Waiting for One Another at the Table of Hospitality
Christopher Fici
NT 322 (Idol Meat and Vegetables)
Dr. Brigitte Kahl
May 7, 2015
Waiting for One Another at The Table of Hospitality:
A Pauline Confrontation with the Anxiety of Food Self-Righteousness
Hardly a day goes by, living as a 21st Century seminarian in the middle of Manhattan Island, where I am not, in one way or the other, anxious about food. I may be anxious about what I am going to eat today, and where I am going to get it, and whether or not I should offer another monetary supplication to the great idol of Grubhub, or whether I should cook something with my own hands and my own pots. I may be anxious about what is in the food I eat/cook, and what this is doing to my body, my mind, and my spirit. I may be anxious about the distraction of being hungry again two hours after I've eaten a meal. I may be anxious about the weight I am gaining as I slip closer to middle age. I may be anxious about some article or essay or op-ed I read haranguing against the icon of our industrial food system, its ecological un-sustainability and tendency to either slowly and silently or quite quickly and painfully poison our brothers and sisters. There are some days in which I wake up immediately anxious about all of this, and there are some days in which I wake up and feel in control, knowing the day ahead of me will provide me with a chance to eat with an sound ethical frame and a strongly beating spiritual heart in the loving company of others.
In this final meditation for our Idol Meat and Vegetables: Toward a New Testament Theology of Food course, I want to integrate, confront, and lay a path towards transcendence over this anxiety which is present in our own contemporary food story and in the food story of the Bible. The anxiety present throughout the food story of the Bible is a reflection and expression of how we as human beings, and also as planetary beings of the Earth, struggle to overcome our tendency towards disorder in relation to the food we need to survive and the act of eating in which we need to thrive. The fulcrum of this anxiety pivots between concerns of righteousness against self-righteousness in relation to our personal and communal practices of producing, distributing, and consuming food. The anxiety which is produced prevents us from eating together at the table of hospitality, in a kind of intimacy which is life-giving to the matrix of the body, mind, and spirit.
Calling upon elements of the Biblical food story we have been forming together this semester, along with elements of our contemporary food story, I will attempt a dialogue with Paul, primarily through his teachings to the Romans (Romans 14:15-17), as he also wrestles with the conflict between righteousness and self-righteousness in the food ethics of the early-community of Jesus-followers, calling them to the common table of hospitality. Paul understood that self-righteousness leads to anxious personal behavior which inevitably leads to sinful personal behavior. He understood that self-righteousness leads to anxious relations with our neighbor which inevitably leads to sinful relations with our neighbor. Calling upon my own everyday anxiety, my own self-righteousness as a vegetarian (and the potential for undue righteousness in my Hindu food ethics/theology), and my own attempts at foregrounding hospitality, I will explore how Paul's confrontational call to transcend self-righteousness in the community of the early Jesus-followers can and must inform the confrontation and potential, and very urgent, transcendence of our own food self-righteousness.
When Eating Becomes a Sinful Disorder
Michael Pollan asserts in The Omnivore Dilemma that food is a constant source of anxiety for us, and that we, in varying degrees and conditions depending on our economic and social privilege, have a kind of collective “eating disorder.” Pollan writes that “when you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the potential foods on offer are liable to sicken or kill you.”[1] Eating disorders, whether in the form ofanorexia or bulimia, or orthorexia nervosa[2], a kind of non-clinical disorder of social alienation which comes from being too obsessed with “eating well” (organic, raw, vegan, etc), are rooted in our anxious and cursed relationship with our food. We are anxious and cursed because we are self-righteous. This righteousness means we are lonely eaters, anxious eaters, unhealthy eaters. This righteousness is one example of the sin of pride, the sin of being curved defiantly against ourselves and against our neighbors, of giving in to the “sin lurking at the door.” (Genesis 4:7)
Self-righteousness gives us an excuse to worship at the idol of our own prideful ego. Even if we think that, because of our so-called righteous behavior, we are no longer worshipping the industrial food idol by our “progressive diet”, we still easily fall victim to the idol of our own pride. This makes our sincere and genuine efforts to eat well, to eat healthily, to eat ethically, and to eat spiritually, all too complex at a time in which what we eat and how we eat and who we eat with and whom is allowed at the table with us to eat are questions which are more urgent than ever in the face of our existential ecological crisis. Food is at the core of our ecological crisis and our concomitant economic crisis, in which, as Raj Patel says, “hunger isn't about the amount of food around-it's about being able to afford and control our that food...After all, the U.S has more food than it knows what to do with, and still 50 million people are food insecure.”[3] Patel insists that food sovereignty must be an essential part of our response to this crisis, “so that not only is more food produced, but it's distributed so that everyone gets to eat it too.”[4] We are inextricably part of a food web, a “complex system of interconnected links. We eat, say, rabbits and rabbits eat plants. The plants feast on soil nutrients, themselves the work of microorganisms and their ravenous diets. Complex, dynamic relationships are the key.”[5]
This complexity and dynamism doesn't hide the concrete fact that, as Rev. Dr. William Barber told our Union community recently, “there is still such a thing as sin..there is still such a thing as the heretical.” For Paul, his primary, urgent, and painful motive was to convince those who had laid their faith at the feet of Jesus to understand a new realization of righteousness in the freedom Jesus had given, a righteousness that was the antithesis of the sinful self-righteousness coming from the complexity of the law unearthed through the narrative of the Old Testament. Paul's mission statement was to echo Jesus' assertion that he came to fulfill the law, rather than simply practice it or parrot it in an unconscious way.
