Tag Archives: food

literature, sermons

Pleasures and Indulgences

4 Comments

(A sermon delivered at Throop Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena, California on 26 February 2017. Copyright 2017 by Everett Howe.)

[Earlier in the service, the “Story for All Ages” was a reading (with role-playing!) of Eric Carle’s book The Very Hungry Caterpillar. At the end of the sermon, I make reference to this.]

The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of Oscar Wilde’s most well-known works. A reviewer at the London Daily Chronicle famously described it as “a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.” I’m sure the book was denounced from the pulpits of many churches when it was first published in 1890, but today it is viewed as a classic, and I do not bring it up now to denounce it; no, today I bring up The Picture of Dorian Gray for another reason.

Let me remind you of the set-up of the story. Dorian Gray is a beautiful young man who is new to the high society of Victorian London. An artist friend paints his portrait, and Dorian makes a wish: He wishes that he could always stay as young and as beautiful as his image in the portrait. Dorian falls under the influence of a hedonistic aristocrat, and he begins a life devoted to pleasure, ignoring the effects of his actions on others and paying attention only to his own desires. After heartlessly jilting and humiliating a lover, Dorian notices that his portait has changed… he sees that now his image in the portrait wears a cruel expression. As he continues to devote his life to pleasure, mindless of those around him, Dorian’s moral failings escalate, to the point of blackmail and murder; and his portrait becomes more and more disfigured with each passing year. But while his portrait ages and decays and reveals his crumbling soul, Dorian Gray’s body remains as young and as beautiful as ever.

The public at the time found Wilde’s book shocking for its suggestions of queerness and its depictions of hedonism. But I bring it up today because of an element of the story that almost passes by with no comment, an assumption that just seems natural.

Namely: Our sins, our excesses, our transgressions, our indulgences — the story assumes that they are all reflected in our bodies. And, conversely: if our bodies fail to live up to a certain standard of youth, of beauty, of physical health, then it must be because we have done something wrong, it must be because we have sinned.

It seems to me that those are the assumptions that deserve to be denounced from the pulpit.

The worship theme here at Throop Church for the month of February is “Indulgence.” This choice of theme was inspired by the fact that Mardi Gras, and all its associated carnival festivities, falls in February this year; in fact, it is this Tuesday.

Mardi gras is French for Fat Tuesday, and in some Christian traditions it is the last chance to indulge oneself before Lent, the 40-day period of fasting and penitence that lasts from Ash Wednesday until Easter Sunday. The 40 days of Lent hark back to the 40 days that Jesus is said to have spent wandering in the desert after his baptism — 40 days in which he was tempted by Satan, but resisted the temptation.

So already we see that the division between Lent and carnival, the dichotomy between asceticism and indulgence, is connected — by the story of Jesus in the desert — to another dichotomy: the one between spiritual purity on the one hand and temptation and sin on the other, between what our culture deems worthy, and what it deems unworthy.

What I would like to offer you today is a chance to think about these connected dichotomies, because they appear in our daily lives in ways that do not help us; they can create spiritual, emotional, and even physical harm.

Let me tell you a story, about the first time my back went out. It was the summer of 2008, and I was on vacation with my wife Bella and our kids. I see now that there had been plenty of warning signs. The very first day of the trip, after 12 hours of air travel, I kicked a soccer ball around with the children of the friends we were visiting, and I felt a twinge that did not go away. Over the course of the next two weeks, as we drove from town to town and slept in friends’ fold-out beds and in hotels, the twinge turned into a constant soreness that made walking painful. The night before our 12-hour flight home, we stayed in a large airport hotel. Early in the morning I got up to use the bathroom, and when I leaned over the sink to wash my hands my back hurt. A lot. It suddenly seemed like a good idea to get on my hands and knees. I crawled a few feet, until the pain in my back and in my right leg became too great, and I collapsed on the floor in the hallway, unable to move without shooting pain.

It was 5:00 a.m. Our flight was scheduled to leave six hours later.

I called out to Bella for help, and she called the front desk. Soon, a man we had never met before — but who said he was a doctor — showed up at our door with a little black bag. He injected me with anti-inflammatories and painkillers, and gave me a small supply of pain medication and Valium. A half hour later I could move again, and we were able to get to the airport and onto our flight home.

But over the next weeks and months my thoughts returned again and again to those moments that I had spent immobile on the hallway floor. Lying there on the floor, I had been worried about many things. In addition to panicking about whether we would be able to get home that day, I wondered: How badly was I hurt? What if I had damaged something seriously enough that I would not be able to walk for a long time? How would that affect my life?

And underneath all of those worries and fears, there was another — deeper — fear, a fear that I could not put into words, a fear that I did not even really recognize until much later, after I had had time to reflect on the incident.

The fear was that Bella would not love me if I were disabled.

This was not a rational fear. This fear was not based on how I knew Bella to be; it was not based on the realities of our relationship. Even more, this fear contradicted my theology; it contradicted our Unitarian Universalist understanding that worth and dignity are inherent in every individual.

So where did it come from, this fear?

