Surrender: A poem for the fast

At the prompting of a book I was reading on my recent spiritual renewal retreat [1], I wrote a poem that I have returned to in my mind during this week of fasting. It is about the tension between intentionally and decisively cultivating a certain kind of life, and at the same time giving up all control (even of your sense of self) to the moving of the Spirit. But it’s also about how something as ordinary as the food we eat each day can lead us into a wide new space of trusting God.

Surrender

For years
I have labored
with all earnestness
in the suffocating kitchens
of my soul
shoulders aching—the pots
are heavy, the movements repetitive
—trying to cook my masterpiece.

Today, I stepped out
into the snow
and breathed the cold air,
mouth agape, like a child,
and coughed.

My breath settled and formed
into manna on the stones
and branches, white like the snow,
and exquisitely sweet and subtle
in flavor.

I walked for hours,
eating what I found
until I was satisfied
and did not feel full.

I followed my tracks home,
back to the kitchen,
stirred the soup
a few times,
and smiled.

[1] Soul Vows by Janet Conner.

A Bad Taste in Your Mouth

For Lent this year, I am leading my two congregations in a journey of “embodying Lent.” At a time of year that we usually focus on denying the body, I propose that we can grow deeper in our spiritual lives by being fully present to the body and intentional about engaging with the sensual aspects of life. Each week worship will focus on one of the five senses and a spiritual discipline associated with that sense.

We started off this Sunday with the sense of taste, and the discipline of fasting. I have slightly edited the sermon I preached, “A Bad Taste in Your Mouth,” to share with you here.

I. What a Bad Taste Can Tell You

When we wake up most mornings of our lives, or when we eat a heavily seasoned food, we usually experience a lingering bad taste in our mouths. We are embarrassed by such bad tastes, and find them unpleasant for ourselves, so we naturally try to get rid of them as quickly as possible. We brush our teeth, or eat something tasty to wash it down.

We have this interesting idiomatic phrase in English: “That left a bad taste in my mouth.” We say this when an injustice or a wrong has been done, or when some good is ill-gained. It’s not something that comes from within us, but something that invades us from outside—like swallowing a bitter pill.

As with any other bad taste, we are tempted to get rid of these tastes quickly. But the taste of wrongdoing tells us something important. Before we wash it down, we need to be sure we are doing the right thing to get to that sweeter taste.

In Luke 4:1-13, we have an example of what it looks like to take the time to savor the bad tastes. This passage describes how the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness, and he fasted there for forty days before he began his public ministry.

Fasting can actually give you pretty bad breath. Apparently, lack of chewing to activate the saliva glands makes your mouth quite stale. Though I can’t taste it on the rare occasions that I’ve fasted, my husband has politely informed me of this reality.

But beyond the physiological level, fasting reveals those bad tastes that you needto be aware of. It shows you what is truly life-giving and what isn’t. It shows you how much of what you consume is actually bitter.

Furthermore, what’s most important is often not what you consume per se, but the way you consume it. It’s quite possible to eat or take in the right things the wrong way, which is what Jesus teaches us in the way he responded to temptations in the desert.[1]

II. Fasting from something… For something else

Traditionally, Lent is all about fasting. That continues to be the primary practice that we associate with this time, even if we’ve turned fasting from meat into fasting from social media.

We usually think of fasting as a matter of denying the body so that we can be more attuned to the Spirit. However, I propose that Lenten disciplines are actually about being more present to the physical body, because it is only through it that we can have spiritual experiences of any kind.

In a book called Sense and Sensibility, Anglican priest Sam Portaro suggests that Lent is a time to “come to our senses” and be more intentional about treating our five physical senses not merely as means to an end, but as holy in an of themselves.[2] In this way, our spirituality goes beyond mere mental exercises; it interacts with the physical, tangible world in faithful ways. That is why I am seeking to take up Portaro’s challenge to have a sensual Lent. Which is to say, let’s pay more attention to our senses!

