping sporadically

in the middle of my YouTube workout.

Five KakaoTalk messages popped

up, all sent from Umma. [1] Dinner

was going to be served in five minutes.

Grumbling under my breath, I hurried

over to the kitchen. “I’ll eat the leftovers

later – is that okay? I had lunch

like two hours ago,” I told Umma apologetically.

I returned to my mat where I

laid down, unable to resume exercising.

I brooded over whether I should’ve just

stayed in the kitchen and eaten.

I tried counting the times I had eaten

with my family in the past four months

I’ve been home. It shocked me how

easily I could recall those occasions yet

struggled to remember the times I had

chosen to skip a family meal—there

were simply too many. Grimacing at

the soundness of Appa’s nickname for

me as the “lodger,” I wondered why I

had trouble engaging in the simple act

of communal eating. [2]

My reason for not joining my family

for dinner was, though valid, so trivial:

I wasn’t hungry enough to have dinner

at that hour. If I had eaten during regular

lunch hours, I would have been

hungry by the time Umma made the

meal announcement. Yet, I ate lunch

late because I wasn’t hungry around

noon because I had a late breakfast because

I woke up late. Everything I did,

including the timing of my eating, was

at my own convenience.

At Yale, a self-oriented meal schedule

seemed perfectly normal. “Oh, I’m

a bit busy” or “I’m in the middle of

something” had always been passable

excuses for declining sudden meal requests,

which were so rare in the first

place. Scheduling meals while frantically

inserting them into GCals was

widely the norm. Yet, at home, it felt

uncomfortable—almost sinful—to say

no to a meal request, even when made

last minute.

The discrepancy between eating culture

at Yale and eating culture at

home confused me. Was I guilt-tripping

myself for leaving the kitchen, or

was feeling guilty a normal response

to situations like these? According to

the culture at Yale, the former would

be true. But my childhood memories

pointed me towards the latter. Before

my years at boarding school and college,

I remember dropping whatever I

was doing at the moment and zooming

off to the kitchen as soon as Umma

or Appa announced a meal. My time

away from home slowly shifted my eating

habits from being community-oriented

to self-tailored.

Nostalgic for my childhood days, I resolved

to comply with what was normal

at home. A few days later, Umma

made another last-minute meal announcement

(coincidentally) near the

end of my workout. I quickly dabbed

the sweat off my face and walked towards

the kitchen, abandoning my usual

routine of heading straight into the

shower.

I saw that the rest of the family had

already started eating. Heart beating

faster than normal, I took a deep

breath as I slid next to Unnie, trying

hard not to meet her startled gaze.

[3] The rich aroma of scallions mixed

with soy sauce loosened the tension in

my stomach. I wondered why the smell

of Umma’s cooking never once enticed

me to stay. I realized it was because I

had never noticed. On past occasions,

the frustration I felt at Umma’s sudden

interjection blinded my senses from everything

else.

Feeling suddenly ravenous, I reached

for the half-eaten plate of tofu pancakes

when Oppa pointed to an odd-


ly patterned china set scattered on the

island table. [4] He looked around the

dining table and asked whose it was.

Surprisingly, it was Appa who answered.

“It’s from one of my Instagram

followers.”

I almost choked. “Wait, you have an

Instagram?” Unnie and I blurted out

at the same time.

“And one of your followers sent you a

present? Is it a sponsorship? How popular

is your account?” Oppa added.

The rest of the meal went by in the

blink of an eye, with Unnie, Oppa,

Umma, and I making futile attempts to

guess Appa’s username and pry more

information out.

As the plates turned empty and Oppa

got up to return to his Latin philosophy

studies, I fought the urge to stall

him and everyone else. The last one to

leave, I regretted all the times I missed

out on laughing and engaging with my

family. All this time, I was blatantly ignorant

of how good God was to make

food an essential human need. He

could have sustained us through some

other way; yet, He made food something

we cannot live without. “Food

must have a purpose other than sustenance,”

I thought.

Now that I had this meal, the answer

was so obvious. Food is a medium

through which humans can put their

individual lives on hold, reconvene,

and build relationships. Without it, we

wouldn’t experience the frequent joys

of connecting with each other – we

would easily get lost in our own busyness.

