sunday post

     This meme to me is like going to church. I could just stare at it on a Sunday morning and be thankful for the imaginary animals all around me.  And in heaven at the taverns it will be so fun. I am going to be a teetotaler for no reason in heaven and sell soda to minors.

     I thought about reading Les Miserables during quarantine and decided not to but did notice something interesting about the first part of the book, which was the straightforward portrayal of a good bishop.  All of the drama in the book hinges on the bishop’s good deed of forgiving a thief and adding silver candlesticks to what was already stolen.  This symbolic act of kindness inspires goodness that becomes epic and lifelong.  In fact, it takes a thousand pages to tell the story, which I really just don’t feel like reading.  The musical will do the trick for me, I think, and I hope everyone gets to listen that that music and read the lyrics in a way similar that I was taught in high school. To make it a whole English unit, a class could read the story Babette’s Feast and bring food, which is what another teacher demonstrated in grad school later on.

    Anyway I thought I would mention the rare generosity of the bishop, which isn’t as rare as it is to find a positive Christian authority within literature now.  I guess there are reasons for what gets told and appreciated in books, and some of my favorites, like I Know This Much is True, and The Poisonwood Bible, actually are pretty representative of the modern negative views of some Christian religion.  But I think everyone will eventually get past that phase, and it will be interesting to see what resurrections happen with Christian characters in books.  I personally think there is a literary frontier to mix evangelical foibles with hyper-detailed modern humorous tell-all-possibly-even-inappropriate stuff that I somehow haven’t been able to bring myself to write yet. My feeling that some of it is beyond me could be some good news of future team work and a lot of writers on the horizon thinking of the stuff that can only be theirs to tell.

Soul Food

Well everyone, I don’t usually write about race. I prefer to express my appreciation for people in different ways.  But I think I will post this post about something I have been thinking about during quarantine days which is the idea of “soul food.” I am eating some peach ice cream right now and have been noticing that as I cook what is yummy and easiest to stock up on turns out to be food that is very southern. A lot of it is in the category that gets associated with African American “soul food” like cornbread, biscuits, grits, macaroni and cheese, fried chicken, collards, shrimp, and creative variations on rice and beans. Besides noticing that it is some of the yummiest food I have ever eaten, it also makes me think about something I have organized my prayer life around which is the idea that a lot of things in life are a food of some sort, and I am usually just asking God to feed everyone all kinds of happy comforts when I pray.  I am talking about things like education, attention, exercise, love, talent, and almost anything else that can make life worthwhile.  And to me, one way of describing that would be as “soul food.”  But that term has already been used as a label for actual food.  And I just find that to be very profound and theological in a certain way.  It suggests kind of a spiritual integrity where what feeds the soul is actual food. Maybe people already knew this as the term became commonly used, but I think it really matches a lot of Jesus’s teaching in many ways.  Even though Jesus said that man does not live by bread alone, he also spent a lot of his time and miracles on feeding multitudes, and he explicitly told people to feed the hungry.  And as tempting as it is sometimes for people to aspire to provide things that are less tangible like teaching, philosophy, and a lot of religion, going ahead and zapping people with some real food is just funnily what could end up not only being one of the highest services but could also end up being the most lofty intellectual concept that is also fulfilled completely in physical reality as the most honest food and life there is.