I’ll admit that fasting sounds like the least appealing of spiritual disciplines, and the it sounds quite a lot like old-fashioned denial of the body. But I am realizing that being present to our bodies actually requires some kind of fasting. Portaro explains it like this: “The limits of our mortality demand that we must often sacrifice one thing in order to obtain another.”[3] Especially in our over-stimulated culture where excess is the norm, we must cleanse ourselves of a constant barrage to our senses in order to take in what is truly good.

III. Delicious Temptations that Leave a Bad Taste

At the beginning of Lent every year, we are called from our over-stimulated lives in a culture that tells us we deserve to have what we need, what we want, and a little bit more just in case. We are called to go out with Jesus into the desert.

In the Bible, the desert can mean a physical desert, or any kind of wilderness—a barren place of dangers and chaos. It can also mean a spiritual place of trial and transformation. Therefore, we are called to a place where there is nothing to cover up and assuage our desires. Nothing is guaranteed. In the desert, we are bare, exposed and uncertain.

In Luke 4:1-13, it is right after Jesus’ baptism, and he is full of the Holy Spirit. That was the starting point: he didn’t fill up with other things. He left room for the Spirit to take up space within him. And that Spirit led him into the wilderness. Into a place that cut him off from all comforts and distractions to focus wholly on God.

Just when he is most full of the Spirit and most focused on God, that’s when the devil comes around. In Greek the word means, simply, “tempter.” The embodiment of temptation suggests that he turn stones into bread.

After fasting for forty days, Jesus is literally starving. He must have had an awful taste in his mouth—dust and blood and stale beyond belief. It must have sounded wonderful to have some bread to wash down that bad taste and finally fill his stomach!

But the idea of commanding power over what God created to satisfy his whims leaves an even worse taste in his mouth. That would lead him down a road of feeling he can and should fulfill his every desire, whenever he wants.

So Jesus responds with a quote from Deuteronomy: “People won’t live only by bread.” That is what Moses told the Israelites who complained about the manna that God provided as food while they wandered for forty years in the desert. That verse ends by saying they also live “on every word that comes from God’s mouth.”

Living by bread alone is trying to take control of the world for our own comfort and pleasure. But if this is our focus, something will always be lacking. Living by God’s word and trusting God’s grace gives us true satisfaction, even when we are hungry.

Then the tempter takes Jesus to a high place and shows him the world sprawled out below: fields, livestock, craftsmen and merchants, people coming and going, living in palaces or suffering under high taxes and violent oppression, some with illnesses or demon possession, rejected by their community. And the tempter says, “All this could be yours.”

If it were today, he would also see strip malls, factories and office complexes, people coming to church and going to McDonald’s, living in comfortable houses or in neglected, violent neighborhoods, while women are harassed and migrant children die in detention and people who can’t fit into the heterosexual norm are told their love is a sin. And the devil says, “All this could be yours.”

This would have sounded wonderful to Jesus. He came to save it all, to bring healing and life abundant. He should be in charge!

But then he feels that bad taste in his mouth again. Because the condition is that he would have to worship the tempter—which amounts to worshipping his own ego.[4] He would gain power according to the world’s ways, by lording it over others and forcing them to give him belonging and approval.

So Jesus replies, again quoting Deuteronomy, “You will worship the Lord your God and serve only him.” God is the only one who can give us true belonging and approval. When we try to get it from external sources, we will build our own egos, not God’s kingdom.

Finally, the tempter takes Jesus to the top of the temple in Jerusalem and says, “Throw yourself off if you are the son of God, because the scripture says that God will command his angels to protect you.”

That sounds wonderful, too. Jesus knows he faces risks to his security and his very life by speaking God’s challenging truth and bringing God’s disruptive healing and inclusion to all. If he could guarantee his safety, couldn’t he do so much more good in the world?

