Good Food is Not Enough

Celebrity chef, food writer, and CNN travel star Anthony Bourdain committed suicide Friday, June 9, 2018.  His death came as a complete shock--its suddenness as well as the manner by which it came.  Coupled with the suicide of celebrity handbag designer Kate Spade earlier the same week, Bourdain's death ignited a firestorm of discussion:  signs of depression and suicide, what to say in conversation or public speaking events, the morality of taking one's life, etc.

Then Dusty Gates posted this in Crisis magazine:  "Good Food is Not Enough."

A hard post--Gates doesn't shy away from some technical theological language, nor does he shy away from the reality that suicide is, at the bottom of it all, a failure.  So several people I know, and for anybody reading this, perhaps you and several people you know, won't like it.  I think that's fair.  Still, Gates makes some good points worth considering.  Gates:

Another reason that Mr. Bourdain didn’t appear to be a man struggling with depression or despair is that he seemed to be truly in touch with goodness, in several concrete ways. He appreciated good food, good drink, good music, good scenery, good friends. He appreciated good culture, and thought it worth preserving and celebrating. He seemed to have a friend in each location he visited, and he appeared to truly relish the opportunity to sit with them, eat together, and talk. Maybe it was all a show, and they were just actors following a script. But it sure didn’t seem that way. Though sarcastic and critical, Bourdain left the impression of a man who placed value on the good things that the world had to offer. He seemed to advocate time and money being well spent on good and enjoyable things. There is still a big step left to be taken, however, between experiencing good things and experiencing goodness itself, and a supernatural bridge is needed to span the gap.

And an instance that might prompt some to take a step back:

St. Augustine gives us insight into the delicate balance in which beauty must be held by the human mind. His own interior battle with carnality and his resulting distrustful, questioning disposition towards the senses allow Augustine to guide us through a detailed description of how experiences of natural beauty and sensible goodness work upon a person’s intellect and will. His Confessions present us with a nuanced discussion of how things like food, art, and music are interpreted, and how they can move us (either towards or away from God), or, in other cases, appear to do nothing at all. Augustine considers, for example, the different affect which beauty has on the one who merely sees, and the one who sees and inquires: “Beauty appears in the same way to both beholders,” says Augustine, “but to one it is dumb, and to the other it speaks. Or rather, it speaks to all, but only they understand who test the voice heard outwardly against the truth within.”

In a reflection on the potential for creation to participate in the sole divinity of God, Augustine relates to his reader a vision he had of himself encountering a host of created things, and inquiring of each of them whether or not they were the rightful recipients of his love: “They denied me: ‘We are not the God you seek.’ And to all things which stood around the portals of my flesh I said, ‘Tell me of my God. You are not he, but tell me something of him.’ Then they lifted up their mighty voices and cried, ‘He made us.’ My questioning was my attentive spirit, and their reply, their beauty.”

Personally, I think St. Augustine's helpful in precisely these sorts of situations.  It wasn't as if the Bishop of Hippo lived a soft, cushy life free of strains and anxieties.  St. Augustine wrote so much about sin because he had sinned quite a lot already.  He knew that of which he wrote.  Still, I know St. Augustine often turns people off.

Here's the turn in Gates' argument:

Anthony Bourdain’s death was a reminder that good food is not enough. Good atmosphere, good conversation, and good meals can take us a long way towards joy. But they are never substitutes for joy. Those things only give us true joy if they are accompanied, or, perhaps more accurately, preceded by a relationship with the Lord who gives us all these good things, and provides them with their significance. Our God ought not be our stomachs, as St. Paul reminds us, as does Dante in his description of the poor souls in his Inferno. Chaucer’s Pardoner goes so far as to claim that gluttony is the root of all other sins. Our food might help us to be joyful and can lead us towards the higher goods, but only if we recognize that it is food for the journey—a mysterious foretaste of milk and honey like that of the Israelites in the desert—and not an end in itself.

Read it all here.

In The Right Measure

OK, this post isn't a celebration of the pop song by Nick Lowe but that does have a catchy chorus:  "You gotta to be cruel to be kind, in the right measure.  Cruel to be kind, it's a very good sign."

Lowe's song wormed its way as I read Marc LiVecche's "The Violence of Pacifism."  Responding to a Sojourners blogger who suggested today's Christians would be judged by their inaction in the face of great evils, LiVecche criticizes the Sojourners' advocacy of pacifism.  That, LiVecche argues, actually makes things worse.  The Crucifixion certainly indicts human violence, but focusing solely there, LiVecche suggests, misses the point.  

The cross saved us, indeed, from our sins; but it did not save us from sinning: that is, it reconciled us to God but not necessarily to our neighbor. Scripture certainly doesn’t pretend so, as demonstrated by Paul’s assertion that God provides the sword as a necessary answer, however temporary and ultimately inadequate, to the practical problem of human evil.

Correct--in this fallen world, to achieve good sometimes you need a show--and sometimes use--of force.  LiVecche again:

The just war tradition recognizes that those who mean the innocent harm cannot always be talked out of their evildoing and must, instead, be knocked out of it. In fact, for an example of this we can gesture briefly to Mattson’s concern about racism. In September of 1957, in order to support the Little Rock Nine’s attempt to integrate Central High School in Arkansas, President Eisenhower needed to order the Army’s 101stAirborne Division to protect the nine from the ongoing threats of white mob violence hellbent on preventing black students from going to class. Force and power, the very things Mattson [SD note: Sojourners' blogger] wants Christians to abandon, were necessary to desegregate schools. Force cannot create peace, but it can create the conditions necessary for peace to have any chance at all of taking root. In any case, while there is a divine mandate that speaks to turning our other cheek to our attacker, there is never such warrant to turn our neighbor’s unstruck cheek to their attacker. This should all be rather self-evident. If our actions in history result in greater harm for our innocent-neighbor getting their teeth kicked out but great delight for our enemy-neighbor doing the kicking, we ought to wonder if there’s something amiss in our policy. When the cost of the preservation of our own piety is our innocent-neighbor’s annihilation, then this act of self-centered other-donation is a moral perversion. So pacifism also does violence to the innocently assailed neighbor.

Wow, that's a powerful line--and a provocative criticism of a pro-pacifist argument that, LiVecche recognizes, far too often gets a free-pass in today's conversations.  Pacifism is, of course, admirable:  Dorothy Day and even modern figures like Bishop Robert Barron have advocated it.  But to declare oneself for that is far different than declaring for oneself and everybody else the same agenda.  We cannot, LiVecche notes, hide our refusal act under a non-violent mantle.  Our faith requires action, and sometimes, rarely, we pray, circumstances might require the use of force.  This recognition should be seen for what it is:  a proportionate and infrequent response.  Resorting to violence first is a lustful, self-satisfying response that helps no one and hurts everybody involved, both victim and perpetrator. LiVecche does a good service to reiterate this.

Read it all here.