How Green Tomatoes Made Me Think Of Original Sin, the Eucharist, and Hope

Not mine, but mine look just like that.

I was making green tomato pickles the other day, a new experiment forced by a motherload of small green tomatoes and a dying sun.  Green tomatoes are humble little creatures, to put it mildly.  I love them fried, but these were too tiny to fry in nice big slices.  So I got on the internet and voila: green tomato pickle recipes.

That's when things got theological.

(Admittedly, with me, it doesn't take much.)

I pulled out ingredients in this recipe to make rag tag leftover inedible fruits into something my hungry kids would eat, and the first ingredient: water with salt.  In our case, blessed salt.  Hmmm.

Add the washed inedible throwaway fruit.  Some peppercorns and garlic cloves for a kick.

Then throw in a generous number of mustard seeds.  As in "The kingdom of heaven is like."

Submerge fruit.  Cover.  Wait.

Aha. Transformation.

When we are baptized--submerged--with the water and exorcised with the salt, the kingdom of God is introduced.  It is tiny, perfect, round like a mustard seed.  But seeds don't stay seeds.  They change things.

In the case of the green tomato, something stunted becomes something wonderful--crunchy, tart, well-loved.

In the case of us...maybe we're still waiting to find out.  But reminding ourselves that we humble, stunted with sin creatures are submerged in God's transforming work, for his Kingdom, is a good thing.  We take on flavor of the salt, the water, the Kingdom.  Until one day, we are fully changed.

***

One thing I haven't talked about regarding the Theology of the Body is eating.  There is a lot to work with there, too.  Emily Stimpson addresses food and eating and sacramentality in These Beautiful Bones, and Mary DeTurris Poust doesn't address John Paul II's Theology of the Body perspective explicitly, but does excellent reflection on the subject of defining true desires in Cravings: a Catholic Wrestles with Food, Self-Image, and God.  The end of a blog post is not the place begin considering that huge subject.  But the same week, while I'm making pickles, there is a mission at a local parish, and I attend.  It is on eucharistic adoration (and what I was able to attend was great).  The two priests giving the mission gave talks on the theology of eucharistic adoration, how to pray with Scripture at adoration, the saints' recourse to it, etc.

But one piece of it struck me hard, and it was this: "Why does anyone think it is crazy that our Lord would veil himself through the appearance of bread?  He wants to save us from our first parents' choice to eat veiled death!  He does this crazy thing to tempt us to take in life, for life, eternal life.  He gives himself to us in the most natural manner we can accept--almost everyone on earth knows how to eat.  It is a necessity.  We must eat to live.  He needs to give us the medicine of veiled Life, the veiled Christ.  There is no trickery.  He tells us flat out: This is my body; this is my blood.  There was little trickery for Adam and Eve: they knew what they were doing was wrong, God said they would die is they ate it.  The veil is no trick at all, but it is a bit of a test: do you believe God's word or not?  In the Gospel of John, chapter 6, Jesus announces "I am the true bread, come down from heaven...whoever eats this bread will live forever."  And people grumbled, disciples left Jesus (keep in mind this comes right after the multiplication of the loaves and Jesus walking on water--and some left anyway)--and Jesus turns to the twelve, and asks 'will you also leave?'"

It was the one word from the Son of God that some could not trust...could not handle the mystery of it...God wants to give you life, wants to save you from an inheritance of death,  But you will have to trust him and eat what he points to--his body and blood, true bread and true drink.

Angels can't do that.  They are entirely spiritual beings.  But humans can.  It is a gift of our embodiment, that we can share in God in this act of communion and trust.

Well, back to the stunted green tomatoes, rescued from the creeping frost.  The green tomatoes aren't veiled anything...just an extended metaphor of an overly theological cook.  But trust God to transform.  What looks hopeless may change remarkably with water, salt, and the Kingdom of God tucked into it.  The Lord indeed works in mysterious ways.

"The Prophetism of the Body": learning to live in truth

I recall reading a Protestant theologian many years ago in grad school (Rita Nakashima Brock, if you care to know) who has written passionately about human embodiment and incarnation.  Honestly, I have long since forgotten much of the particular book, but I do remember one golden line: the body does not lie.

It's true, isn't it?  The body does not lie.  We can rationalize our way out of aging ("I feel young, and with the right surgery, I look it too"), out of violence ("it's not really abuse, a little makeup and ibuprofen and I can carry on"), out of illness ("most people my age have chest pains, right?").  Happiness is physically expressed.  Anger is physically expressed.  Grief is physically expressed.  Psychologists are trained to catch these expressions, since the words from the client's mouth may not match.  There is a speaking that the body does, a language, that is starkly honest.  Literally, the body cannot lie.

Of course, the mind can.  And does.  When John Paul II says that the original sin resulted in a seismic disharmony between body and soul, felt and manifested as shame, he says that original sin opened the door toward wanting to live a lie.  Thank God, we have the grace of Jesus Christ to help us confront those dark tendencies and realities.  But we also have another help to support and receive that grace: the ensouled body, prophet to the self and God's community.