Why then, in all my years of eating,

had I not realized its purpose and

power in bringing people together?

While dwelling on this question, Branson

Parler’s article in Think Christian led

me to the story of the fall in Genesis 3.

logos . 53

[5] Parler explained that when Adam

sinned, he isolated himself from God.

He hid behind the bushes with Eve,

both ashamed of their nakedness when

God sought him. It was this isolation

that broke the relationship between

God and humanity.

What Parler wrote next elucidated why

food’s purpose—reuniting people—

didn’t strike me as obvious: sin broke

human relationships too, and this normalized

isolation in the world. The

normalization of isolation obscured

the plainness of food’s glue-like power.

It seemed to me, at first glance, that human

relationships were untouched by

Adam and Eve. “[Eve] also gave some

to her husband, who was with her, and

he ate it... and they hid from the Lord

God among the trees of the garden”

(Genesis 3:6, 8). Together, they sinned

and attempted to hide their shame.

The next couple of verses cleared up

my confusion, showing how quick

Adam was to turn against Eve. When

God started questioning Adam whether

he had eaten from the tree, Adam

said, “The woman you put here with

me––she gave me some fruit from the

tree, and I ate it” (Genesis 3:12). In a

feeble attempt to justify himself, Adam

tried to reason with God that he was

somehow less guilty than his wife, without

whom he wouldn’t have sinned.

It was in this moment that Adam isolated

himself from Eve, breaking the

first human relationship. It was then

that isolation became a part of the human

identity. The concept of isolation

didn’t exist in God’s original plan for

the world; it never had a place in the

Garden of Eden, as Eden itself was the

state of being in eternal communion

with one another and with God. The

concept of eating alone, living alone,

and doing things alone, which became

normalized in fast-paced settings and

became at times a necessity because of

the pandemic, didn’t exist back in the

days of Eden.

I couldn’t even imagine what living in

the Garden must have been like for

Adam and Eve because existing in

unending and unbroken relationships

seemed an impossibility in today’s

world.

The pervasive isolation made it hard

for me to see that food’s purpose went

far beyond basic sustenance and gastronomic

pleasure. Food is God’s attempt

to preserve His original order

amid the chaos that entered the world

through Adam’s sin. It is one of God’s

many gifts that lets us experience Eden,

from which sin banished us. The greatest

of these gifts, I think, is Jesus, who

tore the veil that separated humans

from God, permanently mending humanity’s

broken relationship with Him.

Jesus further united us all in communion

by breaking His body as bread

and pouring His blood out as wine for

us all to share.

Just as God invited me back to Eden

through Jesus, He had done His part in

giving me food so that I could live out

the life He had originally meant for me

to experience. All I need to do is to accept

and embrace its purpose.

The next time I receive an unexpected

meal request, I will remember that

a shared meal is like tasting Eden, a

place that was once so impossibly out

of reach, yet, through the gifts of God,

became accessible to me on a daily basis.

Though eating solo will still be necessary

on some occasions, I now know

to treat every meal invite with more respect

and caution and to thank God for

repeatedly inviting me into Eden––for

patiently waiting for me to finally taste

His goodness.

Notes

[1] Umma means Mom in Korean.

[2] Appa means Dad in Korean.

[3] In Korean culture, females call their

older sisters Unnie, as it is considered rude

to call them by their actual names.

[4] Similarly, it is inappropriate to call an

older brother by his actual name. For females,

the appropriate title to use to address

their older brothers is Oppa.

[5] Branson Parler. “Eating alone, eating

with Jesus.” Think Christian, August 31, 2015.

https://thinkchristian.reframemedia.com/

eating-alone-eating-with-jesus.


Taste and See

Shi Wen Yeo

Come to me, all you who are weary

and burdened, and I will give

you rest.

– Matthew 11:28.

Food has a cult following. Consider

the Yale College Facebook page

named “Free Food at Yale.” Before

COVID-19, everyday there were announcements

upon announcements

asking people to come to claim free

food all around campus—leftover pizzas,

chicken nuggets and all things of

the sort. Having gone to a few of these

gatherings myself, I was surprised at

the number of people who showed

up—often more than the number of

people who showed up at my weekly

Bible study. Even now, to get people

to show up to mixers, Zoom conferences

or take their surveys, many student

organisations promise food as an

incentive.

