Better than chocolate

Have you heard the story of the 9-year-old who asks her mother, “What’s sex like?”? While Mom hems and haws for an answer, the girl fires off a second question, “Is it better than chocolate?” Mom, happily relieved, says, “Yes, now go do your homework.”

Innocently, the girl has given herself and us a valuable clue. Although chocolate is an inanimate object without feelings, it gives intense pleasure on the tongue when savored in moderation. It is best as a treat or a dessert, not the main course--a lesson the girl may have to learn by getting sick a few times. Sex, of course, is better because the pleasure is reciprocal and grows with the increasing reciprocity between two free-willing adults. To give is to receive and to receive is to give. Children are a wonderful continuation of this reciprocity, through old age and the entire history of the human race, as the generations interact in many varied ways of giving and receiving. But everything begins with pleasure inside the bodies God gave us. We cannot think without bodies. We cannot love until we are loved. Blessed be God forever! Blessed be chocolate and sex, hopefully in combination with each other!

I notice that eating chocolate and making love are not opposites but on a continuum. The lesson of moderation is not abandoned but transformed into the lesson of reciprocity between equals. The wholly new element, however, is a second human being created by God, not by man. [And what a human being she is!

Jesus is no tease

Words fail in writing about the Eucharist, but I can’t help myself. I want the Word above every other word, the Word made flesh, the Word that is before and behind every word and more profound than all the books that have ever been, or will ever be, written to gather dust on dusty shelves. As Eliot demonstrated in The Four Quartets, words are messy tools, but we have to work with what we’ve got.

Jesus is no tease. He gives his all to all. Before the Eucharist, the greatest theologian is as humbled and as beloved as the illiterate peasant. Thus, the Eucharist is more democratic than the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Jesus is pure beauty, truth, goodness and compassion–and absolutely free for the asking. He is particularly kind to the poor, the ugly, the outcast–who in an instant are turned into princes and princesses. Since we are all subject to disease and death, is it not comforting to contemplate the Eucharist at any moment and be transformed?

Imperfect analogies may help. When we gaze upon a famous painting, we are not all art experts, but we are all able to soak up quite a bit of the emotional content. We don’t have to be musicologists to appreciate a Bach fugue or Handel’s Messiah. Experts may see more than we do, but we, in our innocence, may see other things in our awe. When I was a hormonally saturated teenager, I dreamed about being married. Little did I expect that a particular woman from Poland would be my fulfillment.

The Eucharist is always more than we expect. He is redeeming love for sinners. I cannot fix myself up to be beautiful or earn my own salvation. But I can ask Jesus to love me and he will not refuse. Without him I can do nothing. With him all is possible.

Ron Day

Choosing Belief

Doug spoke yesterday of belief as a choice we make daily. His thoughts reminded me of this commencement address the writer David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005. The full address, widely anthologized, has now been printed as a (slim) book of its own. The full text can be found at http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-foster-wallace-kenyon.html.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.