It came from the deep connection that our culture makes between our worth as human beings on the one hand, and the state of our bodies on the other. This is a cultural connection that we need to recognize when we see it; this is a cultural connection that we need to fight against.

But what does all of this have to do with indulgence?

Well, what does indulgence mean? How do people use the word?

For example, what do you think of when you think of an indulgent parent? An indulgent parent is one who does not restrain their child when the child is doing something wrong; an indulgent parent is one who gives the child rewards that are undeserved. This is a first hint that the idea of indulgence is tied up with the idea of things that we deserve, or do not deserve.

In Catholicism, the Church grants an indulgence when it reduces or removes the temporal penalties that someone must pay (in the Church’s theology) for having sinned. If you’ve studied European history you might remember that in the 16th century, one of the criticisms that Martin Luther had of the Catholic Church of the time was that indulgences could be purchased from the Church. That is no longer the case, but indulgences are still a part of Catholic theology; they are usually granted for performing prayerful actions. So this is an example of the word indulgence meaning “avoiding a punishment that one deserves.”

Indulgence can also mean a pleasure that one doesn’t deserve. It is very easy to find examples of this usage just by looking around you. Almost anything physically pleasurable will be described in advertising as indulgent. You can buy “indulgent” bath salts, you can buy “indulgent” make-up, you can buy “indulgent” massages. In Long Beach, there is a day spa called, simply, Indulgence. But to really hit the indulgence jackpot, you have to consider what our culture tells us about food.

Indulgent ice-cream. Breyer’s has a whole line called “Gelato indulgences.”

Indulgent mac and cheese.

Indulgent chocolate.

Indulgent desserts of all kinds.

Now, why would an advertisement say that “This chocolate cake is indulgent” instead of “This chocolate cake is delicious”? I think that these foods are called indulgent because we are encouraged to believe that we do not deserve them, that we are getting away with something if we enjoy them. Our culture overwhelms us with shoulds: We should be devoting our energy to counting calories, we should be watching our cholesterol, we should be eating food based on whether it supposedly contains anti-oxidants and is dense enough in vitamins. All of these shoulds, with no room left for asking, “Do I enjoy this?”

Instead of “Do I enjoy this?” we ask “Do I deserve this?”

And the time and emotional energy that we spend worrying about our self-worth and our body image takes our thoughts away from parts of our lives that could really use more attention: How do I treat my neighbors? How do I fight for my values? How do I create justice? Instead, we ask: Am I a bad person if I have some dessert?

That’s what our society says about indulgence: that all of our bodily pleasures should be guilty ones.

What about the opposite of indulgence? What about asceticism?

The word asceticism comes from a Greek word meaning, essentially, “acting like a monk.” And in many cultures, “acting like a monk” means denying oneself bodily pleasures.

I already mentioned the example of Jesus wandering in the desert for 40 days, resisting temptation. In the Christian scriptures we also have the example of John the Baptist wearing clothes of camel hair, living off of locusts and honey in the wild trans-Jordan area between Jerusalem and Galilee. Later on, we have Christian saints like Simeon Stylites, a fifth-century Syrian who lived for 49 years on a small platform on top of a pillar. Jainism, and some forms of Buddhism, derive from a Śramanic tradition in India that includes a harsh asceticism. And in America, we have the Puritan tradition, from which our own Unitarianism is descended.

So across many cultures there is a tendency for people to associate holiness and piety with doing without. The tension between asceticism and indulgence is connected to the tension between spiritual purity and bodily desires, the tension we see between Lent and Mardi Gras; and as Dorian Gray shows, all of these conflicts are written out on our bodies.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Today, there is some movement in popular culture towards removing the ideas of morality and sin from our thoughts and discussions about our bodies and about the food we enjoy. Early this January — right when people are traditionally most anxious about the condition of their bodies, and are making resolutions framed in terms of goodness and evil, of sin and redemption — early this January the New York Times profiled an up-and-coming British food writer named Ruby Tandoh, whose new cookbook is subtitled Eat What You Love. It’s a good sign when the Times profiles an author who speaks out against the January diet industry, who speaks out against fat phobia, who speaks out against the corporations whose profits depend on body-policing and on socially-enforced body insecurity.1 Tandoh is part of a broader movement of body acceptance and fat acceptance activism that is getting more powerful year by year. The activist Lesley Kinzel powerfully expresses the goal of these movements. She writes:

Fat acceptance doesn’t simply advocate in favor of fatness. Fat acceptance is also about rejecting a culture that encourages us to rage and lash out at our bodies, even to hate them, for looking a certain way. It’s about setting our own boundaries and knowing ourselves, and making smart decisions about how we live and treat ourselves, and ferociously defending the privacy of those choices. It’s about promoting the idea that anything you do with your body should come from a place of self-care and self-love, not from guilt and judgment and punishment. It’s about demanding that all bodies, no matter their appearance or age or ability, be treated with basic human respect and dignity.

More than a century and a quarter has passed since Oscar Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray, and in many ways society has changed dramatically. But our culture, like that of late Victorian England, still connects the condition of our bodies to the condition of our souls. So I wonder, what would happen if we followed Lesley Kinzel’s suggestion? What would happen if we removed the ideas of guilt and judgment and punishment from the idea of “indulgence”? What is indulgence without guilt?

