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.

Please Don’t Say These Six Things at My Funeral | ChurchPOP

Please Don’t Say These Six Things at My Funeral | ChurchPOP


Chad Bird's post on ChurchPOP makes for fun reading about that which we all fear:  funerals.  Like other life celebrations--weddings, graduations--these events have become so scripted and filled with bland assurances that the events--as rituals--have been drained of meaning.  No wonder Donald Trump is doing so well in general election polls:  all the institutions that once underwrote American cultural meaning(s) have been shown to be unloyal, unworthy of trust, and quite corrupt in themselves.  So why not bet all the money on something new that promises a fix?  (That, btw, is a great story in itself; read that here.)

not my image--from the internet

So do funerals matter?  Absolutely--and not, as the old saying goes, for the living only.  The dead, Bird reminds us, still care.  Bird:

 They say the dead don’t care, but I’m not dead yet, so as long as I’m still alive, I’d like to have some say in what goes on at my funeral. And, truth be told, I think the dead do care. Not that they will be privy to the details of what happens at their own funerals, but they still care about the world, about their family, about the church. The saints in heaven continue to pray for those who are still on their earthly pilgrimage, so how could they not care about them?

memento mori reflections, part MMXVI

Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.  

Perhaps such a sentiment, a reminder, is expected these days.  It is Lent, after all.

However, this past Monday I received a much more shocking reminder:  Steve Webb, one of my Wabash College professors, died suddenly on March 5. Steve had taught Religion and Philosophy at Wabash for twenty-five years.  More recently he blogged regularly at First Things, taught at Christian Theological Seminary, and had started a prison ministry.  He had published over a dozen books on topics ranging from Karl Barth to education to vegetarianism to, in what turned out to be his last years, Mormonism.

source: Indianapolis Star obituary

All that production, though, doesn't cover half of Webb's impact at Wabash.  For a time, no faculty member came close to Webb's popularity.  Nobody had more advisees, and nobody taught more students (his courses routinely carried double the maximum enrollment).  Attending a lecture featuring Webb became de rigueur. And within Webb's own department was another prominent, universally-adored and well-published theologian.  At the time--well over a decade--most of us did not recognize the extent of the Wabash Religion department's productivity, and particularly Webb's contributions.

And, above and beyond all that, he was a devoted husband and father.  Steve himself saw the connections because he wrote about them frequently.  Here about soccer, and here about the "dietary celibacy" of dieting food fads.  Steve's mind moved several steps ahead of us mere mortals, being able to find theological reflection amidst the hum-drum routines of feeding the kids or watching them play their games.