French Fries, Lent and Natural Selection
March, 2010
French Fries, Lent and Natural Selection
When I was a child, the sixth of seven boys, I learned that if I wanted to get enough to eat, I would have to eat fast or I would starve! It was the process of natural selection at work, teaching me survival skills so that I would live to see my teenage years. The net result was I survived, but didn’t really taste my food. I gobbled it down to grab for that last morsel that one of my greedy grizzly bear brothers might have overlooked.
I’m not sure exactly when this survival lesson began to dawn on me. My guess is it was about the time my brother John was born. John is about two years younger than me. So there were two years when I had my mother’s full attention; two years when it was not survival of the fittest, quickest, or smartest; two years of emotional warmth and a plethora of whatever a Cajun-Italian mom gave her baby: Hot sausage links, fried catfish smothered with shrimp etouffee, and grits, lots and lots of grits!
But when I turned two and baby John came, all that changed. I was thrown into that brutal evolutionary process in which the search for food takes on life and death proportions. Let me illustrate this with a typical Sunday dinner at our home.
Mom would go to an early Mass so that she could begin frying the four chickens and 10 pounds of potatoes that would go with whatever green stuff and bread that accompanied the meal. There was “NO PICKING!” at Mom’s dinner table, no chance for a pre-emptive strike at the grub, so I knew, when dinner was served, I had to eat fast to have any chance at SECONDS!
“SECONDS” is heaven to the sixth son of seven boys, whose mother is distracted with the baby, making sure he gets everything he needs grow up to be big and strong and whose dad has his hands full insuring that the older boys did not stab, punch, pull, kick, and bite one another as they divided up the spoils. I am not exaggerating! One of my brothers bit his godfather on the leg when the older man was innocently drinking coffee with my parents. His scream brought on a 911 call, shots, stitches and years of therapy.
But back to Sunday dinner. There was no eating until grace was said; after that, natural selection and survival habits took over. I learned to grab for the food with both hands: one for the chicken and one for the French fries. (I have no memory of ever grabbing for a vegetable.) The problem with that method was I didn’t always get a good piece of chicken. If I happened to grab a wing all was lost, because I knew that any second chance at chicken would also be a wing. (Scientific studies have proven what everyone knows from experience; there is no meat on the wing of a chicken!)
There was no losing with grabbing for my mom’s homemade French fries; I always got a handful. But, at two years old, or three or four for that matter, I could not hold very many French fries in my tiny hands. I had to eat fast and grab for more. And that brings me to the point of this article;
I never really tasted my food.
Taste has nothing to do with the “natural selection” process in a home with one girl–Mom–and eight boys, including Dad.
A FULL BELLY WAS EVERYTHING!
Thankfully in this process there is something called “graduation and going to college.” In large Catholic and Mormon families, this ritual saves more young children from hunger than scholars are able to document. This was true for me.
And when my older brothers began to leave home for that mysterious savannah where a different sort of survival of the fittest exists, Mom began to notice my eating habits. “Whoa!!” she would say, “Slow down! At that rate you’ll never taste your food.”
“Taste?” I said, “Taste?” What a novel idea.
But I took her advice and began to eat more slowly. And something beautiful began to happen. I tasted my food!
I WAS REBORN, CONVERTED, AND FILLED WITH AMAZING GRACE…
and jambalaya, pasta, red beans and rice, and hot home-made bread, slowly and deliberately eaten! The flavors seemed so new, intense, and incredibly rich! I was going to survive after all! And with fewer animals, I mean brothers, at the trough, I really and truly tasted the food I ate for the first time since I was in diapers.
That brings me to Lent and the world of natural selection that we live in. The struggle to survive is so intense that few people really “taste” the amazing beauty, goodness, and joy that is life, even when it is difficult! Lent is the Church’s invitation to give up some of the nonsense, let go of the addictions, stop the self-centered busyness, and turn off the distractions that get in the way of living a full and happy life. St. Paul says that in death we take only three things to heaven, faith, hope, and love. These virtues are our way to God after death, and they are our way to God and a full life before death.
And if what we are doing for Lent — giving up chocolate, abstaining from meat, or donating to Operation Rice Bowl — does not expand our faith, hope, and love, then something is wrong. Maybe we are just doing “fast-food spirituality,” a form of natural selection that decreases the number of saints in the world, and increases the number of “spiritual Neanderthals!”
Our Lenten disciplines are meant to alter our “fast-food, tasteless” approach to life! It slows us down so that we can “taste” God in the midst of life with all of its incredible seasonings of joys and sorrows, deaths and resurrections. Through Lenten self-denial and sacrifice we rid ourselves of the spiritual junk food that clogs our veins, and prepares us to fully enjoy and savor the Easter feast.
So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13:13
CLM Update:
Mucho thanks for all of you who pray for and financially support CLM. Keep it up! Here’s what we are doing with your help!
Working with youth in Yakima, and on the Yakama Indian Reservation… I gave a talk to teens on Marriage and Human Sexuality (one out of three girls on the reservation become sexuality active at age 13, most often with older boys!)
Working with adults on the Yakama Indian Reservation… I’ve been attending a men’s support and prayer group and will be cooking dinner next week. I’m trying to build trust by becoming a part of their lives. We are talking about doing a men’s retreat and marriage workshop in the near future.
Strengthening marriages in Seattle… Here are some comments from our marriage workshops… “Great job! Imagine spending a day speaking with my spouse and loving it.” “WE NEEDED THIS YEARS AGO!” “You gave us a practical approach to speaking and listening.. GREAT Training!” “I have been to many of your talks, Robert, this one was the best I have ever heard!”
Teaching Confirmation classes and giving Confirmation Retreats… From “Light One Candle Christian, Illuminate the Darkness” here’s a comment from the parish youth minister: “I have been on many Confirmation retreats, some that I have given, and this is the best I have ever seen!”