The Righteous Food Ethic of Paul
Paul was not completely indebted to what has come before in relation to law and ritual. What he was not especially indebted to was the dichotomy of self vs other, or of one community of people separated from another by certain legalistic markings, which provided an unnecessary barrier between those considered pure and those considered impure. The very shattering of this self vs other dichotomy, in the new understanding and fulfillment of the ideal and practice of the law as proclaimed by Jesus, is what sets the table of hospitality. For Paul this was “much more than a new theory or theology, it is a new relationship and a new community practice...It is the practice of Selves who no longer try to vanquish their Others. This is a transformation that 'works; only so long as it is won and occupied, not through a war against an Other, but through a radical transformation of the Self in solidarity with the Other: 'Faith working through love' is the only thing that counts.”[6] The inherent alienation of one-over-the-other is vanquished at the table of hospitality. Then as it was, as it is now, Paul realized that the very physical necessity of eating was a fulcrum in which this “new relationship and new community practice” could be realized and attained. Without addressing very directly how the early communities of Jesus-worshippers formed their food ethics, then the very practice of a life devoted fully in faith to Jesus, as envisioned by Paul, could not come to be.
This takes us to the passage we are primarily encountering in this final project, which comes from Paul's letter to the Roman Jesus-followers. He tells his recipients of his communique that “if your brother or sister is being injured by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love. Do not let what you eat cause the ruin of one for whom Christ died. So do not let your good be spoken as evil. For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 14:15-17) On a first, surface glance, Paul appears to be denying the very necessity of a Christian food ethic. This echoes his claim to the Corinthians that “food will not bring us closer to God” (1 Cor 8:8). Yet when we encounter, in the same letter to the Corinthians, Paul's lessons on how the community of Jesus-followers should relate to the practice of eating idol meat, we encounter the subtle but clear message of the Pauline food ethic. This message and ethic is the message and ethic of hospitality, the hospitality that is “the whole law summed up in a single commandment, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.” (Galatians 5:14-15)
Paul's food ethic had two goals: the first was to make sure that, even if the eating of the meat of the idol did not actually effect, on a physical or metaphysical level, one's devotion to Jesus, the devotee of Jesus should never act as exemplar of idolatry which would weaken the conscience of one's neighbor. Paul even declares that “therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.” (1 Cor 8:13). Second, the Pauline food ethic directed the community of Jesus-followers to the core of their faith, the core of the common table, where “because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” of faith and life in Christ. (NRSV 1 Cor 10:17) At this common table everyone would sit together in the embrace of the essential values of hospitality, the fruit of the Spirit as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” (NRSV Galatians 5:22-23)
Confronting the Idol and the Anxiety of the Idol
How do we define the idolatry that Paul felt was the antithesis of his food ethic which he understood as essential to devotional praxis for Jesus? First is the warning of Paul, based on the struggle of the Israelites in the Old Testament, particularly with the episode with the “golden calf”, of putting another deity before God. Paul understood a special paradoxical tension amidst the community of Jesus-followers, in that the eating of idol meat would not directly lead to a metaphysical compromise with idolatry for the devotee of Jesus, yet such freedom did not entirely cure the tendency and temptation towards idolatry in the devotee either. Paul warned that “we must not put Christ to the test...so if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall...God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.” (NRSV 1 Cor 10: 9, 12-13) What is this fundamental test which must be received from God rather than imposed on God? It is the test which exposes the fundamental idolatry, first expressed in the insouciance of Cain, of placing the fallible and vulnerable human being on the same level of God. This existential arrogance is a reflection of the Hindu concept of the ahankara, or the false ego, an inflated sense of identity in which one feels oneself, as a replacement for God, as the center of the universe and the focus of ultimate concern.