We have a word for that. Indulgence without guilt is called, simply, pleasure.

In the coming weeks, I would invite you to think about how your perception of food and of your body may be overlaid with ideas of morality and sin, of purity and defilement, of self-worth and self-loathing. Can we transcend these dichotomies, and simply think of our bodies — and of other people’s bodies — as our homes for the decades we have on earth? Can we think of our pleasures as simply pleasures, and not indulgent sins that we should feel guilty about?

As for myself… I know now to pay more attention to what my body — and my back — is telling me. With attentiveness, and yoga, and regular exercise, I’ve avoided serious problems for now. But as I progress further into my 50’s, and as I experience the changes to my body as it ages, I know not to view these changes as reflections of my character.

And, on some evenings, I may decide — like the Very Hungry Caterpillar — to have a piece of cake. It may not always be wise choice. I may find — like the Very Hungry Caterpillar — that I will end up with a stomach-ache. Or I may find — like the Very Hungry Caterpillar — that eating cake will change my body in unexpected ways. But whether or not it is wise, and no matter what it does to my body, I know that my choice to have a piece of cake is not a question of sin.

This Tuesday, on Mardi Gras, what if we don’t “indulge”? Instead, what if we simply do something we find pleasurable?

We live in our bodies for as long as we are on this Earth. May we live in them with joy.

Blessed be. Amen.

Image credit: Christ Tempted in the Wilderness, by John Martin, 1824.

  1. And that’s all in one tweet! ↩
engineering, research

Holism, Reductionism, and Combos® Baked Snacks

1 Comment

Many, many years ago — when I was 23 — I saw a very compelling episode of the public television show Nova called “How to Create a Junk Food.” This was a documentary from Britain’s Channel 4 that was given a new voice-over by the producers of Nova, as well as a silly intro and outro featuring Julia Child. The show chronicled the development of a new snack food.

This past year I’ve watched this documentary twice, once in San Diego through the miracle of inter-library loan and once in the Media Resources Center in UC Berkeley’s Moffitt Library. The program tells a remarkable story of technology gone wrong. In the 1980’s, the British company PA Designs Ltd. hoped to fill a snack food market niche. Their market research showed that consumers wanted an easy-to-eat snack that was healthy, natural, and had no chemical preservatives. They wanted something that was nutritious, tasty, and crispy.

The food technologists at PA Designs started with this mandate, and through a careful, step-by-step evolutionary process — addressing various problems of manufacturing requirements, consumer preferences, and cost restrictions — they developed a brand new snack, one that eventually came to America as this:

Combos

What are those, you ask? Why, those are Combos® baked snacks.

Healthy? Natural? Nutritious? No chemical preservatives? What the heck happened?

Initially, the food scientists thought that they could make a crispy cone baked from croissant dough, and fill it with moist savory fillings. Peter Sampson, of PA Designs, immediately noted a potential problem when he and his crew of food technologists were sampling fillings — beef, and cheese, and chicken-and-prawns — that had been prepared in their test kitchens. He said,

At this stage, […] all of this looks so edible and so nice — but then, it looks familiar. The skill here, I think, is going to be in maintaining as much of that presentation as we can when it becomes a sludge that we extrude into that [outer shell].

As it happens, even the initial prototype versions of the snack made in the test kitchens did not go over well with consumers — the British housewives who sampled the snacks agreed that they were too messy, and were not suitable for eating without knife and fork.

To address this problem, the food technologists decided to move away from the baked croissant cone to an extruded product, perhaps made with a newly-developed cooker-extruder. And, because the flavors of the fillings did not stand up to the high temperatures needed for pasteurization, they decided to enhance the fillings with natural and artificial flavors — or, as they say in Britain, “nature equivalent” flavors.

Slowly, step by step, driven by the problems they faced, the food technologists moved ever further away from the “healthy, natural, nutritious” food that they had intended to produce, and created a Frankenstein’s monster.

What went wrong? It is the curse of the scientist, of the person with a reductionist world-view: taking care of the minutiae, without keeping an eye on the holistic big picture. What seems tragic to me here is that the ideas that the food technologists used are ones that I use myself all the time while cooking, ideas that I think are in fact necessary in order to cook well and to be comfortable in the kitchen.

You taste the sauce, and note that it is not sharp enough, so you think of acidic ingredients that you can add: lemon juice? vinegar? You want to make some hash with your kale, but you have no potatoes, so you think of substitute starches — leftover rice, or pasta… or maybe you quickly toast some bread and cut it into small cubes. Solving problems like an engineer is part what you do when you adapt recipes on the fly.

But with too many substitutions, too many improvisations, you might create a dish that is not recognizably connected to what you walked into the kitchen thinking of. It’s OK to think of the whole as being the sum of its parts; but little changes to each of the parts can add up to a big change for the whole.

