HOME
SUNDAY SCHEDULE
NEWSLETTER
CALENDAR
DIRECTIONS
LEADERSHIP
PROGRAMS
OUR BELIEFS
SERMONS
ABOUT US
CONTACT US

We are on the cusp of a special season. It comes every year. The newspaper announces it. The new books in the bookstore describe how to do it new this year and differently and in what trendy manner. I am referring of course, to the “holiday baking season.”

I don’t know about you, but I remember being a kid making Christmas cookies with my mother. Cookies in the shapes of Christmas trees or ornaments or bells or horns. We’d make sugar cookies, rum balls, and three different kinds of fudge. And we’d eat so much we’d get headaches.

There would be leftovers for at least a week. And my relatives always had strange food that only they would make: sweet breads, sugary confections from an ethnic bakery. My grandmother made mincemeat pies. She never could explain just what mincemeat was in a way I could understand. And I loved strawberry rhubarb pie, but what the heck was a rhubarb?

But gluttony comes early. Those of us with children can recall the endless negotiations & diplomacy that children use when trying to divide candy or dessert, we can see gluttony at work, the fights & tears over who gets the bigger piece. With the wisdom of Solomon we tell one child to cut in half and the other gets to choose and we can see the agonizing indecision there about how to cut it just so. Parental wisdom isn’t always welcome.

I used to bake a good deal, back when I weighed a lot more than I do now. I loved bread so much I had two bread machines. In fact, I still do, even though I haven’t made bread in a year. I can make 4 different kinds of rye bread, and a half dozen others: carrot bread, banana bread, and exotic breads from specialty flour.

I used to bake cookies and brownies, and my special favorite - pies. A man can bake pies, it isn’t girly, like cake is.

At holidays, we had too many sweets, and we ate too greedily & too soon. We always had too many left overs, and what are you going to do– throw them out? There are starving children in China, we were told. Although my parents never did seem to send the leftovers to China, so I didn’t really understand how that was supposed to be motivational.

It’s the same curse with Halloween. You want to have enough for the trick or treaters, but what happens when it rains on Halloween night and now you’re stuck with a couple of 24 packs of Reese’s chocolate? It would be wasteful to throw them away, right? Better to be a glutton?

What’s gluttony? Too much food & drink. According to Pope Gregory the Great– who is the one who gave us the list of the seven deadly sins, here are the five ways gluttony reveals itself: Too soon, too delicately, too expensively, too greedily, too much.

The medieval monks took gluttony quite seriously. The fourth Century Evagrius of Pontus wrote:

Gluttony is the mother of lust, the nourishment of evil thoughts, laziness in fasting, obstacle to asceticism, terror to moral purpose, the imagining of food, sketcher of seasonings, unrestrained colt, unbridled frenzy, receptacle of disease, envy of health, obstruction of the (bodily) passages, groaning of the bowels, the extreme of outrages, confederate of lust, pollution of the intellect, weakness of the body, difficult sleep, gloomy death (10).

There isn’t that much in the bible about gluttony. Just the reading we heard from Deuteronomy and Jesus saying that we are not defiled by what goes in us, but by what comes out.

So this begs the question of why gluttony is a deadly sin. After all, the only person it seems to hurt is the glutton. We know the side effects of anger and pride cause murder and war, so why is gluttony ranked up there?

Perhaps one reason is that gluttony was often associated with lust. In his Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis said: “when the belly is full to bursting with food and drink, debauchery knocks at the door.”

Another theory is that the problem of gluttony was a serious one for monks and priests in the medieval era. Apparently, there were a lot of fat priests who were supposed to be celibate. It was thought that overeating and over-drinking could easily lead to lust. Saint Basil put it this way:

“through the sense of touch in tasting– which is always seducing toward gluttony by swallowing,/ the body, fattened up and titillated by the soft humors bubbling uncontrollably inside,/ is carried in a frenzy towards the touch of sexual intercourse (14).”

They really knew how to preach in those days!

My first experience with those who are overzealous when it comes to punishing gluttons was as an adolescent with my best friend’s parents. The summer I was 17 years old, my best friend Skot and I hitchhiked all across the country. We started from our homes in Maryland, went down to New Orleans, all the way across Texas, then up North, and finally ended up in Michigan. We had been hitchhiking for three weeks.

We ended up at his family’s vacation spot near Lake Michigan. We were going to a UU youth conference in a week, that was a half day’s drive away from his parent’s vacation place.

Some families had a bare spot of ground and a driveway and they pitched a tent for a couple weeks in the summer, others had a rough cabin, others a fully furnished house. Skot’s family had a wooden platform where they pitched a tent, an electric lantern, a radio, and a refrigerator.

A few days after Skot and I arrived, the rest of his family made the two day drive from Maryland. They arrived with food for the fridge, and I stayed with them for a couple days.

