We Eat Our Existences

The Garden of Eden has Adam provided with food, and supplied as well with an "occupation," if one might call it that--to tend the Garden.  (Presumably Adam's work was not particularly taxing.)

The vision that Jesus supplies of paradise includes a great feast (and not much else described in specific.)

Bodily sustenance, rather than being risen above in any vision of humanity in a blessed state, is presented not merely as an aspect of the longed-for existence, but as its most powerful and plentifully-described aspect.  Why?

Or perhaps the better question might be, Why do we not seize upon the biblical descriptions of bodily sustenance as a collective key to understanding the Scriptures?  After all, the notion of obtaining food--and more importantly, the notion of sharing food and/or procuring it for others--are only reduced to minor parts of human existence if we choose to view them so.

It is true that Jesus tells us that life is more than food, but here again the matter of proportion is what governs--life may be more than food, but life itself is (in Jesus' construction) a minor part itself of overall existence.  What matters to Jesus is how one lives, and in this regard life is to be lived simply and humbly.  We have little to possess and little to give, and in this context the basics of sustenance become a large part indeed of the business of life.

People who have the leisure to conjecture about the meaning of the Scriptures are usually people who are at least somewhat shielded from the dire concerns of mundane existence that plague the truly poor.  And yet many people, even if thought a small portion of humanity, are nearly as bound up by moment-to-moment questions of survival as were the animals presented to Adam in the Garden.  If questions of proportionality are exercised vigorously, one might well wonder if "humanity" proper does not consist of the desperately poor, scarcely distinguishable now from the soil-scratching grandchildren of Adam, while that admittedly large proportion of modern humanity who know relative comfort are the analogues of the "mighty men" of old, or even of the "sons of God" or the Melchizedek-like divines of anomalous stature that lorded it over the most ancient peoples.

If we remember what a large part is played in earthly existence by bodily sustenance--that is, if we refrain from thinking ourselves as elevated in considering food and drink minor concerns--then we can come to an entirely new conception of the proper relationship of humanity to God.  Adam's "food" was the totality of provision he obtained from God.  The "food" of the blessed feast foretold by Jesus is the totality of provision to the elect.  And the "food" of the mortal human is the totality of earthly provision we enjoy because of the sufferings of Jesus in Creation.  In this light the idea of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus is not merely apt, it is inescapable.  Our "food" is the sustenance provided to us in all regards by Jesus, much as Jesus has "food you know not of" from his Father.

As regards the theme of this blog, "roused, readied, reaped" is not merely a persistent stream of continual, overlapping, and differently-sized arcs of experience, it is also (if properly viewed) a cascade of cycles of "provision and procurement" of the means of life--the faded offspring of the great initial process of Eden, in which Adam was given all he could want, and that included an untiring and unfailing occupation of training up and plucking that bounty.  For us, the bounty is less, and the effort is greater, but the hoped-for blessed state in the end is the same.

The upshot of all of this for salvation is to be found in the implications of "provision and procurement."  When we remember what food and drink mean to this or that person--the "poor" who we will always have with us and who we seem intent on making sure we have with us--who are trying for one more moment of life and who in such moment might find salvation, then we can no longer look with disdain on what we so often deride as "consumption."  "Consume" as the generalized notion of "eat" is what we do in life.  We are blessed by God with natural resources and with means to obtain those resources--that is, "provision and procurement"--that is, more pointedly, "consumption"--that is, more pointedly yet, "eating."  We eat our existences.

It is often said that we should eat to live, not live to eat.  Nonsense.  As an example, "living," for us mortals, cannot be understood but as traveling through time, yet our conceptions of time are phantasms.  No one knows if time--that is, time containing any points of reference describable as elements of our lives--will continue beyond any moment.  For all we might refuse to admit it, the "future" might as well be seen as a blank grey wall that could manifest itself against us at any moment--the past is no guarantee of the future.  In effect, though, we treat the future (if we are honest enough to admit that it possesses for us no guarantee) not as a blank grey wall, but as a mirror.  Possessed of no necessary qualities, the future must then have ascribed to it the qualities we have known.  The future must be mirrored--if only approximately--by the past, if we are to conceive of the future at all.

We provide to the future a set of anticipated qualities that we extract from the experiences that have been provided for us.  We draw from the future a set of expectations that we procure from the stores of experiences we have had.  We, in our conceits, place the future before us as something by which we will be sustained--even if we are only to be sustained in a framework of familiar experiences in which we might meet the new, the challenging, the risky, even the fatal.  The future might kill us, but we approach the future as a resource that will sustain us.  We consume the future.

We consume time.  We consume space.  We consume each other.  We live to eat, because that is what living is.  When we live we consume the Savior whose sacrifice for us was always implicit in human existence--it is the understanding of this that is the substance (consumed, intellectually, as well) of the ritual.  We all must eat, but only rarely do we eat with the proper notion of what we are doing, just as anyone feeling penitent could bow underneath John's baptism, but only a few would grasp that they were under the ministrations of Elijah.