My wife Terry teases me that the Evening News let me put up this blog because they got tired editing the letters that I wrote to the Editor.
Well tonight the tables were turned. Our lovely hosts who put up this blog server for our enjoyment, actually published a couple of excerpts from some of the blogs in the paper, including one of mine. Dave from the LunaPier Cook was another, as was Ashley of So Alive.
Dave was nice enough to post a link in his blog to my site, so I’m happy to return the favor because there are a lot more people interested in food than politics or religion. Maslow figured that out about fifty years ago.
I’m grateful to the paper for the publicity as well as the opportunity share my thoughts with those interested in reading them.
I’m grateful for Father Cunningham, my African American Jesuit religion teacher Junior year at Creighton Prep HS in Omaha, Nebraska. Other than the couple of older Jesuits who drank too much, Father Cunningham was the only person of color in the faculty and only one of a handful of African Americans at the whole school. There were no African Americans in my tidy middle class part of town. Father Cunningham was the first adult Black man I had ever had a substantive conversation with.
Father Cunningham had the longest fingers of any man I’ve ever met. They would reach out across the room and end a few inches from your nose. It was one of the most challenging classes I have ever been in. It was completely unpredictable. There were no rules other than the fact that he was in charge and he didn’t even pretend to care about fairness. It was almost daily hand-to-hand verbal combat. There were no easy answers to anything, and if one side of a particular argument appeared to be winning (often my side), he would arbitrarily intervene to skew the outcome to those that were losing. I spent most of that year in seething rage at how biased it all was. It probably took me ten years to realize that his willingness to aggressively confront our whole white suburban prep school sense of entitlement was done out of love rather than spite. By that time he has left the priesthood, married, had some children, and passed on.
I’m sad that I never had the opportunity to thank him in person for helping me learn how to think and have the courage of conviction. I’m also sad that he didn’t live long enough to see Barak Obama run for President. Instead I thank him every day by expressing my opinions.
I am also most grateful for my wife who gets to hear a lot of my opinions. We will be celebrating our 11th wedding anniversary this Saturday, but we’ve known each other since we first fell in love as seventeen year-olds. She was a smart cutie from a Toledo Catholic girl’s school. I was a skinny debater from an all-boys Prep School in Omaha. I’ll tell the whole story of our almost forty year romance some other time, but it is the stuff of novels. I’m just grateful that she is still as much in love with me after all these years as I am with her.
I am blessed way beyond my deserving, so much so that heartfelt gratitude seems hardly sufficient.
“In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.” I Thessalonians 5:18
Unfortunately, I have to agree with you about food being more important to people than politics or religion. But I do see that as kind of an odd thing. Food, food preparation techniques, food-related miracles, they’re all throughout the entire Biblical narrative. Beyond that, there are church potlucks, dinners for wedding rehearsals and receptions, dinners for funeral wakes, fish frys at some churches on Fridays … the list goes on and on. And what could be more important to some politicians than to be invited to a State Dinner, or to have anything at all that’s been prepared by one of those amazing White House Chefs? Food is definitely a huge part of both religion and politics, and people should be aware of how these three things interact on a daily basis.
Myself, I’m quite thankful to the Xenos Christian Fellowship of Columbus, Ohio, and at http://www.xenos.org for helping me form the religious beliefs I have today. Over 20 years ago when they were smaller I was invited to live with one of their home groups, and learned more in that year than at any other time. Their teachings are very similar to what I see each week at Crossroads Community Church at 23 and Sterns Rd. … but Xenos will always be at the forefront of those kinds of teachings.
Dave,
Thanks for the post. You’re right of course. Food is one of the basic metaphors of Christianity when we talk about bread and wine.
Culture and ultimately politics derived from man’s discovery that groups of people working together were much more efficient food producers than individuals.
Thanks again for your support.
Jeff