The marketers at PA Designs came up with several names and packaging options for the extruded product the food engineers eventually produced. The high-end option was “Mousse en Croûte.” An option meant to appeal to British tradition was “Mrs. Palfrey’s Cracked Wheat Savouries.” The name they eventually settled on was “Crack-a-Snack.”

I don’t know whether Crack-a-Snacks were ever actually produced in England. But the concept of an extruded tube filled with a savory filling found its way to the United States in the form of Combos®; this television ad introduces them to an innocent nation, while suggesting that the cheesy filling is inserted by hand. Nowadays, when I see the packages of Combos® on display in the gas station mini mart, I always think to myself: Hmm, mousse en croûte.

(Here is some extra bonus material about the Nova documentary. First, a review in New Scientist of the Channel 4 documentary; second, a review from the Los Angeles Times of the Nova episode; and finally, perhaps only available until the lawyers from WGBH in Boston notice that it exists… the final 35 minutes of the Nova episode, ripped from a Betamax tape recorded in 1988 from a KQED San Francisco broadcast.)

Image of Combos® snacks taken by the author. Featured image: Detail from Frankenstein observing the first stirrings of his creature, engraving by W. Chevalier after Th. von Holst, 1831. More information here.

sermons

Living Into…

1 Comment

(A sermon delivered at Throop Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena, California on 3 January 2016. Copyright 2016 by Everett Howe.)

The worship theme for the month of January is “embodiment”. This is an interesting theme for Unitarian Universalists, because UUs have the reputation of being overly intellectual, of living in the mind rather than in the body. Here at Throop, as in many UU churches, worship is usually patterned after the same traditional Protestant service that was practiced by 19th-century Unitarians and their Congregationalist predecessors in New England. One author writes that by 1800 “the usual […] order of service included the opening blessing, followed by a psalm or hymn, a Scripture reading, a prayer and an anthem, the sermon, another prayer, another psalm or hymn, and the closing blessing.” As the 19th century progressed, psalms fell out of favor and more hymns were used. This is essentially the same order of service you hold in your hands! The main differences are in content, not in form — what counts as scripture, and what sources inform the sermon. But what you do during the worship service is the same: You sit and listen to prayers, readings, and sermons, you occasionally get up and sing, and you may have a chance to meditate or pray.

But Unitarian Universalist worship services do not have to be structured like this! I know ministers who have led laughing meditations during service, and ministers who have had the congregation blow soap bubbles throughout the sanctuary; at the annual solstice celebration at First UU San Diego, one of the highlights for many people is an extended period of drumming, which inspires many to ecstatic dance — in the pews, in the aisles, in front of the chancel; and many UU congregations have led “soulful sundown” services that center on music and performing arts. Of course, other traditions give more examples of embodied communal worship: the Pentecostals sometimes speak in tongues; the Shakers tremble with ecstacy; the whirling dervishes, well, whirl.

I will not surprise you this morning with an invitation out of the blue to ecstatic dance, although I’m sure Chris1 would be happy to provide the drumming. As an introvert myself, I know that when I do embodied practices — which, for me, is usually Iyengar yoga — I often prefer privacy. Later on in the service, though, I will be inviting you to participate in a short meditation that involves some physical motion.

Why is our worship like this? Why is it that in public worship in many UU churches, people are more comfortable engaging the mind rather than the body? Part of the reason is certainly tradition — but I would suggest that another part of the answer is because the body is very personal; it is the one piece of the physical world that we claim some control over; our bodies are fundamental to our identities. And engaging in embodied worship in public involves ceding some of that control in a way that can raise up deep emotions, for good or for ill.

As evidence of the deep connection we have with our bodies, I’d like to give some examples of how some primal beliefs and emotions — deep physical responses of enjoyment and of disgust, together with ideas of purity — quickly come into play when we speak of our bodies, and of accepting new things.

Let me start with a story.2

I like many different kinds of cheese. And for my work as a mathematician, every year or two I have to go — or rather, I get to go — to conferences in France. Many years ago, on one of these trips, I was introduced to a cheese called époisses. Wikipedia politely describes this cheese as being “pungent”, and it definitely has a strong odor and flavor. But in my opinion it is a little bit of heaven on earth. Some époisses on a piece of crusty bread? There is nothing else like it.

In the United States it is not legal to sell a true époisses, made with unpasteurized milk. Nowadays you can find a pasteurized version just down the street at Whole Foods, but it’s really not the same. So once, when I was coming back from a conference in France, I decided to take some true French époisses home with me, so I could share the experience with my wife and with friends.3

The day before I left my conference in France, I went to the local cheese shop, and bought an époisses. I asked the clerk if he could wrap the cheese in plastic. “O, non non!” he said. “Les bactéries anaérobies!” Dangerous anaerobic bacteria would flourish if the cheese were wrapped tightly in plastic. So instead, I had it wrapped loosely in paper, and I kept it in the hotel refrigerator overnight. When I left early the next morning, I wrapped the époisses thoroughly with several layers of newspaper for insulation, put the whole package in a paper bag, and then in a plastic sack. I did not put the cheese in my luggage, because I wanted to make sure it stayed cool; instead, I kept it with me as carry-on baggage. On the trans-Atlantic flight I asked the flight attendant for some of the dry ice they use to keep drinks cold; I put the dry ice in one of the layers of newspaper around the cheese, and I wrapped the whole package — cheese, newspaper, dry ice, more newspaper, paper bag, plastic bag — I wrapped it all in my coat, and put the whole thing in the overhead bin.