These food-based advertising campaigns

tend to be exceptionally effective

when the food is a hard-to-make

or hard-to-find cultural staple. Rather

than the generic pizza, Consider the

Korean-American Students at Yale’s

recent offerings. Their virtual movie

screening of the Korean film The Host

was paired with free Shin Ramen and

Choco Pies, which could be picked up

from a Cross Campus booth. Anyone

who grew up in a remotely Korean

environment immediately associates

these foods with comfort and love.

Needless to say, the movie night was

incredibly successful.

Many churches, too, have been using

these sorts of food-based advertising

campaigns. This phenomenon is especially

prevalent in immigrant churches.

So the question arises—why has

the church harnessed the power of

physical sustenance as a channel of

evangelism?

“Stay for lunch!” some church members

would say to a first-time tentative

church-goer. Back home in Singapore,

I once saw a church waving

mammoth banner that read something

like, “Bring your lunch! Join

us here!” For context, it was directly

opposite a sweltering hot hawker centre

and sought to offer reprieve for

lunchtime diners within the church

compounds.

It is undeniable that food is a primary

means through which many first encounter

Christ. Food is often used to

entice non-Christians into a Sunday

service. And evidently, food is effective.

I like to think about it from the perspective

of a dear friend I met at the

Korean United Methodist Church

here in New Haven. Attending graduate

school outside of Korea, without

friends or family in a cold, lonely foreign

land, she comes to church every

Sunday. To her, the familiar strains of

the Korean language in church are

lovely to hear lovely to hear; but, it

is really the lingering smell of kimchi

wafting towards the sanctuary from

the basement of the church, the steady

bubble of the stew, and the hiss of the

rice cooker that remind her that she is

welcome. It speaks to a primal side of

her, surpassing the mental boundaries

that she might have and speaking to

her inner self who knows the love infused

in her mother’s cooking. While

initially skeptical,the food provides a

clear message of love—“You are safe

here. You are welcome here. You belong.”

That is the same message spoken

over by the sermons she hears on

Sundays. There are many others like

her.

And the effectiveness of food in increasing

church attendance makes

sense. It is far easier to say, “Come to

church with me for some kimchi and

rice!” than it is to simply say “come

to church with me.” Food lowers inhibitions,

increasing the instances of

non-Christians accepting the invitation.

This model seems to work particularly

well in immigrant churches,

where the very identity of church is

defined in contrast to an outgroup.

In the case of this Korean church

in New Haven, the appeal was finding

Korean food and Korean community

in an otherwise American,

English-speaking society. In this way,

logos . 55


immigrant communities seem to align

themselves with that particular aspect

of Christianity—the outcast group

defined against external forces.

Not only does food welcome the lonely

and the foreign. It also, I think, parallels

the ubiquitous love proclaimed

in many Sunday sermons. Just as it is

written in Psalm 139, “Where can I

flee from Your presence? If I go up to

the heavens, You are there; if I make

my bed in the depths, You are there.”

At the point at which one bites into

the food offered by a church, there

may be an instant link to the food

they ate back in their home country,

the food that their mother prepared

growing up, the food of familiarity

and belonging. Experiencing this

warm, primal love again in a church

links those experiences of love with

the church itself, reminding them

that God is omnipresent in time and

in space, giving us familiar comforts

even in a foreign land.

But this power of food comes with its

associated dangers and risks. In the

Korean church I attended as a child,

food was often a source of a lot of

tension and politics. My earliest memories

of church involve adults stampeding

from the 400-person service

down to the canteen, where women

would dole out food from large pots

and men would sit and eat. I remember

my mother stressing out about

weekly small group fellowship—while

she wanted to prepare food that evaded

criticism from other women, the

food had to be modest enough to not

cause a burdensome expectation on

the woman in charge of preparing

food the next week. The kind of food

people would bring to fellowship also

drew many comments about their socioeconomic

status and the extent of

their commitment to church, which

drew the church into human politics

and divisiveness.

