I saw a comment on the front page of this week's Sunday /New York
Times/ that gave me the burbling glurps at the coffeehouse this a.m.
Linda Creager, a church outreach worker from Birmingham, Alabama, was
quoted in a piece on the benefits of extended fasting, and described
her experience of a 40-day fast:
"After four or five days, I didn't even want food. I could really
see how great it's going to be when we don't have to eat anymore,
when we get to heaven."
Is this inconsistent coming from a person whose embodied deity
(she's a Christian) spent a lot of his time involved in food-related
activity--meals, feasts, feeding crowds, winemaking, fishing,
etc.???
Later the piece quoted Campus Crusade for Christ prez Bill Bright:
"Fasting and prayer is [sic] the atomic bomb or hydrogen bomb of the
Christian discipline."
For the past 10 or so years, I've fasted 16 hours per day to help my
body cope with environmental toxins, yet think of heaven more like
the 8 hours a day where my meals are. And often the sweaty work it
takes to put that food there. 'Course that may be religious
differences; my idea of heaven is we live there already; it's just
easy to forget, what with intellectual property lawyers and Spice
Girls ads and Windows 95 and people who cut motorcyclists off and
the Designated Hitter. And I pray pretty much continually, though it
has nothing to do with fission or fusion (fishin' sometimes, but only
in moments of weak faith in piscine ecology).
So if anybody has insights into this cultural phenom, where heaven is
a place where there ain't no food, and where a world-wide cultural
practice is likened to nuclear weapons, I sure would appreciate
hearing from you; privately, since this is kinda off topic for the
list.
Oh, the article said that many people who do religious fasts, do so
on Slim-Fast. :^| If I did that for 40 days, I'd be seeing Care
Bears in grass skirts and Tony Lamas dancing a Texas two-step with
Jimi Hendrix in the sky.
Yours in wonderment about what food means to people---
peace
misha
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Michele Gale-Sinex, communications manager
Center for Integrated Ag Systems
UW-Madison College of Ag and Life Sciences
Voice: (608) 262-8018 FAX: (608) 265-3020
http://www.wisc.edu/cias/
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
If you knew what life was worth, you
would look for yours on earth. --Bob Marley
To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with "unsubscribe sanet-mg".
To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"subscribe sanet-mg-digest".