I sat down next to the colleague I was travelling with and settled in for the twelve-hour flight. My colleague sniffed the air, and asked, with wrinkled nose, “What’s that smell?”

For him, I’m afraid it was a very long flight.

The point is that my colleague and I each have strong reactions to the idea of eating this cheese. To him, it’s too stinky to even consider eating. To me, it is an invitation to bliss. And both of our reactions seem to completely side-step rational thought.

These preferences we have for what foods are delicious, what foods are disgusting, what foods are “clean”, and so forth — these preferences are very personal, and can be hard to overcome or to change. They are deep-seated.

Sometimes, our visceral reactions align with our intellectual choices. I know that some meat-eaters seem to think that vegetarians are all secretly craving some bacon or a nice steak, but that’s not been my experience — most of the vegetarians I know are at best indifferent to the taste of meat, and often are actively repelled by the idea of eating it. Their vegetarianism — whether it comes from an intellectual or an ethical choice, or from a cultural or religious tradition — their vegetarianism matches up with their gut reaction.

And, conversely, for many meat-eaters the taste of a well-cooked steak provides a visceral satisfaction that is not matched by other foods and that is hard to describe in words.

It is very helpful when deep-seated gut reactions align with our higher goals. But whether they align or not, I believe it is good practice to be aware of the part of our reactions that come from our gut, and the part that comes from our minds, and how the two are related. Here’s a story to illustrate this.

As I mentioned, for my work I go to Europe every couple of years. But the first time I went to Europe was in the late 1980s, while I was still a student. I traveled for about a month, staying in youth hostels and using a student Eurail pass to get from place to place. I would take the train to a new city every few days, and see the sights, go to the museums, visit the churches and cathedrals… And in some ways, I felt like I was getting an education in Bible stories and Christian history in the same way that a medieval peasant might have — by seeing the mosaics and stained-glass windows in the local churches.

If you haven’t ever taken an opportunity to look at the stained glass windows here at Throop, I encourage you to do so after the service. The windows on the north side illustrate parables from the New Testament, while those on the south side are based on the Sermon on the Mount; the windows behind me show Mary, Jesus, Saint Mark, and the angels Michael and Gabriel. This is an ancient tradition; the mosaics and windows in European churches and cathedrals also show saints and stories from the Bible, sometimes annotated with highly abbreviated names in Latin or Greek. Part of the embodied experience of visiting these sacred spaces is the coolness of the stone buildings, the muted light through the stained glass, and the shining gold of the mosaics. When I first saw these mosaics and windows, 25 years ago, I could sometimes figure out what the scenes represented, but since I hadn’t been raised in a church and had never read the Bible, many of the stories were unfamiliar to me.

When I visited the Basilica of Saint Mark in Venice, there was one mosaic outside the main doors that really puzzled me. It showed two men opening up a big wicker basket to show the contents to several men wearing turbans; the turbaned men are turned away in disgust, and one is literally holding his nose. What story is this, I wondered.

It turns out it is not from the Bible — rather, it tells something of the history of Saint Mark’s Basilica itself. The story is that the bodily remains of Saint Mark had long remained in Alexandria, where he is said to have died. But in the 9th century, when Alexandria was under Muslim control, two Venetians took Saint Mark’s relics, put them in a basket, covered them with cabbage leaves and pork, and tried to smuggle them out of the city. The idea was to keep the Muslim customs inspectors from investigating the basket too closely. The trick worked, and the Venetians smuggled the relics to Venice, where they remain to this day.

Who knows whether this is true — and it is certainly an example of people of one faith mocking the traditions and beliefs of another. But the point is that sometimes the things that we have immediate gut reactions to — things that we don’t want to consider or think about — those things can become blind spots.

The residents and civic leaders of many cities like to think of their cities as prosperous, as being places where everyone has opportunities for work, and every life is valued. But when homelessness becomes apparent, when people are sleeping in alleys and on park benches because they have nowhere else to go, too often the reaction is not: How is this happening? What economic and social problems are leading to this? Do we have housing that people can actually afford, and homeless shelters that actually provide safe quiet space?4

No, those questions require taking a problem — a contradiction between what we think of our society and what it actually is — and accepting that this problem exists, internalizing it, as a first step towards solving it. I think that that is one reason why it is so much easier for people to say, “Let’s just pass laws to make sleeping in public illegal.” That keeps the problem external: If we just make those people go away out of sight, we won’t have to think about this difficult problem.

There’s a similar dynamic, I think, with the question of refugees fleeing the violence in Syria. As I mentioned in services last month, we face a tension between two things — On the one hand, we have the images of America that we believe in: A nation of immigrants; a place that welcomes those who have been oppressed elsewhere; a country that asks for “[the] tired, [the] poor, [the] huddled masses yearning to breathe free”; a country that announces to the world that we will provide refuge when others will not. All of that on the one hand, and on the other: Fear. Fear that among those we welcome, there will be people who will do us harm; fear that we will invite evil into our homes.

