A Burning Stomach, a Fickle Globe
A Burning Stomach, a Fickle Globe
Nathan Beacom
On Hunger & Loving Deeply
This essay is featured in Ekstasis Issue 10 Print Edition
A few years ago, in these pages, I wrote a love poem to food. I argued that eating can be a spiritual act, that it can connect us with the very foundation of reality, that it is the locus of our most sacred exchanges with each other and with the beautiful world. At the table, we meet and mingle with material elements that make up our very life, endowed with a sacramental significance that connects us to the minuscule and the cosmic, to the thrumming heartbeat of the universe, and to the Love that makes it all go round.
These ideas are still deeply held, and I do not believe they are trivial. At the same time, my stomach hurts. I don’t mean that I’ve overindulged or that I’ve grown sick of food, but that my gastrointestinal tract has rebelled against me and against the whole world. I won’t go into detail, but it is enough to say that, because of a number of considerations regarding the proper working of my body, I’ve had to think about what I eat in a way that is new to me. Whole classes and categories of food are to be avoided: staple ingredients—ingredients at the heart of the world’s finest culinary traditions—and of some of my very favorite recipes.
Salt, too, has taken on a new significance. One never thinks of it until one has reason to avoid it, but salt is the magical, mystical ingredient that gives life and vibrance to most everything we eat. Salt alone, of course, does not make good food, but it marries together and awakens the harmonies that come from meats, cheeses, vegetables, herbs, and spices. Try taking salt out of your favorite recipes for a week. You’ll never underestimate the might of this mineral again. As Saint Matthew wonders, “if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted?” (Matt. 5:13 KJV)
When you are required to think about these things, your approach to cooking changes too. No longer can you think merely about perfecting flavor; extraneous considerations come to bear, and a nagging voice stays your hand from adding the one-last-dash of salty fish sauce you know would perfect the noodles. You spend triple time in the grocery store checking nutrition labels and glumly realizing that sausages and brats are no longer part of your life.
I don’t mean to complain. My own dietary abstinences are small compared with those of many who suffer from severe allergies, those with celiac disease, or those with epilepsy who must observe a punishingly strict ketogenic diet. I just mean that it has got me thinking. There are those who face severer losses still, like the loss of their hearing, their sight, their memory, their motor skills, or other things besides. Here, basically, is the question: can we give our love wholeheartedly to a world which may be snatched away from us?
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Let me explain what I mean by giving our love wholeheartedly to the world. I mean that there is a correspondence between our hearts and the world. I can’t recall where, but the philosopher Roger Scruton once said something along these lines: our hearts and the world beat at the same frequency, so when we see something beautiful, we respond with love, and that’s how we know they were tuned by the same source. In other words, we recognize something in the world, as though it were somehow made for us, made to speak to us.
The world is not just alien and frightening to us, but full of useless, superabundant loveliness. If our breast is shaken with the glory of a mountainside or the sweep of a river valley, if we are moved by the sound of music, if we are consoled by the steady crash of waves or the soft whispering of leaves in the woods, we are feeling some kind of harmony between our hearts and the world.
And this harmony calls forth a response of love. We feel a desire to throw ourselves into the world, to climb its summits, to swim its lakes, and to run through its fields. We want to get to know the creatures that swirl in its seas, that fly above us, and skitter through the tree branches. The stars, planets, and galaxies shake us sometimes at night, demanding to be looked at and admired. In a humbler way, too, we grow to love the trees that shaded the park where we used to play as kids, or the creek that ran nearby, or the little birds that hopped around on the porch. The world beckons us to dive into it head first, to give our hearts to it.
And yet. And yet. And yet. Nature’s beauty is also red in tooth and claw, the human world is pockmarked and boiling with vice and selfishness, and that which is lovely is fated to diminish. Trees will die, lakes will dry up, relationships will sour, and we ourselves, so fragile, will inevitably come to some kind of loss. Our joints will lock up, we will slow down, our sight may fail, our hearing grow dull, our taste become bland.
How are we to approach such a world, one which is so lovely and so fickle? One sort of classic spiritual answer has to do with indifference. Perhaps the solution is to become unattached to the whole show, to view it as a kind of charade. Atheistic pessimists like Schopenhauer took this route, and Schopenhauer’s hero, Buddha, endorsed something like this. Even in Christianity, there are many figures who would emphasize the changefulness of the world as a reason for seeking to leave it behind. Saint Augustine said that the world was not to be enjoyed, but to be used. Only God is to be enjoyed. Certain mystics of Eastern Christianity sought, through shutting their eyes and controlling their breathing, to free themselves from the sensory world altogether.
All of this has something of the air of heartbreak around it, of spurned and disappointed lovers. Only one who knew great desire and great attachment could suggest desire as the root of suffering. Within this strain of thinking, too, there is a mighty truth. If we tether ourselves completely to any passing thing, as though it were our anchor, we are bound eventually to sink with it.