The biggest risk is if, in the end, food

is the thing that is holding everyone

together and keeping everyone coming

to church, then it has distracted

from the gathering’s main purpose,

which is to learn about and worship

God. And the danger is always present

and very strong, simply because

in a community where people share

most things in common—language,

attire, food—there could end up being

no room for Jesus to bind everyone

together. A church must always

be conscious of this risk and not let

food become the idol.

The next time someone offers you

food at church, stay. Though their lips

might say “stay for lunch!” what they

really are saying is this: “taste and see

that the Lord is good; blessed is the

one who takes refuge in Him.” Food

can be the way in which many people

from all nations and tongues apprehend

the Lord, making His kingdom

come over all the earth, that more

people might come to know and love

Him.

logos . 57

If You Give a Man a Kit Kat

Daniel Chabeda

He is crying, quietly because he’s already

a spectacle lying in the mulch beside

the only path to the laundry room.

You wish you didn’t recognize him, but

you already made eye contact through

his curtain of tears. Maybe it’s an orgo

midterm again, you think charitably.

Crouching down in the soil next to your

new suitemate, you can feel his distress

like honey bees in your teeth. Thinking

quickly, you tap Brian on the shoulder

while reaching into your bag. Brian

sits up, and you press a fully wrapped,

king-sized Kit Kat into his hands. He

wipes his eyes. “Thank you.” You smile,

soothed, and offer, “Do you want to talk

about it?”

I do. This is a familiar scene: one person

feels a negative emotion, someone

else offers them food, and both people

end up happier. This positive stabilizing

effect is termed emotional regulation

by psychologists, but does the phenomenon

make sense? How does food regulate

the emotions of both the food recipient

and offerer? If we consider God

as an offerer of food to humanity, in

what ways do we both become happier?

Behavioral psychologists study the intrapersonal

and interpersonal mechanisms

of this social interaction, termed

food offering, to understand why eating

and offering food makes us feel so good.

Within you and me, there is a psychological

and physiological feedback loop:

our present emotional state changes the

way we consume food, which in turn

affects our later emotional state. When

we experience stress, we are more likely

to consume high-caloric, snack-foods:

more chocolate and fewer grapes. [1]

The raising of serotonin in the blood

from eating these high-carbohydrate,

low-protein foods can decrease our

feelings of being helpless, distressed,

or depressed.[2] Food consumption

has a calming effect even for 1-day old

infants: babies given a sugary solution

by pacifier cried much less than babies

who were given water. [3] These

intrapersonal mechanisms are deeply

ingrained in our regulatory systems before

we can even feed ourselves.

The interpersonal mechanisms driving

food offering between you and me are less

apparent. One plausible explanation for

the positive emotions experienced by

both the giver and recipient of food is

Empathic Emotion Regulation (EER).

According to the EER model, when an

observer sees another person in a distressed

state, they experience empathy;

this empathy transfers the distressed

feelings to the observer. To alleviate this

new psychological stress, the observer

will aim to soothe the distressed person.

In this model, the empathic response

of the observer drives them to take action

to help the other person feel better.

Because eating food can have so many

calming emotional effects, we offer

food items to one another as a means

of interpersonally regulating emotions.

Finally (and I think amazingly), this

shared experience of stress relief over

food leads the two people to feel a closer

bond to one another (see Figure 1).

Among the many ways to offer emotional

support––verbal encouragement,

hugs, direct assistance with a task––

food offering is unique and potent.

Food is an early need. Food offering

from parents is one of the first behaviors

that one experiences as an infant,

and children inevitably form psychological

connections between food, emotional

regulation, and social interaction.

[4] Secondly, food is such a basic need

for survival that to give a food item in

your possession to someone else conveys

a deep desire for the other person

to live, even potentially at your own expense.