Body as prophet? One of the phrases that John Paul II used in the audiences was "the prophetism of the body" (and to those who say John Paul II said nothing new, I counter with this phrase!).  How is the body a prophet to the self?  Well, the body does not lie--which means the body, in its own blunt way, tells the truth.  The body is a truth teller.  It tells us who we were created to be.  That is prophetic work.  In a powerful way, the body, even in its fallen and imperfect state, can be a spokesperson for God (that is, a prophet to yourself!).

But the other role of the ancient prophet was to call God's people back to the covenant.  This is even more interesting.  How does the body call us to covenant?  If you take the body seriously as sign, as a "pre-given language of self-giving and fruitfulness," then the body points to and expresses the covenant we are called to with God.  The body was very precisely made for an exclusive covenant with the other.  God's covenant is nothing if not unmerited gift, and the audiences' "hermeneutic of the gift" is expressed and seen through the ensouled body!

I do not mean to push this too far--honestly, I am thinking through the implications myself.  But today's gospel, when Jesus Christ says he will send us a Spirit of Truth, got me thinking.  Perhaps we can recognize the Spirit of Truth because we were created to welcome truth in our very ensouled bodies.  The body as a temple of the Holy Spirit gains a new meaning here: truth holds Truth. We live in a world that needs gentle truth tellers.  Perhaps one of the gifts of the theology of the body is recognizing that there is need for courage, but no need for despair: in addition to the Power of God and a Spirit of Truth, we carry the seed of the prophetic word in our very bodies.  And that word is "God did not create us to be alone, but for love, healing, and communion."  Good news indeed.

May we all realize the body does not lie, and seek to live in better harmony with its message.

***

Theology of the Body, Extended is for sale, and I still have a few signed copies.  If you'd like to buy it, please, check it out here.  Thanks!

"We have a God who fights for us."

Miriam.  Image credit.

One of the privileges I have as a college professor is that I teach a class called the Christian View of the Human Person, and the students have an option to write religious autobiographies.  Sometimes these autobiographies are wrenching, other times, joyful, other times, seeking.  But often, they are touching. Like this one: a couple of days ago, one of my students wrote--after a litany of real challenges in her young life--"But thank God: we have a God who fights for us."

We have a God who fights for us.  I immediately thought of Miriam's triumphant song in Exodus, "The Lord is a warrior; The Lord is His name."  We have a God who--for us--fights.  I've never thought of the warrior language in particularly positive ways before; at best, it's not my preferred image of God. But it's a true image.  It's just that the fighting is not violent, not power-over.  Our God fights for us like a physician saving a dying patient, a lover wooing to win his love's attention, a father seeking a child lost in the woods, a teacher using every trick to help the student learn the lesson.  Like a God who is willing to take every measure, short of taking away our will, to lure us into healing relationship with him.  Even becoming human and dying on a cross.

St. Therese de Lisieux, in her autobiography Story of a Soul, tries to explain why she was preserved from being a great sinner, since she feels it was through no merit of her own. I can't find the passage (feel free to tell me where it is!) but her thrust is that she felt she was in some way preserved from sin, received mercy before she could even commit the acts of sin.  I see some unusual relevance here. What if the Lord fights for us, even before we sin?  What would that look like?

Well, it would look like the Theology of the Body.  Original humanity, before the fall, was given the gift of the sign of the ensouled body.  Our bodies speak a primordial language that points to God, before a single word of revelation is handed down.  That sign was created by God.  That was God fighting for us, giving us direction, before we even stepped into the abyss.  But the fighting is not violent.  It is not brutish.  It is gift.

After the fall, the hermeneutic of the gift remains: the ensouled body remains as primordial prophet, and the gift becomes most clearly revealed in the death of the Son of God, a gift of salvation.  God never stops fighting for us.  It is, as David Power wrote, a "Love Without Calculation."

And after the resurrection, the gifting continues, because that is how God fights for us.  "I will send you an Advocate," says Jesus Christ, and the apostles receive the Holy Spirit, become temples of the Holy Spirit and agents of God. If we need to fight, he promises to fight with us: "do not plan what you are to say should they take you to court, the Holy Spirit will give you the words to say."

The law of the gift boils down to this: we have a God who fights for us.  The Lord is a warrior, the Lord is his name.  But like all of Christianity, it's not the fighting we expect.  It's a sacrifice that costs everything--but also changes everything.  We expect God to jig, and he jags.  No matter: soon enough, we realize that God isn't the one writing with crooked lines; we are.  He has fought for us from the beginning of time, in unexpected but entirely consistent ways.  When we listen to Miriam's song this Easter Vigil, let's keep in mind the upside down sacrificial gift of a God who fights for us.

The LORD is my strength and song, And He has become my salvation; This is my God, and I will praise Him; My father's God, and I will extol Him. "The LORD is a warrior; The LORD is His name. (Exo 15:2-3)