An important side note here: the devil uses scripture to make his case. Here we have an important lesson about reading the Bible, which is relevant to our United Methodist denomination’s protracted conflict over LGBTQI inclusion. Every act of reading scriptures is an act of interpretation. As people of faith we all respect the authority of scripture, but we do not all agree on how to interpret it. You can faithfully seek to understand it and come to different conclusions. You can also take a few lines out of context and do damage, as I feel has been done with the scriptures used to denounce LGBTQI persons.

So knowing scripture and being faithful are two very different thing.[5] When Jesus hears the tempter quoting scripture, he knows for sure that the bad taste in his mouth isn’t just starvation: it is the wrong way to do a good thing. Something is amiss in these appealing choices to be satisfied, approved of, and secure. He knows that he cannot protect himself from suffering and still do the vulnerable work of loving and saving that he is called to do.

So he replies, “Don’t test the Lord your God.” There is a vast difference between testing God and trusting God.

IV. Fasting as Trusting

We usually think of temptation as indulgence of something so pleasurable that it drives us to harmful excesses. But temptation is more than that. What makes it bad isn’t that it is pleasurable. What makes it bad is that we try to get at what is good in the wrong way. We want to cut corners, guarantee success, avoid conflicts, take more than our share. The root at all these temptations, as I understand it, is the human impulse to put our own control over trusting in God.

Fasting can help us get into space of relying more on God’s grace. It helps us be aware that you don’t have to get all the pleasure in now. You don’t have to shore up security. You don’t have to push for recognition of what you do and who you are. Trust that all you need to survive, and to be fully, joyfully alive, will flow to you.

There are many ways to fast, and most of the disciplines we explore in these weeks will in fact be a form of fasting, but the most concrete way to do it is through food, and that is the discipline I suggest for this first week of Lent.

Keep in mind that the point of fasting, in the understanding I have elaborated here, is to give something up so that we can experience something else through that sense more fully. Here are some ideas of ways to do this:

• You could actually, literally, not eat anything for one day of the week—at least not until dinner, perhaps. Try to spend this day in quieter ways, with space for prayer, reflection and scripture reading. You might be surprised at unique type of clarity and energy that not eating for a day can give you.
• You could give up adding extra salt to anything, or eating anything that contains added sugar. This helps you appreciate the flavor of fruits, vegetables, grains, proteins, just as God they are.
• You could give up processed foods. An easy rule of thumb for this is not to eat anything that comes from a box or a can. I have chosen to do this one and take it a step further. I will be giving up anything that has added seasoning when you buy it—including salt and sugar. This might be complicated because it would include bread and a bunch of other stuff, but for only a week, I think it will be a good challenge.
• Another option that doesn’t actually involve changing your diet is to give up distractions while you eat. Don’t watch TV, read, text or talk on the phone, or get paperwork done. If you normally eat with family, consider eating together in silence, if that works for your family. I practiced this from Ash Wednesday to Sunday, and I found it does help me experience more fully and appreciate each bite.

A final note about what not to do. I am very adamant that Lent is not a weight-loss or healthy-living program. It is about spiritual discipline. Do not do something that you think you should already be doing the rest of the year. Do something different and strange—something that you would not want to do all the time.

Whatever you do, be aware of how your eating, or refraining from eating, can help you dwell with the Word of God. As Paul writes in Romans 8, the word is near you—it is in your mouth, so near that you can taste how good it is. Savor it and live by it, trusting God to guide you, care for you, and love you, even when hunger, rejection and hurt cannot be avoided. Let that trust be the sweet flavor that transforms the bad taste in your mouth.

[1]N.T. Wright, Lent for Everyone: Luke, Year C, p. 8.

[2]Sam Portaro, Sense and Sensibility: A Lenten Exploration, p. 8-9.

[3]Sense and Sensibility, 11.

[4]Pulpit Fiction Podcast, “Lent 1C,” March 10, 2019. http://www.pulpifiction.com

[5]Pulpit Fiction Podcast, “Lent 1C.”