Confronting this tension — thinking carefully about our values, and about our fears, and acknowledging the conflict between them — this is hard work. It means we must take the problem inside ourselves, and confront our own contradictions.

It is so much simpler to try to make the problem go away; to think of it as a problem caused by refugees — instead of being a problem within us, that is made evident by the refugees.

That brings us to another question of embodiment, to another meaning of the word: What principles do we want to embody, to live into — our values, or our fears?

Let me take this back to the idea of spiritual practices involving our bodies. If feeling and acknowledging our own internal conflicts is necessary and yet unsettling, what can we do to make the process easier?

I’d like to close by sharing a movement-based meditation that I was taught by Rev. Kathleen Owens, who says that she learned it from a Buddhist monk in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1990s. I was taught this practice in the context of training for lay ministry; the question was, what do you do if you have been ministering to someone who is facing serious problems; what do you do when you have helped someone deal with their own stress by listening and absorbing some of it yourself? What do you do when you have been upset by what you have heard?

There are a number of physical practices that can help when you need to recenter yourself. One is simply to go outside, and breathe, and touch the ground. Another practice that can help is a meditation that Rev. Owens calls “three palms”. If you are willing, I would like to teach this to you now, so that you might use it later.

Ideally, this is a standing meditation, so if you are willing and able, please stand. If standing is not good for you, don’t worry; you can do this seated as well. As you are willing and able, stand up straight, tall but comfortable. Keep your feet shoulder-width apart, and keep your knees loose, and unlocked. Press your toes gently into the floor to create a slight arch under the toes. Leave your arms at your side. Now:

  1. Face your palms outward. With an inhalation, slowly raise your arms away from your sides and up to almost together over your head.
  2. As your arms reach the top of the arc, exhale; let your middle finger tips touch one another, then the rest of the fingers, then the bottom edge of your palm, leaving an opening between your palms.
  3. Inhale while lowering your arms and hands to a resting position in front of your mouth and throat. Rest here and exhale.
  4. Inhale as you continue to lower your arms and hands down until they reach a position in front of your heart. Exhale and rest.
  5. Inhale, and with your palms together, turn your fingertips away from your body and towards the floor. Rest your hands in front of your navel, and exhale.
  6. Inhale as you extend your arms and hands down, and separate your arms back to your sides. Exhale and rest.

Repeat this two more times.

After the third time, stand quietly and breathe deeply for a minute. Then release.

May your mind and your body find connection with one another, and may you know peace.

Photo credit: The author. (Warped panorama of the interior of Sainte Chapelle.)

  1. Our percussionist. ↩
  2. A composite of several different events. ↩
  3. These are current topics in Los Angeles. You can search the Los Angeles Times for articles about the recently-passed homeless ordinances. Here’s a religious perspective on the issue. ↩
sermons

Sinful Desserts

4 Comments

(A sermon delivered at Throop Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena, California on 15 November 2015. Copyright 2015 by Everett Howe.)

(A general note on the sermons I post: While I do lightly edit them and add links and footnotes, they are still basically texts that I wrote with the intention of speaking. Therefore I sometimes use punctuation that is more appropriate for spoken language than for written language. Grammar, too, is different in practice for spoken language than for written language, so if something looks funny to you when you see it written here, try reading it out loud.)

In Providence, Rhode Island, there’s a bakery called simply: Sin. Their web page says that they have “a line of special occasion cakes and desserts that makes the ‘Sin’ of dessert well worth it,” and they encourage you to “go ahead and Sin… Eat wicked and never feel guilty.”

Closer to home, near Venice Beach, there’s Sinners and Saints Desserts. “If you are a sinner,” they say, “you will enjoy our decadent, scrumptious creations.” If you’re a saint, on the other hand, your choices are limited to their gluten-free selections.

The colder parts of the Central Time Zone seem to be home to great depravity. In Saskatoon you can patronize Mortal Sin Foods 1, and in Sioux Falls, be sure to visit Sinful Things Desserts, “home of the ultimate sin.”

Or, if you prefer the comfort of your own home, search for “sin” and “dessert” at cooks.com.

What is going on here? Why is there a very strong thread of American culture that associates pleasure — especially bodily pleasure, and most especially the pleasures of eating — with sin? Why is it that choosing something to eat solely because you like the taste — and not because it’s full of anti-oxidants or B-vitamins or omega-3 fatty acids — why is it that choosing to do something solely because you like it is often seen as the top of a very slippery slope towards selfishness?

Spoiler alert: I won’t be able to tell you the answers to these questions in the next 20 minutes. But I would like to raise up the questions themselves as something to think about, especially as we enter the winter holiday season. Because our worship theme this month 2 is gratitude, and I would like to encourage you to be grateful for, and not guilty about, pleasure.