But this is only part of the truth. Yes, to love and to desire is to be disappointed and to suffer, and to love the wrong things too much is enough to eventually destroy us. No earthly thing on its own can constitute a worthy object of our ultimate hope or our final love. At the same time, we continue to sense that there is a deep harmony between our hearts and the world, and perhaps glimpse the work of a great composer. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, concludes a famous poem—in which he frets over the world’s brokenness and the loss of his most beloved friend—with well-known lines that utter a truth more profound than the dour pessimism of Schopenhauer: it is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.
“Man was made to lead with his chin”; the theologian and chef Robert Farrar Capon wrote, “he is worth knowing only with his guard down, his head up and his heart rampant on his sleeve.” What he meant was that to be human is to take some mighty risks, and among the greatest of these risks is to love deeply. Any parent, I think, must know this when they look at their child. I once had a mentor whose son was shipping out for a tour of duty in Afghanistan. “I tell my kids,” he said, “hold all things close, but none too tightly.” I’ve always thought this a nice summation of the proper attitude. Detachment and deep love held together—an ability to give one’s heart without grasping and clutching at things in a possessive way. It is a love that requires both selflessness and courage. It is far easier said than done.
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This isn’t really all about my aches and pains, of course, but it is my way of reflecting on the theme of this issue, of “tending the garden of the future.” It is in the future that our perils chiefly lie. It is the future that holds out to us the withering of the vine, the pestilential blight, the arthritic hands that can no longer pull weeds, and the silence of winter’s ice.
Each of us has our own garden to tend, and each of us also tends the garden of this great big world. And for each of us, the trap is laid, as the writer Robert Louis Stevenson said. We know what the future holds: suffering and loss. What do we do in such a circumstance? Do we close off to this world that will hurt us, do we turn our back on it and seek refuge in the recesses of our own mind? Hardly! We open the bottle of fine wine, Stevenson would say, we toil hard to bring forth every beautiful blossom in the garden we can, we give the surplus sweet corn to our neighbor, we teach our children to plant and weed, and, when we can, we put the dirty garden gloves aside and sit back with a glass of ice-cold lemonade and soak in the fading warmth of the sun.
Tending the garden of the future, in other words, is done best by tending the garden of the present. There are those today who get overwhelmed by the direst predictions about climate change or other global catastrophes. Time to close up shop, they say. Time to quit having babies. The world is going to end in fire! Well, yes, the world will likely end in fire no matter what. Someday our sun will grow beyond its bounds and swallow up all these lovely planets. That’s always been true.
Our responsibility is not to despair, but to work and to enjoy with hope. For Christians, there is a basis for this hope that does not see the world as doomed and disposable and mostly a thing to be escaped. Maximus the Confessor, the Greek theologian of the 6th century, emphasized that, because God had united himself with human nature in the person of Christ, he had united his divinity with the whole of creation: “The unspeakable and prodigious fire hidden in the essence of things, as in the bush, is the fire of divine love and the dazzling brilliance of His beauty inside every thing. . . a shining forth, an epiphany, of the mysterious depths of being.” The world, Maximus thought, was destined to be like the burning bush, on fire with love and yet not consumed—united to God, perfect, divinized, and yet still itself. “Earth’s crammed with heaven,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, echoing Maximus, “and every common bush is afire with God.”
If this is so, then we can confidently give our hearts to the world. We can love this world with the knowledge that what we do in it is not destined to merely pass away, but somehow lives above time in the very heart of God. It is this God, furthermore, who entered into the triumph and loss and pain and uncertainty of this fragile, fickle globe. God, too, knows what it is to lose a child. It is to this same theme that the journalist G. K. Chesterton spoke in his poem “A Christmas Rhyme”:
The sages stare and can but spy
Blue devils in the good blue sky,
But only God in agony
Can look on all good things that be,
And see that they are good.
Then do we bid a blessing down
On milk and blood and wine.
All huge and humble things we bless,
For man's great thought is grown a guess…
And there are no things human left,
But those He made divine.
Whether we can believe in this is the whole question of faith. Thereon hangs the whole difficulty, perhaps, or the whole challenge. But we must have some kind of hope to work now in the present, where we live—a faith that our work and our joys are meaningful. This is especially so in the face of certain disasters.
I may not be able to enjoy the foods I once did. Someday we may lose our sight, our hearing, or our mental sharpness. The world may grow hotter, resources more scarce, disasters more frequent. We will grow old and pass away. What can we do?
We cannot turn our back on things, spurn them before they can hurt us by being torn away. Rather, we must all the more dive into the time that is given us. We tend to the garden of the future mostly by tending to the garden of the present. That, it is traditionally believed, is where God lives. Our challenge, which is not always an easy one, is to follow the words of Longfellow: “Act, act in the living present, heart within and God overhead.”
Nathan Beacom
Writer & Journalist
Nathan was raised in Iowa, and writes on nature, culture, God, and the good world.
Photography by Calogero Agro
This essay is featured in the newest Ekstasis Print Edition. Enjoy the fullness of what we have to offer and support our work by buying a copy for your coffee table, office space, or reading nook.