Morning Songs

I stumbled across this piece of writing in an old journal of mine recently. After a bit of editing, it became what I would share this past Sunday at my dad’s surprise retirement party, as a tribute to him. This one’s got all the senses.

I have just finished my first semester studying religion at an obscure liberal arts college in Vermont. I return to Michigan as summer is settling in, my head full of Buddhist philosophies of detachment and compassion, my heart in the throes of an impossible love affair. At the beginning of June, I pay a visit to my father. It is 2008: the year before my father will find love and companionship again, the last year of many he has spent alone.

I escape the city, the distractions, and my mother’s teeming house in Ann Arbor, where I am immersed in the complexities of almost-step-families, pets, body work clients, and my teenage brother’s dreamy worlds and fashionable friends.

I stop in Lansing to teach a songwriting lesson and then cut loose up to Hubbardston, the place I come from. I barrel down the enchanted, rain-broken roads at twilight. The manure off the lush green fields smells almost sweet to my homesick nose. The sun stumbles through the patchwork of clouds, unable to keep itself decently covered. As I draw closer to the farm, it starts raining again, just a few fat drops with the sun still exposing itself lewdly in the distance. The brown of the dirt road glows with the shuddering satisfaction of quenched earth. The green of the fields looks like it is whirling up the very breeze that blows into my car—a magic trick the plants have been practicing just for me.

When I get to the farm I talk with Dad about politics in the school system—teachers’ rights and the administration’s disgraceful neglect of students—and we listen to a recording of the concert we played with my younger brother last Friday. Then he heads upstairs to rest up for his daily ritual that begins at 4:00 AM.

I stay up till nearly midnight, suddenly charged with energy. My fingers fly across the keys of my laptop as I save drafts of emails to every single person whose unanswered letter sits in my inbox. There’s no internet here, but I can’t stop the poetry, the philosophical musings, the admiration and respect as it flows to people I’ve known all my life, people I’ve just met, people I’ll never meet again. I don’t know what’s come over me—usually, I am not so reckless in my love of humanity.

I am awakened early by my father’s routine. I slept in the walkthrough, so he comes and goes on his way to the shower or to close the windows he’d opened during the night to cool the house. I could have put my ear plugs in, as I do most nights lately, but I didn’t, and I still don’t, even as his careful footsteps keep rousing me from sleep.

I want to hear this ritual, to be a part of it somehow. I want to feel that I know my father’s daily life intimately, as if I had grown up with him. As if it hadn’t been fourteen years since I’ve lived in this house. I don’t mind being woken up. I love every moment of his footsteps in the hall, his shower running, his window and fan adjustments.

I never fall back into a deep sleep. About an hour after he leaves, I rise to do as my father does. While he is away teaching, I find myself playing out what I know about his ritual. I let myself feel like my father’s daughter, like it wouldn’t be so bad to take a lesson from him. Surely, I will replicate some of his ways without even realizing it sometimes. I might as well embrace this fully, approach it head on. Perhaps with acceptance of the fact, I will be more able to change the habits I don’t want to replicate—the things that I believe made my father suffer.

So instead of taking my breakfast to a sunny spot, as I normally would, I sit down at the old round oak table in the dining room. There, he has a cutting board that he takes his meals on, and a duct-tape-and-tissue-box construction to prop up his books and magazines. A metal reading lamp with one of those natural-light bulbs sits to one side. I prop up my book on the tissue box, turn on the lamp, and sit in my father’s seat.

For lunch, I take it a step further: I boil soba noodles and heat up a jar of his homemade buckwheat turkey sauce with chopped carrots and greens. I eat what my father eats every morning. He says it gives him energy as he goes forth to give his whole heart and mind, as well as his popcorn, bad jokes and deafening sneezes, to his special education students. He needs all the vigor he can muster to stay on his game, and be present to these rejected cases, the kids no one else knows what to do with.