For those of us who live in food

security, we might not consciously make

an immediate connection between food

Figure 1. A flowchart adapted from Hamburg et al. illustrating how empathic

emotional regulation functions.


offering and survival, but our visceral

emotional response when receiving a

free donut reveals that those implications

are still present. Lastly, food is a

universal need, so food offering has

the unique ubiquity to be an appropriate

interpersonal behavior irrespective

of culture, relationship type, age, sex,

etc. While it would be inappropriate

in Western culture to soothingly stroke

the hair of an acquaintance, food can

be offered appropriately even to total

strangers with little awkwardness. Nigerian

chef Tunde Wey hosts a dinner

series, Blackness in America, where unacquainted

guests of many races come

together over a meal to discuss issues of

race, violence, and policing in America.

[5] The ability of food offering to

facilitate meetings of strangers over a

meal even turns enemies into allies and

friends. [4] In fact, God did it.

In the Judeo-Christian framework, God

is the first and ultimate food offerer.

Genesis, the opening book of this scripture,

begins with the account of God

creating a delicious and nutritious world

full of edible flora. God offers plants to

all creatures for their nourishment and,

in a stroke of generosity, plants humanity

in a beautiful garden where they lack

no good food.

And God said, “Behold, I have given

you every plant yielding seed that is

on the face of all the earth, and every

tree with seed in its fruit. You shall

have them for food. And to every

beast of the earth and to every bird

of the heavens and to everything

that creeps on the earth, everything

that has the breath of life, I have given

every green plant for food.” And

it was so.

– Genesis 1:29-30

This first food offering from God to humanity

is analogous to the early-devel-

logos . 59

opmental food offering between mother

and infant; through this offering, the

first sense of connection to, reliance on,

and relationship with God is established

in humanity.

By Genesis chapter 9, humanity has

fallen. Rebellion against God (through

an act of eating) led to division and

pride and excess and poverty; humanity

existed as enemies of God’s peace,

justice, and righteousness. And there is

death. In this chapter, God expands his

previous food offering of plants to include

animals.

Every moving thing that lives shall be

food for you. And as I gave you the

green plants, I give you everything.

But you shall not eat flesh with its

life, that is, its blood.

– Genesis 9:3-4

This second offering corresponds to

God’s conveyed desire for humans to

live, potentially at His own expense.

However, it appears that He withholds

a portion of the gift. God prohibits His

people from eating meat with blood:

its life. Why would a God who desires

good for His people withhold something

containing life?

To examine the significance of blood,

let’s consider our basic motive for eating.

We eat to stay alive. And every living

plant and animal we have eaten had

to die first. This exchange is so familiar

it is forgotten: we need to take life

away from our future food to sustain

our own lives. This bodily necessity can

consume our thoughts and actions, but

God communicates in Genesis 9 that

physical life is not our only need––and

we cannot get everything we need for

life in its fullness from some meat! The

exclusion of blood reveals a condition

of lack which alerts us that though our

physical vitality might be sustained by

meat, we lack spiritual aspects of life as

long as we cannot receive the life of the

flesh, the blood. When an Israelite let

the blood of bulls and goats spill onto

the ground, they witnessed their defi-


ciency as the animal’s blood drained

from their diet. God’s command is not

an arbitrary prohibition, but a sober,

loving signifier of our spiritual need.

This need exists because of sin. I know

that this word can evoke strong distaste

and maybe even distress due to how

some Christians and churches use it to

judge, condemn, or prop up their personal

morality. But sin is a necessary

and accurate word to describe the lack

God highlights through the exemption

of blood; sin destroys life. Sin separates

us from God who is life. Being in sin,

we are spiritually dead. This is a huge

problem, and requires a huge solution.

The prohibition of blood consumption

in Genesis 9 serves as a warning against

approaching a solution in insufficient

ways, “for it is impossible for the blood

of bulls and goats to take away sins”

(Hebrews 10:4). [6] But what is sufficient?

Let’s return to the EER model and

consider a response to a more extreme

situation. Imagine another scene. She

is standing above the gravestone of

her father, her form pale and still like

paper mâché. Her soul has let out all

its air and cannot stop the walls of her

heart from caving into the hollow left

behind. You tenderly approach her, trying

to catch the slips of paper mâché

that the wind is stripping off her back.

From up close you notice her eyes are

downcast, dragged earthward by the

gravity of grief. You take her hand in

one of yours and smile empathetically.