High school students often think that life is unfair. I was no different, and when I was in high school, one of the particular unfairnesses that bothered me was that… I had a body. It wasn’t so much of a question of it being a body that was failing me in some way — which really, mine was not, unless you count a bad case of acne — no, my complaint was more fundamental than that. I used to stay up late at night, reading, or working on math problems, or studying chess, or — one lucky summer — programming the school’s personal computer 3 that I had been allowed to take home. Basically, I would stay up late doing nerdy things that I liked. And whenever I started to get sleepy, I would regret the fact that I lived in a body. Why do I have to go to sleep?, I would wonder. Why can’t I just live as a disembodied mind — or, as the conventions of science fiction would have it, as a brain in a vat of nourishing fluid?

A few clarifications must be given here…

First of all, a person living as a brain in a vat would still get tired. Sleep is a really a function of the brain, not just of the rest of the body. But what I was really confronting in high school was the distinction between the mind and the body, not so much the brain and the body.

Secondly: Star Trek fan that I was, I should have remembered that many of the science fiction stories about disembodied minds are really about the benefits and pleasures of our bodies, benefits that we are prone to overlook.

But perhaps the main thing to mention is that trying to maintain a distinction between the mind and the body — or, to move from philosophy to religion — to maintain a distinction between the soul and the body… the thing to mention is that trying to assert or maintain this distinction has a long history. The ancient Greeks, for example, contrasted the intellectual and restrained Apollo with the physical and ecstatic Dionysus. Many religions speak of a human soul that exists independenly of our bodies, and that may live on after our bodies die, or be reincarnated into a different body.

And if we become so focussed on our souls as being completely separate from our bodies, it’s easy to wonder, as I did in high school: Wouldn’t we be better off if we didn’t have bodies.

But we all do have bodies. Our consciousness comes from our bodies, so in some sense we are our bodies. We take up space in the physical world. And not just our literal, physical volume; the existence of our bodies uses up resources. We consume things — air, water, food — we eat other living things — to survive. And society has a lot to say about how much space, literal and metaphorical, we should feel entitled to.

I was at a conference in Ottawa last week, so I’ve been on two cross-country flights recently. There’s nothing like being on an airplane to bring about awareness of your body — as you sit in those uncomfortable seats, wishing you had paid extra for that luxurious extra four inches (four inches!) in Economy Plus — as well as awareness of other people’s bodies, as you wonder: Who will wind up in the seat next to me, and battle me for the arm rest?

It’s so easy to get wrapped up in these little battles over who gets what space that we can forget: Who is it that said that the airline seat is the appropriate amount of space for a human body? The airlines set expectations for how much space we should be able to take up. If you happen to exceed those expectations, air travel will make you keenly aware of this… both from the discomfort of trying to fit into those narrow seats, and from the awareness of your fellow passengers’ relief when they see you walk past their row when the plane is boarding.

This is just one reflection of our societal expectations about body size, and how they encourage feelings of shame and guilt. Larger people know from repeated experience: strangers feel free to comment on their bodies, on their perceived health, on their choice of clothing, on their purchases at the grocery store… especially if they are buying food with government assistance. Women, of course, get an especially large helping of this barely-disguised disapproval, because their bodies are often viewed as not being their own; their bodies exist, society says, to be attactive to men, or to be incubators in which to grow babies. “Don’t eat that!”, complete strangers will tell a pregnant woman. “It’s not the best thing for your baby.”

But society is wrong! Our bodies are our own. We are our bodies. Mind and body are not separate things — our minds, our souls, come from the physical existence of our bodies. We, all of us, take up space in the world. And we have a right to do so.

We take up space with our bodies, and we take up space in other ways as well. We all agree that helping others is good; but taking care of ourselves — physically, emotionally, spiritually — these are morally good things too.

My learning service agreement for my internship with Throop Church lists eight areas that I am supposed to focus on. Some of these areas are things you would probably expect — I am supposed to develop skills in worship, for example, and in pastoral care. But perhaps you will be surprised to learn that one of the focus areas is “self-care.” It is easy for people who are attracted to ministry to buy in to the belief that their whole lives should be devoted to nothing but service; that self-sacrifice should be the goal. But this is not only unsustainable — I say that it is also morally wrong.

A couple of months ago, from this pulpit, I talked about the Transcendentalists, and the notion of “self-culture” that they adopted from William Ellery Channing. In that sermon, I pointed out that the Transcendalists seemed to miss the importance of community. But they were not wrong in stressing the importance of cultivating one’s own soul; what is the point of being alive and being human, if not to spend at least some time expanding one’s horizons.

There’s an older story, too, that I think makes this same point. It’s a story that appears in the Christian scriptures, in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John — the story of Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus.

The story is this: 4 One night, in the week before his crucifixion, Jesus was staying with friends in Bethany. While Jesus and others are having their dinner, Mary of Bethany comes to Jesus with a container of a very valuable perfume, and she anoints his head and his feet with it, using up almost the entire container. The disciples see this, and say “Hey, Mary, what are you doing? Why are you wasting this perfume on Jesus, when you could sell it for a lot of money and give that money to the poor?” Jesus tells them to leave Mary alone, because she has just done something kind. And then he says, “The poor will always be with you, and you can help them any time you want. But I’m not always going to be with you.”