This is a part of my father’s story that I do want to replicate. I want to eat buckwheat every morning so I have the energy to give myself to the rejected and struggling ones.

Between breakfast and lunch, I pray the way my father does. On my own, I have developed my own postures of prayer. I have become critical of the habit of bending before God, as if I am somehow unworthy of fully basking in glory. I prefer to turn my face up to the light. But today, I get down on the rug in my father’s living room, just as he does every morning at 4:00, and I tuck my knees under me and curl forward into a little ball. I rest my forehead on my clasped hands, and give thanks to God. I send God’s love and peace to those I love and those I don’t know and those I want to learn to love. I pray to be a better person, there in the humble stance of my father.

After lunch, I sleep on the couch the way he always does after big meals, or sometimes all night when us kids come to visit. He took the bed out of his and mom’s old bedroom awhile back, and left a painting job half-done in there. Now there are only enough beds for the four of us kids to sleep comfortably when we are all there. Dad moves down to the couch without giving it a second thought.

When I wake up, I walk to the woods out past the alfalfa field. As I know my dad has done countless times on his hermetic forest romps, I head to the pond, strip off my clothes, and jump in.

It’s a spring-fed pond, and the water has a few warm pockets on the surface, but it is mostly as cold as March. I swim hard through the cotton-like seed pods that have accumulated on the water’s surface. When I pull myself back up on the raft, I am surprised at how tired my arms have grown. I can barely lift myself up.

Dad is back from school when I finally tromp back through the fields, spurred on by the rumbles of thunder and the clouds coming in. After taking his own rest on the couch, he gets up and makes me breakfast for dinner. We sit down to a feast that reminds me of my happiest memories of visiting my dad after the divorce. The food is the typical culinary style of my father—overburdened with vegetables, free of red meats, a little zealous on certain seasonings—but something about it is exquisite. It tastes better than anything I’ve had in years. He makes scrambled eggs with carrots, broccoli and green onions, cooked just right and bursting with a buttery flavor, though I know there is no butter in them. There are strips of turkey bacon cooked in the convection oven, with a sweet tang to the meat despite their low fat and sugar content. There are fried potatoes with some tarragon and dill, that are just the right amount of greasy and salty.

For dessert, Dad puts on pancake batter made of fresh-ground buckwheat, oats and pears. We sit down to steaming cakes, me with butter and him without, and top them with yogurt and local maple syrup. The pears are tender and sublime.

I recall so many breakfasts Dad did up right for us when we came to visit. It was one of the ways I knew—in spite of all the distance, sadness and uncertainty in our relationship with him—how much he loved us.

After dinner, we talk more about the politics at the school, and about the kids he tries to stand up for. One autistic student has been writing a lot of stories with violence in them. The administration is trying to get him to stop, but my dad suggested that maybe this could be a constructive tendency, and the student could become the next Stephen King. They did not appreciate the encouraging remark, particularly since it was made in a meeting with the student himself present.

We turn to the topic of Christianity, and the things we respect about the more conservative Evangelical members of our faith, and the things about them that make us grind our teeth. We stand out on the wrap-around front porch, waiting for a rainbow to appear among the deep gray of the clouds. We discuss the church’s debate about homosexuality and the cultural contexts in the Bible. I find his views more similar to mine than I’d thought, or maybe we are both just going softer—more open to encompassing everyone’s heartfelt say in things.

Later we move to the near-dark parlor and sit at the piano. Dad plays a beautiful melody of a gospel song he is writing. He plays it like a loop track while I try to write a second verse, squinting in the dim. It feels good to try to come together over a song like that, to put my vulnerability on the line and sing out my half-formed lyrics as Dad’s fingers move over the keys.

Then he starts playing a song that chants the words, “How can I serve you?” over and over again. I sway on the piano bench and feel like I am in church. I feel like raising my hands and turning my face upwards, as if God were waiting somewhere in the dark gray clouds.

“I want to sing that song every day of my internship,” I say. I am going to be working at a social service agency in Detroit this summer.

