Bodies/Food

Phillip and Patrick just went home after a long afternoon of wine, delicious food and fascinating conversation. Christy is off to work, and I just hung up the phone with my mother. The buzzing of my head has decreased to a hum and the pots and pans stacked in the sink along with the exhaustion in my back tells me that good company has come and gone.

The effect is mysteriously mirrored internally: As it has been since my junior year of college, Easter Sunday spins me away from the body of believers, again alone in my disbelief, disquiet, and confusion. For forty days, and increasingly over this past weekend, I have felt the sweet company of the Church's orbit toward my tiny corner of the universe, where Mark's mute terror and amazement have morphed into loud unhappy professions of my own frustrations with the faith. But today Christians move into the blessed joy of resurrection, an end to the doubt and emptiness of our sometimes-mundane existence, and so ends my movement with them. Here I stay- for now anyway.

I wish I could tell you why: the feeling that I am ready to let go of what I've increasingly allowed myself to admit is somewhat unrealistic is strangely akin to my intuitive sense about eating animals: the basic reluctant suspicion that there is simply more than meets the eye, that beneath the smiling, chewing, laughing warmth there is suffering that isn't heard. I'm desperate to find a Christianity that acts in concern for the environment, for suffering beings, that challenges me in my ability to support and give care to these basic human needs-- but I'm growing impatient, in myself just as much as in the Church. And while I certainly know myself to be a hypocrite in my convictions, such knowledge only intensifies my longing for accountability. I don't want to count on going away to heaven; I believe in kingdom stuff here, and now, and in what I eat for dinner. I want someone to call me up or come to my door and ask me if I've started eating locally yet, not when I've been to church last, not how many I've told about Jesus, whose late, late flesh (like most) is beginning to lose its taste.

I tell myself: I am a Christian, I just don't believe in afterlife away-from-here. I am a Christian, but that doesn't necessitate a love for the Old Testament, and a lot of people disagree with Paul; I am a Christian, but that doesn't definitely mean I hold a belief in virgin birth; in divinity; in literal creation; literal resurrection.

And when it comes so far, to this (I am a cat, but with dog ears and a doggy wet nose, and big dog feet, and rancid doggy breath, and a messy dog-tail, but a cat), maybe its just time to call it what it is. Maybe there is no Christian like me because I've stepped a step or two, too far.

In her book, Take this Bread Sara Miles tells the story of herself as a left-wing lesbian atheist who steps into a church to take communion, and finds herself so moved by the experience of being fed that she becomes a Christian and dramatically reorients her life toward feeding others. I picked up her book on Good Friday, hoping for peek into some radically progressive, generous Christianity that might tether me afresh to my faith. And I can't help but note ruefully how opposite my experience has been: that I spent my life thus far believing, then more or less stepped into a food bank to volunteer and found myself so deeply moved by the experience of being fed that I feel inclined to leave the church altogether. Its not just the food that I eat there, but the earnestness of the volunteers and the staff, the overwhelming care present in their secular tasks, and the sweet simplicity of sorting rotten fruit for hungry bellies.

Despite all this, I pulled myself out of bed this morning at 4:30AM (an hour not unknown to me at the grocery store!) to drive into Queen Anne, to the beautiful Episcopalian church my friends and I attend for the Easter vigil, a three hour-long account of the story of Christianity starting with Creation. Afterward they served a breakfast of eggs, croissants and champagne (hall-e-lujah!) of which of course I ate the fruit cup, and then went out for a waffle at my favorite vegan joint.

As I tuck myself into bed tonight (tomorrow I will inhabit my normal space in the wee hours of the morning: unloading frozen cases or trays of bread), the words of the liturgy run through my mind and like usual, I am mystically comforted and not irritated by their presence.

I want to close with another holy reading, one I've found incredibly comforting if not salvific- not yet:

Everywhere I saw bodies, and food.

Food and bodies had always been wrapped up in meaning for me: They were my way of understanding the world. But it would take decades to have these accumulated experiences make sense in a narrative, much less one I'd call Christian. It took actually eating a piece of bread-- a simple chunk of wheat and yeast and water-- to pull those layers of meaning together: to make food both absolutely itself and a sign pointing to something bigger. It turned out that the prerequisite for conversion wasn't knowing how to behave in church, or having a religious vocabulary or an a priori "belief" in an abstract set of propositions: It was hunger, the same hunger I'd always carried.

- take this bread, sara miles, xiv