2010-04-11 06:30:55

KEEPING THE FEAST: Have You Had A Bad Year? Here’s A Belated Easter Homily Just For You

Filed under: Europe, Faith, Featured, Food, Paula Butturini
Posted by: John

by JOHN MARKS

Have you had a rough time between Easter or Passover 2009 and 2010? Did you lose a house? A marriage? A loved one?

I’m not a believer in any of the world’s great faiths, as visitors to this site know, but I do appreciate the ancient wisdom that sometimes comes from the churches, synagogues, mosques and temples of the world, and this season I’ve been thinking, in particular, about the wisdom that comes from suffering.

Last week. on Easter itself, I wrote a piece about the sexual abuse of children by priests and what the Pope should do about it, not the most comforting message. This week, to make sOME amends for the timing of that essay, I offer up something from an unexpected source, an Easter vigil homily given by Father John Marsland, President of Ushaw College, the oldest operating Catholic seminary in England.

But let me go back a step. A few weeks ago, we featured an interview with a writer named Paula Butturini on the occasion of the publication of her wonderful new book Keeping the Feast: One Couples Story Of Love, Healing And Food In Italy. Since we ran the interview, Keeping The Feast has been praised by The New York Times, featured on National Public Radio and singled out in an especially memorable fashion in the following homily.

The Times reviewer described the book as“blunt and brave”. People Magazine called it, “a reminder that food sustains not only bodies but souls as well. And The National Catholic Reporter had this to say: “This is not a religious self-help book or one that offers easy-to-use formulas about overcoming life’s difficulties. It is far deeper than that. It is about the tough slog that love sometimes becomes, and it is about the power of a table and good food to connect us with the history and the lives that have brought us to the present as well as with each other. It is about healing.”

As the reviews suggest, it’s a remarkably rich work. For people struggling with clinical depression, or psychiatrists working with patients, it’s a case study written like a novel. That’s not just blarney. Butturini will speak to a gathering of Yale psychiatrists later this year. For lovers of food, it’s a loose cookbook. For anyone who has ever just barely made it through an extended calamity, it’s a survival guide. For readers of Peter Blackstock’s music column, it might be thought of in terms of a crossover radio hit, its appeal steeped in the sorrow and redemption of blues, country, pop and gospel.

For all these reasons, I couldn’t resist running this homily. From our atheists, agnostics and skeptics, I beg a little indulgence. For what it’s worth, for our religious readers, I extend this belated peace offering.

Homily for Easter Vigil 2010

What a feast of symbols and words of love and light.
.
What a journey we have come on …..from the fire of God’s eternal love in the darkness, accompanying the Easter candle symbol of Christ, the light of the world, we have walked with God’s people through the Red Sea as they passed from slavery to freedom, we have listened to the voice of the prophets through the ages pointing to the moment when God himself would act to reconfigure the hearts of his children and raise the world up in a new kind of birth.

We have sung our Exultet, our Gloria and our Alleluia.

Then came the Gospel. We would expect to meet the Risen Christ but Jesus does not appear. There is no story of him arising to a trumpet call and a ringing of bells, there is no description of him going say to the temple and shouting “Here I am, look I am alive” or visiting the high priest and saying “See how wrong you were!” or back to Pilate and asking “Who’s a friend of Caesar now?”.

What do we have? Women puzzling over an empty tomb, being terrified, searching their memories at the prompting of the angels. We have the apostles and others (whoever they are) thinking its all nonsense, Peter running off and seeing –an empty tomb and being amazed.

What’s going on? How come they are not all singing Alleluia?

Note however the words at the beginning of St. Luke’s account of that first Easter morning: at the first sign of dawn. That’s what we have. The first sign of dawn.

The fact is: Resurrection dawns slowly. Its like a feast being slowly lovingly prepared. And we have just arrived deliciously but delicately at the starter.

The image comes to mind because I have just finished reading a book called: “Keeping the Feast” by a friend of mine Paula Butturini.

I knew her and her husband John in Rome but I had no idea of their story till I read the book.

The story is of a slow resurrection. A few weeks after they were married John was shot in Romania during the revolution at the end of Chwciesku’s regime. Badly injured and just escaped with his life. Descended into a terrible depression. Two years of intense struggle.
Daughter traumatised by witnessing her father’s depression and saying “My Daddy has gone and there is a fake daddy there instead.” And asking “Is my daddy going to kill himself”.

It was food, friendship and faith that won the battle. Food representing the continuous celebration of ordinary life prepared with constant love. Friendship from their close circle and from strangers alike giving words of comfort, encouragement and wisdom. Faith expressed at times in a scream of anger and frustration at God. Resurrection dawned slowly almost imperceptibly.

Resurrection is the lifting of life to how it should be lived. It is the introduction of a new ingredient into the recipe of life.

Tonight each of us is invited to “keep the feast” – celebrate the ordinary good things in our life with greater intensity and awareness, the food we eat, the friends and family around us, the God who loves us.
The feast cooks slowly but we can rejoice in the process.

It is not till Pentecost after several appearances and teachings that the sun of truth truly lights the hearts of Jesus’ disciples or maybe Peter only truly knew it when he himself gave his life.

The power of Christ’s resurrection is still dawning in our world. We are part of the struggle to raise it out of its depression, its tendency to self-destruction. It seems like a fake world that has been substituted for the real one. By our continuous, faithful celebration of life it becomes more and more its true self.

The book end with the preparation of a plate of spaghetti vongole (with clams and garlic and peperoncino and parsley). Paula writes:
“The three of us will be quiet for a moment or two as we twirl our spaghetti into the first neat forkfuls that we lift to our mouths. We will chew that first bite hungrily and perhaps, if I have hit all the measurements right, give a tiny sigh of delight. Then already heartened, we will start to talk and laugh and eat in earnest, keeping the feast that we are meant to keep. The feast that is our life.”

Happy Easter everyone. Keep the Feast.

Comments (1)

1 Comment »

1. John–thank you for this. I’m off in a moment to order Paula Butturini’s book.

   But I did want to say–I have no problem with your holding the church’s feet to the fire (so to speak). If we do not live the love and hope we proclaim, there is no good in us, and we need to be called out as frauds.

   Peace to you and yours,
   Doxy

   Comment by Doxy — April 13, 2010 @ 5:23 am

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