Dad says it is a morning song for him—he played it every day while the kids ate breakfast when he was a student teacher. “Poor kids,” he laughs.

But before this we had taken a walk with the dog down Maple Rapids Road, through that same broken humidity of yesterday evening, the freshly drenched fields breathing with life. We spoke of love, of relationships, of the struggle to find the right partner and the struggle to stick together. We spoke of the joy of being alone but also the pain of it at times. We recognized that we all long for closeness. We talked about our family, about him and mom, about bad decisions and things falling apart. But we spoke with the detachment and compassion that comes from years of slowly chipping away at your heart’s hard places. I heard my father speak out of years of curling up face-down on the living room rug and praying to be a better person. I heard him speak out of years of standing up from that worn spot and going forth into the day to find some way to serve someone. I heard my father speak with a voice I wouldn’t mind taking after.

Restorative Justice

Restorative justice has been coming into fashion lately in political and legal systems, but it’s still a long ways off from being our modus operandi. In the story of Jesus, we find that it is the only way to right a wrong. All he wants is to be able to sit again at that table and eat with those who betrayed, denied and abandoned him.

Restorative Justice (Maundy Thursday)
Mark 14:12-42

My followers, my fellow workers,
My hope for the future, my friends.
You promised not to grow weary of this hard road
That leads to eternal life.

But you would betray me, disappointed and angry
That you’d given your all without seeing the reward.
You would hand me over me for a tiny treasure,
Not because you thought it was worth it
But because you thought it was useless to hope anymore.

You would desert me, terrified and convinced
That your life would come to nothing in the end.
Bewildered, you had eaten the bread of my body,
Had drunk the cup of my blood, but you forgot already
That not even death could break this life-giving bond.

You would fall asleep, foggy and forgetful
That you had to remain conscious before injustice.
You did not want to face my suffering, or any suffering,
And you had nothing to say when I came to wake you again.
How could you fail so many times? There is no excuse.

What justice suits such cruelty, carelessness, and cowardice?

The justice that offers you my body and blood anyway;
The justice that restores you to life in my kingdom
So that all the suffering you inflicted may be healed
And all the loneliness of being right or being wrong
May come crumbling down in our joyful reuniting.

A tribute to a sensical woman

On the occasion of her birthday last year, I wrote  a poem for my mother, Lucia, and sent it to her in a card with an amateur portrait I attempted to draw of her with markers. Fortunately, this bit of ephimera made it all the way across the Caribbean Sea to her doorstep. Now, I would like to share the poem here, because this woman has, like no other, taught me what it means to be fully attentive to sensing the world around me.

My Mother

My mother belongs to the birds.
She belongs to the one absurd red flower
That appeared out of nowhere along the path.
She sees them; she loves them.
She expects nothing else.

My mother is a house by the sea.
She breathes. She is full of empty space.
She dwells in a very particular place,
With pancakes and maple syrup,
Cut onions frying in tamari,
Laughter and speech that pours forth
Knowledge from a secret symmetry
In the microcosms of our bodies.

My mother sometimes works at a desk
With machines and people.
Sometimes, she works over a table
With the tender bodies of people.
She is not always compassionate,
But neither are you.
She remembers the one with the aching heart.
Her best work she does over a bed of moss
Or a cool patch of sand dune.

My mother is a day of rest.
A new Sabbath instated
On the day she was born
After a long, hard creation.

The Panoply of Marriage

The eleventh month of this year was full of a few of my favorite things: visitors from far-away countries, the color orange, elaborate rituals, inside jokes, golden rings, the number 11 itself, and marriage—my own, finally. It was overwhelmingly sensuous, as all good rituals, along with their preparation and aftermath, should be. So I cannot pick one sense to summarize it, between the silk curtains and flames and waterfalls, the shared soup and carefully decorated cakes, the songs and poetry recited, the reassuring touches and passionate kisses, the flowers and incense of our best offerings to God. It can only be described as a panoply of sensorial experience that causes you to stumble awkwardly or forget your lines as you try, and inevitably fail, to take it all in.