You draw your other hand from your

bag, and gently press the still-wrapped,

king-sized Kit Kat into her palm…

NO! Kit Kats are not enough for death.

And even casseroles, though more appropriate,

are not sufficient. The magnitude

of the gesture––store bought

candy to simple snack to four course

meal––must correspond to the severity

of the distress. But what kind of food

offering is appropriate to regulate distress

as large as spiritual death? What

meal could be so intimate that it could

bridge the gap of enmity between us

and God and form a bond of closeness?

What food did God offer to humankind

when we were left dead in our sin, poor

and isolated and proud of our impoverished

independence? He gave us His

only Son, Jesus: the Bread of Life, the

Lamb of God.

In the context of EER theory, God’s

food offering is quite provocative. How

despondent and pitiful we must have

felt––and made God feel!––for God to

scour His parish pantry and refrigerator

of perishables in search of just the right

item to soothe our squalid state. Picture

Him, bent on knee and reaching into

the back of Cherubim cupboard for the

already-sprouting potatoes––those get

tossed into Hell––before He turns and

perfectly tends to a wok of Seraphim

stir-fry. It won’t be enough, He knows.

The humans who thought they were

generally decent people––merely sometimes

at fault––are actually dead in

their separation from the Life of God.

But God wants to bring us close (Isaiah

43:1-7). God wants to call us friends

(John 15:15). So finally, God walks up

to His own Son’s bedroom. The Son

has coexisted in unity with the Father

from all eternity. They don’t need to

make eye contact. The Son is God; He

knows the Father’s will. The Son knows

that He will be offered as a sacrifice,

that the Bread of Life must be eaten by

all humans who would seek eternal life.

The blood of the Lamb must be shed.

Jesus takes the Father’s hand and, in a

universal monstrosity, the Father offers

Him to us as a free gift: the ultimate

food offering.

Jesus Christ was offered to abundantly

satisfy our need for spiritual life. He

lived on earth generously, fulfilling the

needs of countless distressed people.

Then He was unjustly killed. But by the

power of God, His body was resurrected

to an unending life so that we could

receive that same life! Anyone who believes

Jesus was resurrected and is living

Lord will freely receive life and relationship

with God by His grace. If you desire

this fulfillment, God has prepared

the table.

Through all the psychology and the

theology (and the puns), maybe you are

still unconvinced that God has anything

to do with you. This is a valid doubt.

But how would your perspective of who

God is and how He wants to relate with

you change if He knocked on the door

of your heart? What if he was carrying

some food?

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If

anyone hears my voice and opens the door,

I will come in to him and eat with him, and

he with me.

– Revelation 3:20

Notes

[1] Oliver, G., and Wardle, J. “Perceived Effects

of Stress on Food Choice.” Physiology &

Behavior 66, no. 3 (1999): 511–15. https://

doi.org/10.1016/s0031-9384(98)00322-9.

[2] Markus, C.r., Panhuysen, G., Tuiten,

A., Koppeschaar, H., Fekkes, D., and Peters.

M.l. “Does Carbohydrate-Rich, Protein-Poor

Food Prevent a Deterioration of

Mood and Cognitive Performance of Stress-

Prone Subjects When Subjected to a Stressful

Task?” Appetite 31, no. 1 (1998): 49–65.

https://doi.org/10.1006/appe.1997.0155.

[3] Smith, Barbara A., Fillion, Thomas

J., and Blass, Elliott M. “Orally Mediated

Sources of Calming in 1- to 3-Day-Old

Human Infants.” Developmental Psychology

26, no. 5 (1990): 731–37. https://doi.

org/10.1037/0012-1649.26.5.731.

[4] Hamburg, Myrte E., Finkenauer, Catrin,

and Schuengel, Carlo. “Food for Love:

the Role of Food Offering in Empathic

Emotion Regulation.” Frontiers in Psychology

5 (2014). https://doi.org/10.3389/

fpsyg.2014.00032.

[5] Judkis, Maura. “Discomfort Food: Using

Dinners to Talk about Race, Violence and

America.” The Washington Post. WP Company,

August 23, 2016.

[6] All Biblical citations are from the English

Standard Version.

logos . 61

λ ο γ ο ς

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