My Spiritual Encounter with French Asparagus

Asked to refract my "spiritual autobiography" through the prism of "multi-cultural" encounters, I thought, first, of a plate of asparagus; then, of my last college roommate Andreas.

A child of midwestern parents in the late - 1950s, I had little experience of church.  My worldview was shaped, not by Bible stories, but by airtight, antiseptic packages. Food came frozen or canned.  On special occasions, the meat, veggies, and dessert were separated by aluminum dividers in a frozen TV dinner.

The world, too, was separated in packages: over here, the USA's good, hard-working people; over there, the relentlessly aggressive Communists; everywhere else, decadent Europe's socialistic freeloaders and the backwards continents where savage dictators oppressed starving people.

Time itself was parceled out by the half hour in TV Guide.  If dinner and the dishes took longer than 30 minutes, there was a risk of missing a portion of Batman or Bewitched.

When I did become involved with the church in my teens, Christianity was a package of just a few beliefs.  Life was a test of how closely I could adhere to those beliefs.  To be saved, I couldn't tolerate blurring of lines between fact and myth, right and wrong, clean and dirty.  I worried a lot about not being pure enough.  Rather than transgress, I would come to a full stop at an intersection, even late for a plane, even at 5 a.m., no car in sight.  I considered dropping out of a play that used the name of Jesus as an expletive in a punchline.  I scolded my friend Andreas for smoking pot in our dormitory at Duke.

Andreas was a baby-faced freshman from Philly, not religious, but open to anything.[IMAGE: My sketch of Andreas.] I took on the role of big brother to him, and also tried to convert him.  We argued, and he challenged me, but nodded and ceded the good points I made.  One night, I heard him talk Italian on the phone to his father and Swiss German to his mother.  I'd had no idea that he'd immigrated from Italy in fifth grade.  Starting then, he began to blur all my lines.  His father had fought for Mussolini; Andreas had experienced life under socialism; he knew the history of US interference with elections in countries where we helped install dictators.  He was a Roman Catholic, not because he believed the Gospel, but because that was part of his culture.

When he and I rented an apartment together, our cultural conversation opened up a new front, in the kitchen.  Andreas laughed at what I mixed with macaroni, something called "Velveeta Cheese Food".  He would make polenta from scratch, broil fish, and bake bread. He told me that "pasta" isn't just noodles, but the Italian word for the essential part of the meal, the part that assuaged appetite; meat wasn't for that, only for flavor.  He told me that Americans reverse priorities.  He said that Americans eat so that they can get back to work, but others only work so that they can get back to the table with family and friends.

A couple years later, I chaperoned high school students in France, and I saw what Andreas meant.  At 8 o'clock, the meal at a little country restaurant had already gone on a couple of hours, with wine, and bread, and small servings of varied dishes.  Between courses, I took a walk outside through the neighborhood where families were combined at backyard tables, pouring wine, playing with kids, eating bread. They were still at it when our group broke up around 11.  Later on the same trip, we ate at a fancier in-town restaurant, where one course was asparagus with butter and lemon, just two or three spears side by side on a small plate.  I'd never liked asparagus; but the sauce and elegant presentation made this stand out for all time -- I wrote a page about it in my journal that night.
[IMAGE: In my journal that same week, I sketched the view from my room.]

This cultural experience helped me to understand what I was absorbing from the Book of Common Prayer and from novels by Roman Catholics like Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, and Graham Greene.  Their stories, like the stories in the Bible, are filled with flawed people who may even try to get away from God, and cannot do so.  For these authors, God speaks through events, through broken people, and through mixed feelings.

I guess what Andreas and my experience in France and those Roman Catholic writers taught me was to stop looking ahead to the next thing, and to be present in this moment; to trust stories in all their ambiguity, though they may not always "go" with the dogma; and to see this world as something good in itself, not just as a proving ground.

I was primed, then, to understand what Episcopalians mean when they claim to have a "sacramental" view of life.  Wanting to know more, I signed up for my first EfM class.

For a deeper dive...

• I wrote about the asparagus and Andreas in a reflection on 19th century Americans influenced by travel in France. See my post Ah, Paris: The Greater Journey.
  
• Flannery Would Love It! . I visit the author's home, see the film of her novel Wise Blood, and reflect on her work.
  
• Saints in Spite of Themselves. I reflect on Greene's full body of work. In Escape Clause I re-read Greene's novel The Heart of the Matter. In What's Funny About The Comedians?, I compare Greene's suspenseful and darkly comic novel about Haiti with the tedious movie made of it.
  
• Third Take on The Second Coming. Walker Percy writes novels and essays that I've appreciated without liking them much. I worked hard to appreciate this novel, and got good results.