After being a student for so long, the best metaphor I can find for this month of my marriage is the sense that I’ve graduated from something. Yet, perpetual student that I am, I also feel like I’ve only just begun learning, and I didn’t really get in enough classes on medieval female saints or anthropological perspectives on globalization or a thousand other things that I should be an expert on. In this case, I didn’t get in enough classes on how to be tender enough to be emptied out, or on how to open my being to another—along with all his others—in the vulnerability of true love. I guess I’ll just have to figure it out as I go along.

But I did learn a lot at the end of this year. I learned that hosting a group of eight beautifully mismatched gringos in Bogotá is the closest I’ve come to herding cats, and yet I loved every minute of it and every bit of the people who came to share this time with me. I learned how important it is to let go of control precisely at the moments when you think you most need to exercise it. I learned about the power of promising your heart and your damned best to someone in front of a gathered assembly, and how that creates a little ship-like container to carry you along life’s troubled currents together. I learned how humbling the kindness, dedication and helpfulness of my family, friends and even strangers can be. I learned just how much I need these people, sometimes even to keep breathing properly, as I discovered when my little brother successfully prevented me from hyperventilating through his unrivaled ability to crack me up. This sort of kindness will be the subject of a future post using a new sense category that is legendarily located in the bowels.

But for now I will just say, I am grateful, and I am empty-handed, and I am whole.

The Taste of Grace

I wrote a song recently that I thought was about grace. I wanted to say something about finally realizing that all my efforts to construct a meaningful, purposeful life have mostly been futile, as I can only hope to receive my purpose as a gift from a reality much greater than the little world inside my head.

But I have realized that instead I wrote a song about food. Our human revelations and yearnings are often so much more basic than we like to admit. Of course, food is also a form of grace, as the very fact that we are able to eat is thanks to a fearsomely intricate web of life that we did not create and have in fact become rather adept at destroying, from the microorganisms in the soil to the birds of the field. Not to mention that the primary way we achieve a sense of communion with each other is not through spiritual ideals, or the cultivation of virtues, or anything else so elegant and transcendent. It is through sharing food.

So maybe this has something to do with why each of the three verses of my song have to talk about food in order to say anything about spiritual revelation. The taste of grace is sometimes crunchy and oily like an empanada, sometimes hot and savory like soup, sometimes sweet and tangy like bread and wine.

Brand New Town

I once met a saint who fried empandas
On the corner of 72 and Caracas
In the shadow of the outstretched arms of St. Francis
He made people feel like they mattered
Sometimes I don’t know if I matter to anyone
That’s when I run to where he’ll sing me this song

When all your dreams are a city in shambles
And your tricks are all worn out
Lay your burdens down, walk out in a field
Say, “I’m a brand new town”

I’ve tried my whole life to prove my great wisdom
And to win all the world’s affections
Now all I’ve got to show is a fight I lost with my baby
And some stone soup to make us in the evening
Sometimes I don’t know what I was born in this world for
That’s when I run to the one who knows me more

Chorus

Only when I came to this temple of the spirit
Filled up with hungry bodies
They gave me bread and wine and said, “No need to repay us—
This life is a gift we could never possess.”
Now I know that everything I have is worth nothing
So I’ll sell it all to the buy the field where you found me

Chorus

Possible Lives and Honest Soup

Sometime last year I began seeing a lot of internet excitement about the newest food trend in New York City: something called bone broth that people were buying in cardboard sippy cups for somewhere between $4.50 and $9.00 a shot. A Paleolithic miracle food, the gamey beverage is purported to make your hair shiny, your skin glowing, your bones strong, and your digestive tract invincible. Now, from a world away, across the Caribbean Sea, buried in the heart of the Andes, and perched precariously on the highest peak of a poor neighborhood at the end of a dead-end street, I sit in my kitchen and think about the contrasts between the kinds of lives that are possible in certain times and places. And I think about soup.