One day we were very hungry. And the deal was that we were going out to dinner that night. It took a while to get his family into the station wagon. It took a while to get to the pizza place. It was a bit of a drive. I hadn’t eaten that much that day. I was a very hungry, skinny 17 year old. Naturally, Skot’s parents were buying.

Skot’s mom & dad, Lorraine & Bob, his two sisters, and his little brother shared a couple medium pizzas. Skot and I ordered a large pepperoni for just the two of us. We ate the whole thing. Well, the whole thing except two pieces. We were scolded by Skot’s mom for ordering such a big pizza in the first place– we had been greedy, and now we hadn’t even finished! Sacrilege.

I offered to bring the last two pieces back to the platform shack for eating later, but Skot’s mom, Lorraine, wouldn’t hear of it. Skot managed to eat one more piece but turned a little green. I declined to eat the last piece because I was stuffed, and I figured his mom would get over what was ailing her– the vehemence of her complaint made no sense to me.

All 7 of us got back in the old station wagon. Skot’s mom and dad in the front seat; me, Skot, his sister and me in the middle bench seat; another sister and the younger brother in the back; and we began the long ride home.

After a couple minutes, Skot’s mom started complaining and chewing us out again for being so greedy and wasting that food. Skot said nothing. I reminded her I had offered to bring the food back.

She said “Shut up! Children should be seen and not heard.” I had a hard time remembering this woman went to our UU church and sang in the choir. I felt she was losing it, whatever “it” was. One of her daughters complained she was being too harsh. That was it.

“Bob, pull over, he’s got to get out.” “Me? I said, incredulously.” “Yes, you. You have to leave our property and go back home.” “Now, Lorraine,” Bob said. But Lorraine started tugging on her door handle like she was going to jump out of the car at 55 miles per hour.

So, Bob pulled over in silence and I got out of the car. It took me an hour to walk back to their platform near the Lake.

Did Lorraine really think I’d just hop on a bus and go home that very night? I slept in the woods. They left the next day, taking Skot back to Maryland. I noticed they left the refrigerator on their platform about half full. I ate pretty well the next couple of days.

Of course there have been times when I really was a glutton. If I was in a mental mode of “scarcity,” if I thought the food was about to run out, I thought I’d better move fast to get the last piece of strawberry-rhubarb pie.

Even as adults, I’m sure we can remember an incident or two in our past when we really enjoyed what we were eating, and so– we just kept going. Or we really enjoyed what we were drinking, and just kept going. “Too much of a good thing– is wonderful” is a saying attributed to Mae West.

I think a more UU view of gluttony can be found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics:

Drink or food that is above or below a certain amount destroys the health, while that which is proportionate both produces and increases and preserves it. So too is it [with] other virtues.

We’re barraged with reminders that overeating is unhealthy, that a poor diet is one of the major contributing factors to a whole range of diseases. And if we pay attention to the news at all, we know that

“Studies show individuals who are overweight or obese run a greater risk of developing diabetes, hypertension, coronary heart disease, stroke, arthritis, and some forms of cancer.” Microsoft ® Encarta ® Reference Library 2005. © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

As Francine Prose puts it in her book entitled Gluttony:

“We know what our grandparents didn’t know– about the horrors of cholesterol, the perils of red meat, the liver-destroying effects of [alcohol], the artery-clogging power of the foods that are most delicious.

“Our obsession with living forever means that we are doubly affronted by the spectacle of the obese, whose flesh seems to be making a statement that the pleasures of the moment have been chosen over the promise of longevity. Doesn’t that fat man want to live?

“The so-called glutton is a walking rebuke to our self-control, our self-denial, and to our shaky faith that if we watch ourselves, if we do this and don’t do that, then surely death cannot touch us (58).”

Prose says: Our

“impossible hope that diet and exercise will enable us to live forever have demonized eating in general and overeating in particular. Health consciousness and a culture fixated on death have transformed gluttony from a sin that leads to other sins into an illness that leads to other illnesses.” (4).

Social notions of attractiveness have made thin “in” and fat “out” and gluttony “the sin” that sent people to hell in the hereafter becomes: pity, contempt, and distaste.

The idea that over-eating is a psychological disorder has replaced the idea that it is somehow a huge offense against Divine Providence. Instead of loving the sinner and hating the sin, we can feel sorry for the glutton.

Part of the situation may be that the effects of gluttony are more easily seen than the effects of sloth or pride. We can always change our mask in public, but if you’re a serious glutton, it’s pretty hard to hide.

Society wants to sell it to us both ways– we are encouraged to be gluttons by the food industry, and we are encouraged to be thin by the diet industry.

Despite all the best selling diet books in the bookstore and on TV and in magazines, there is also the talk of the trendiest restaurant and the newest exotic ingredient. Remember when arugula was the new lettuce? And chipotle became the new ranch dressing?

What we get is the idea of thin, rich, young people eating tiny portions at trendy restaurants. Over-attention to delicacies is part of gluttony.

