Eating Is Sacred

Eating together is an act of communal worship. It is–or should be–a celebration of one of the fundamental human experiences, of something intimately connected with life and death. We kill to eat, we eat to live. Hunting, farming, and agriculture are intimarely bound with life, sex, and death. They cannot meaningfully be separated. We eat at funerals, we feast to celebrate major life events. We eat, or refrain from eating, all the time in religious contexts.

Sources of food are sacred. The growing, raising, harvesting, preparation, and ultimate consumption of food are sacramental acts. We are sick because we have forgotten this and we have disassociated ourselves too much from a basic aspect of human existence. We are less human because of it. This is why we are unhealthy; this is why we are crazy.

Eating is holy. Food is holy. hunting, gathering, and growing are holy. To do these things we have to go out and interact with the earth, getting caught up intimately in the web of life, sex, death, and eating that interweaves the living earth in a way that is impossible when we just go to the supermarket to pick up our groceries.

We are fat because of our blasphemy. I am overweight because I have failed to appreciate the holiness of eating. I have become less human because I have learned to be casual about something that is sacred because it is so closely bound up with what it means to be human.

Eat mindfully, and you will have no problem making time for spirituality, because the most spiritual things are also the most mundane, the very things we do all the time for survival. They are sacred precisely because they are done for survival. If we can stop being casual about sacred things–and stop being mindless about eating–then our lives can be saturated with spirituality. We can live closer tot he quick, closer to what it means to really be living.

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She Blinded Me With Christian Science

Today my wife and I went to a service at the Church of Christ, Scientist. We’re not sure that Cedar Ridge Community Church is a good permanent church solution for us, and we were in the mood for something different. I actually found an Episcopalian parish I wanted to attend, but they’re on some kind of weird summer schedule (I guess most Episcopalians don’t go to church in the summer) where they only have an 8:00 am Rite I Eucharist service (old style, and with no music). I was kind of annoyed about that.

Alternately, we’ve been thinking about visiting an Orthodox church again, but we hadn;t hear back from the OCA parish in Bethesda about whether they have child care during the liturgy.

So instead, we decided to go on a wacky adventure to the Church of Christ, Scientist!

I should co ahead and say that I’m not actually interested in joining the Church or practicing Christian Science. But the church is odd and quirky (much like Mormonism) and I wanted to at least visit. Plus, I’ve been keen for some time on getting my hands on a copy of Mary Baker Eddy’s Science And Health With Key To The Scriptures, just out of pure theological curiosity.

Anyway, there was child care available, which was good (without it, we would have just had to go home, because there’s no way our one-year-old can quietly sit through, well, pretty much anything).  The service was kind of boring- Christian Scientists have no preachers, because the Bible and Science and Health are their preachers.  That means the sermon is just a set of collected readings from those two books.  It takes up most of the hour, and it’s hard to sit still and pay attention.

There were also some responsive readings, which I always really like in a religious setting, and some hymns.  It was nice to sing hymns after six months of nothing but contemporary Christian praise music.  Did I mention that I like hymns?

One of the readers sounded hilariously like a Mormon General Authority- actually like a cross between Thomas S. Monson and L. Tom Perry, I thought.  My wife mentioned that the man had sounded like a GA, and I laughed because I had been thinking that the whole time.

The meeting was not well-attended, although the church was in a really nice building.

The topic of the sermon/readings was Life, and it was all about how life, mind, and spirit are real and  how matter and death and illness are illusory, which I think is pretty much the gist of the religion.

At the end, when we went downstairs to fetch the little one, the nice lady there gave us a copy of Science And Health, and that pretty much made my day.  Also, it was really nice of her, because I think the book cost something like ten dollars.  The thing was, the cover was glossy and it hurt my eyes in the car on the way home when the sun reflected off it.  So she really did blind me with science.  As in, Mary Baker Eddy blinded me with Christian Science.

Incidentally, Christian Science is not the same thing as Scientology.

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