If I lived in a place like New York, I would probably occasionally buy a cup of bone broth. I am a middle-class, educated citizen of the land of noble quests for dietary, spiritual, psychoanalytical, socially conscious and postmodern intellectual fulfillment, where all individual revelations are opportunities for mass marketing. So bone broth seems like a great idea to me, along with coconut oil, almond butter, organic grassfed beef, and kombucha tea. And though I would surely at times make my own bone broth (which, the killjoys say, is really just glorified beef stock), at other times, perhaps when experiencing a wave of educated middle-class frazzlement, I would probably decide to treat myself to a ready-made $5.00 shot of the stuff.

But for the time being I have a different kind of life, where other things are possible. Here in Colombia, I cannot buy shots of bone broth, or almond butter, or kombucha tea (coconut oil and organic grassfed beef are theoretical possibilities, but then, so are penthouse suites). But I do not say this to make you feel sorry for me, the noble American who has given up her first-world comforts to live in solidarity with the downtrodden of the earth—or at least with her fiancé, as is my less impressive situation. As I said, other things are possible here that are not possible in my country.

What I can do in Colombia is go to the supermarket and buy a plastic bag full of “meaty bones” for 1,500 pesos—60 cents with current exchange rates. At the neighborhood store, I can buy a pound of potatoes, a single slice of pumpkin, a baggie of shucked peas, and a carrot and an onion for the equivalent of about 1.80 US dollars. Then I can climb up the makeshift stairs dug into the hill and return to my kitchen to make a delicious soup that leaves our lips shiny with collagen-rich beef fat and our tongues relishing bits of succulent, flavorful meat, hearty Andean potatoes and the vegetables that somehow taste more like the Vegetables They Were Meant to Be here.

Poor people in Colombia are the ones who eat bone broth. They don’t call it bone broth, of course. Here in the capital, Bogotá, they don’t call it anything at all, because it is something shameful to only have enough money to buy some bones for the soup. On the ransacked coast, however, they are more honest, for they call it “bone soup” and they even serve it with that name in the little diners.

This honest, working class soup is possible here in Colombia in a way that it is not in the United States, just as bone broth in cardboard sippy cups may only be possible in the latter country’s great meccas of dietary seeking. It is remarkable to think that even certain flavors are only possible in certain parts of the world.

Of course, in this age of mass globalization, people have tried to change that. We want quinoa, coffee and curry at all times, in all places. Especially we who call ourselves Americans. But there is an undeniable integrity and elegance to life when the flavors we encounter are limited by the particularities of the place we inhabit. Perhaps it is in fact the costlier flavors that will become more universal. Whatever has become a fad in New York City will be demanded anywhere else that people aspire to economically developed greatness. But it is the humbler, cheaper, more honest flavors that will become the exclusive secrets of the poor and marginalized.

I think this principle could be extrapolated to other spheres. Certain lives are possible when you posses certain privileges of money, nationality, race, location and education. For example, you could, like two of my cousins who live in New York, become a nutritional coach, personal chef, and entrepreneurial guru before exiting your twenties. In Bogotá, that would be highly improbable, and most anywhere else in Colombia, certainly impossible. But other lives are possible when you do not possess many privileges of the kinds listed above. You could, like my fiancé, have become a street-smart emotional genius, and begin in your teens to organize cleaning brigades for your infamously dangerous, miserably poor neighborhood, eventually becoming a community organizer that wins the confidence of all kinds of ordinary, unique people. Then you would be invited into their worlds and would taste countless bowls of their honest soup, offered to you like a sacrament.

It is remarkable to think that we are all so limited in our range of possible lives, even sometimes by the very privileges that supposedly open all the options in the world to us. Yet there is a great integrity and elegance in living fully the possibilities of your particular circumstances.

But enough with this speculating. It is better, I think, to make soup.