This is a very interesting passage from the Gospels, and there is a lot of commentary on it. Reading the some of the commentary, you sense the discomfort that the story creates. There’s a sense of anxiety; some commentators say “Now, don’t go and use this as an excuse not to help the poor.” They seem to be worried that this story will give people permission to be entirely self-centered.

Now, who am I to be giving Biblical exegesis? But I am going to go ahead and do so anyway. And, I am going to trust that all of you here already have social consciences; that you do think about caring for the poor, about righting wrongs, about justice, about healing the planet.

But what does Jesus say about these issues? “The poor will always be with us.” The problems and injustices of the world are huge, larger than any one of us — which is why we have to work together to solve them. But any single one of us? If any single one of us devoted all of our energy to helping humanity, we would do some good — but alone we would never be enough; there is always be more to do. Each one of us could throw our entire selves up against these problems — and be completely annihilated.

And what would be the point of our human existence if this were all that we did?

It is important to devote time and energy and money trying to help our fellow humans and to help improve the world; but we each need to have some time left to be our own individual selves. Again: What is the point of your existence as a human if you don’t spend some time expanding your soul… experiencing your body? Experiencing wonder at existence?

People seem to find it very easy to discount this lesson. Let me give one example of where I think this happens.

There is a philosophical and social movement nowadays called “effective altruism;” two of its main proponents are Peter Singer and William MacAskill, philosophers at Princeton and at Oxford, respectively. I think there are many problems 5 with this movement, but I will try to summarize it without getting too sidetracked by my criticisms.

The effective altruists try to measure the impact of any action by a single number; they measure goodness in “quality-adjusted life-years,” or QALYs. For example, one year of life for a healty person is valued at 1 QALY; one year of life of a person with AIDS who is not receiving AIDS medication is worth 0.5 QALYs; if that person were to take AIDS medication, the value of one year of their life would increase, to 0.9 QALYs. A year of life for a blind person, they say, is worth 0.4 QALYs.

Now, the effective altruists want to use these numbers to evaluate the benefit of good actions — for example, of giving AIDS drugs to patients who need them, or of preventing blindness. But perhaps you already see one problem with their system: Your blind friend may not view their life as being worth only 40% of the life of a sighted person. But I promised not to get distracted by criticism, so let’s continue.

Once they have figured out the worth of every action in terms of QALYs, the effective altruists then try to figure out the most benefit, as measured in QALYs, that you can get from various life choices. They come up with some interesting and counter-intuitive conclusions. For example, if you happen to have the skills that would make you employable on Wall Street, the effective altruists say that the best and most moral thing you can do with your life is to work on Wall Street, and donate most of your income to a charity that, for example, provides mosquito netting to the poor in malaria-infested parts of the world.

Don’t volunteer at a food bank or a homeless shelter, they say — that time could be spent more profitably working at a high-paying job, and sending the proceeds to the mosquito-net charity. The children you will save from malaria outweigh the homeless and the hungry in your own town.

I think that there are many problems with this philosophy. For example, it works entirely within an existing political and economic structure, without questioning whether that structure is good. It is like taking the size of an airline seat as an absolute fact of nature, instead of as a choice that was made because it is convenient to a large corporation.

But here is the problem I would like to focus on today: This utilitarian philosophy does not take into account the worth of the individual. It views each person simply as a machine whose moral value is measured in how much money they can make to donate to charity. It does not value the preferences of the individual; it does not value the spiritual satisfaction of the individual; it does not value the social connections, and the moral growth of the individual.

Perhaps I take this too personally — because as a Ph.D. mathematician, I am employable as a Wall Street financial analyst. According to the effective altruists, people are dying of malaria because I am standing here today, instead of working at a hedge fund.

That may be true. But I would rather be here today than at that hedge fund. Because my soul grows here. And that is worth something.

Perhaps you will be glad to know that my desire to live as a brain in a vat did not last long. As I have grown older, I have learned to appreciate the connection between my mind and my body, and to enjoy the pleasures that I can still get from my body. These pleasures and abilities will not always be there; being able-bodied is a temporary condition.

I would like to close this sermon with some homework. It is optional; and it will not be graded.

If you are willing, take the time this holiday season just to notice when pleasures — and, in particular, foods — are decribed in terms of good and evil, sinfulness and saintliness.

Now, you personally may need to think of dessert in the context of a medical condition, or dietary restrictions; and in any case, it is good to think of dessert in terms of how it will make your body feel not just immediately, but also in the next hour, and the next day. But for extra credit, see whether you can avoid thinking of dessert — or of any food — in terms of sin, and guilt.

Because you deserve more than sin and guilt. Take up your space in the world, and know that you have value.

Photo credit: Peggy Greb. The image is in the public domain, and was released by the Agricultural Research Service, the research agency of the United States Department of Agriculture. More information here.

  1. Oops, they have closed. ↩
  2. At Throop Church. ↩
  3. A Processor Technology Sol 20. ↩
  4. Versions are given in Matthew 26:6–11,
    in Mark 14:3–7, and in John 12:1–8. ↩
  5. These articles mention some of them. ↩