Paul's food ethic, an ethic meant to represent the very essence of the liberatory social and spiritual ethic at the core of Jesus' teaching, was based in his crystal-clear understanding of how the act of eating defined how the social order was formed and maintained. How one eats and what one eats and whom one eats with defines one's place in the social order, where “the gods have ordered the world and created every people, each in its place. At the center of each place is an altar, the table at which both gods and mortals gather, where food is both offered and consumed. To sacrifice reconfirms this order-a people in their place, together with their gods. But this place must be fit for the gods; it must be holy.”[7] Then, as it is now, the source of our food anxiety comes from being subjected to a position in a food order where the gods order a world and a table where we are required to compete with each other, where we must be in combat with each other, where we must conquer each other, where we are “consumed by one another.” The gods who require such a cannibalistic table are the idols of the empire, which was Caesar in Paul's context, and for us it is the idol of the market as God[8] represented by the idol of the industrial food order.
Paradoxically when we try to remover ourselves from being consumed by the Other we risk consuming ourselves in self-righteousness. As Hilde Bruch writes “anorexics struggle against feeling enslaved, exploited, and not permitted to lead a life of their own. They would rather starve that continue a life of accommodation. In this blind search for a sense of identity and selfhood they will not accept anything that their parents, or the world around them, has to offer...In genuine or primary anorexia nervosa, the main theme is a struggle for control, for a sense of identity, competence, and effectiveness.”[9] It is the same struggle for identity, competence, and effectiveness for those suffering from orthorexia nervosa, who are 'plunged into gloom' by eating a piece of bread, become anxious about when their next kale, chia, or quinoa hit is coming, or eat only at home where 'superfood' intake can be tightly controlled.”[10] In attempting to protect ourselves from being consumed by others, we consume ourselves double-fold: first by eating habits rooted in what we feel is an urgent, necessary, unavoidable, and ultimately unhealthy austerity, and secondly, by expressing our devotion to this austerity in self-righteousness towards our neighbors. We injure ourselves in our anxiety and we injure our brothers and sisters at the same time. Instead of love, joy, and peace, the way we eat becomes a source of strife, jealousy, dissension, and factionalism. (NRSV Galatians 5:19-20). We think our food and drink is our righteousness rather than “peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”
Overcoming our Anxiety through Hospitality
How then can we confront and transcend the anxiety of being at the cannibalistic table of the industrial food idol without creating more anxiety for ourselves and for others? How do we respond in the way of righteousness rather than the way of self-righteousness? For Paul, the separation of righteousness from self-righteousness is essential for the new order and the new way. The table is where the question of righteousness over self-righteousness is most visceral. Food is the most radically communal experience we share together as a human community. Food is our common concern and our common necessity. It is the place where we choose, when we “come together to eat”, to either “wait for one another” (NRSV 1 Cor 11:33), or to consume one another.
It is the place where either we can remain aloof and alienated in austerity or where we can come together in the spirit of mutual life-giving abundance which gives life rather than death, in which “as followers of Jesus we are 'sensuous revolutionaries' living our deepest passions and connections in order that our free and full embodiment may sing of abundant incarnation. It is the sensuous revolutionary Christ who calls to us and is in a true sense himself a sensuous hedonist empowering revolution through the skin and enabling abundant embodied living that is the counter to the worst excesses of our genocidal and disconnected world.”[11] This abundance allows to overcome boundaries and borders in a permeable way which honors the ethics of our own spiritual spaces and allows us to participate in the hospitality of our neighbors, brothers, and sisters.
As an intern at Bluestone Farm, I was faced with a dilemma following our Sunday eucharist celebration, as we gathered for brunch. The sisters and other community-members always made a large pot of scrambled eggs made with eggs from the chickens on the farm. As a Hindu, I have been instructed not to eat eggs, yet I made a decision, rather than to raise a fuss and make myself an Other in this situation, to eat eggs with the community. Afterwards, as I explored this choice in my own mind, the concept of hospitality came clearly into my consciousness. I could very easily rationalize my decision to eat eggs as a bit of laziness or a bit of passive cowardice in not wanting to raise a fuss, but instead I was feeling something rather more profound in my choice. I did not feel injured by what my brothers and sisters on the farm had lovingly provided for me to eat. I did not feel that my eating of eggs, despite a distinct prohibition against doing so, had prevented me from experiencing love, joy, and peace at the table with my brothers and sisters. I felt (for better or for worse) no sense of sin either. What I felt instead was a gratitude at being part of their table, of being invited to the table, and I understood that the loving connection created by the table was, at least in this case, more reflective of the presence of God than the rote following of rules for rules' sake.