Go to any bookstore and you’ll see two huge sections– one of cookbooks, the other on dieting. Of all the seven deadly sins, gluttony gets the most money made off of it– on both ends, so to speak.

There is the public health issue– obesity is about to overtake smoking as the number 1 cause of preventable death. That’s significant. So is the number of overweight children in our schools. So lots of time and money is spent combating the effects of gluttony.

We become gluttonous or severely overweight partly because of temptation, and partly because we are genetically predisposed to be as large as possible as a survival mechanism.

There are plenty of cases where people say or admit they use food to compensate for a lack of love or for dealing with anxiety. There are also plenty of cases where medical or biological effects can make being overweight “normal” for a particular person. Just this week, I read in the Post-Dispatch that a team of researchers at Washington University discovered that normal intestinal bacteria “help unlock a gate that allows fat to enter cells for storage.”

Weight and diet have different social consequences for women than for men. There are far more web sites, books, magazines, and other media directed toward women and dieting than for men. For one thing, a “stout” man is more socially acceptable than a “fat” woman.

This week, they had these manly men on the TV show Oprah, a show that is usually on at the YMCA when I go to work out. These guys all pretended to be women for a week. They wore dresses, make up, high heels, lipstick, wigs, you name it. They went out in public quite a bit to see if they could fool people in the street.

One man who was rather large got teary talking about how– when he and the guys were out in public, dressed as women– people studiously avoided eye contact with him, even as they might have glanced appreciatively at the others. He was ignored as a large woman in ways he was not ignored as a large man. He felt a strange sort of humiliation. He understood in a new way what it might be like to be a fat woman in our culture versus a fat man.

I’ve known plenty of women with eating disorders. I’ve only known one man with an eating disorder.

I have had the experience of eating with all men at a table and the more frequent experience of eating with all women at the table. And I have to tell you the two experiences are like day and night. The men simply eat or maybe make a comment or two, that’s it.

The women I am thinking of– and it is no one in this room!– seem to want to know what everyone is eating, in what detail, they make appreciative coos and caws. They insist on knowing what’s on my plate and how much and whether it is any good or not, and on and on and on. I suppose it must be genetic or socialized early on.

The aunts in my family make a big deal– a ritual of food preparation, of exactly how food gets to the table– and there is a much greater insistence on everyone beginning to eat simultaneously, no matter that this means getting 14 children aged 3 months to 8 years and 27 adults aged 18 to 92 simultaneously seated, and ready to go.

And it is better that the carefully cooked food go cold than– God Forbid!– someone should dare to eat while the food is hot. But we all put up with it because we love each other– or try to– and because it has been handed down from time immemorial, and go sit down and behave, why don’t you? And so on. I have found the only solution to the tyranny of the cooks, is to become a cook yourself.

Most who write about obesity or gluttony do not write about the pleasures of food. The food writer MFK Fisher talks about her indulgences:

“As often as possible, when a really beautiful bottle is before me, I drink all I can of it, even when I know I have had more than I want physically. That is gluttonous. But I think to myself, when again will I have this taste upon my tongue. Where else in the world is there just such wine as this, with just this bouquet, at just this heat, in just this crystal cup. And when again will I be alive to it as I am this very minute, sitting here on a green hillside above the sea, or here in this dim, murmuring, richly odorous restaurant (MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating (New York: Vintage, 1976, p613).

There is something about a hearty appetite for life that is appealing. There is something appealing about imagining or actually sitting there on a “ green hillside above the sea” with a friend and a glass of wine or talking with your lover & drinking a whole bottle of wine in a “dim, murmuring, richly odorous restaurant.” For life is short, death is long, and shouldn’t we reach for such experiences when we can? Even moderation should be taken in moderation, right?

In this holiday season of food and drink which is often too soon, too delicately, too expensively, too greedily, too much, let us be mindful of moderation but not so mindful as to stress ourselves out unduly. For refusing joy is itself a form of blasphemy.

The truth of the matter is that you can eat right, drink your bottled water, take your vitamins, get plenty of sleep, and still get hit by a bus. Looking out the windows at your tragically broken body will be a bunch of gluttons who didn't think twice about eating that chocolate chip cookie.

The holiday baking season is upon us, and despite the lure of cookbooks and stern warnings of diet books, UUs should find a balance between gluttonous splurging & puritanical primness. Let us recall some wisdom from the ancient Chinese: hunger is the best sauce and dining with friends the best spice.

The opposite of the word gluttony is abstemious. It means: “not indulging in excessive eating or drinking.” We began this morning singing ‘Tis A Gift to be Simple, a hymn from the abstemious Shakers. So let us now conclude with an invitation to friend and strangers to join us at the Welcome Table.

We’re Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table, #407

Benediction

 Home   Sunday Schedule   Newsletter   Calendar   Directions   Leadership   Programs   Our Beliefs   Sermons   About Us   Contact Us