Thursday, 19 March 2009

• Do You Pray Like Your Local McDonald's?

   by mr maple
  
  

  
  

  
  This is a doctored version of a famous manuscript:
  
  Many people never learned how to pray, an equal number believe they don't have the time, and some define praying as something to do before heating up frozen food in a microwave oven. Much of this stems from the fact that many members of the last couple of generations - myself included - did not grow up witnessing their mothers carrying on the traditions of their grandmothers...For all but the poorest of American Christians, there remains an embarrassment of riches when it comes to prayer.  We scorn morning devotions, derive our prayers from prerecorded songs - even secular ones! - recite laundry lists, and rely heavily on formulaic requests for success.  Yet although we may gain marginal amounts of time by doing these things, we lose the delights of praying earnestly, the wonders of creative expression through prayer, the pleasures of time spent in the honest pursuit of God and the nourishment of our souls and those of our family.
  
  In case you didn't recognize the passage, it's [heavily] edited from Mark Bittman's seminal book, How to Cook Everything (the original passage can be found below and the book is one of my new favorites!)  The passage struck me heavily because of its profoundly simple description of how American contemporary culture has evolved over the past several decades.  Such insight into the pitfalls of convenience-driven access to food (and God) goes a long way in explaining the obesity of our bodies and the atrophy of our spirits.
  
  We pray vague and "safe" prayers, asking for general goodness in our lives and making it easy for God (or chance) to fulfill them.  We are willing to take a vague answer that assuages the doubts in our faith instead of taking the chance to ask for something we might not get or that risks challenging what we believe.  We are afraid to ask for things that will demand radical change in our own lives, things that criticize our complacent tendencies towards comfort, wealth, and security.  We pray before we eat or travel in the same way we knock on wood: actions that amount to little more than superstition.  We confuse liturgy for superficiality and mistake sincerity for legitimacy.  Our most intense periods of prayer are usually music-driven and emotionally preprogrammed: a pre-defined vocabulary of praise songs that serves good but limited purposes, often leaving us dependent on memorized lyrics and inexperienced in formulating specific, detailed, and eloquent requests for the complex issues in our own lives.
  
  In the end, our prayers are often like our foods: intense but not intricate, addictive but intermittent, appealing but anemic, fast but not fulfilling.
  
  Do you allow convenience to dictate your prayer life?
  
  And the original passage:
  As far as I'm concerned, convenience is one of the two dirty words of American cooking, reflecting the part of our national character that is easily bored; the other is "gourmet." Convenience foods demonstrate our supposed disdain for the routine and the mundane: "I don't have time to cook." The gourmet phase, which peaked in the eighties, when food was seen as art, showed our ability to obsess about aspects of daily life that most other cultures take for granted.  You might only cook once a week, but wow, what a meal. Both of these tendencies are the enemies of good everyday cooking, one of the few simple, routine joys of daily life. The irony is that most "gourmet" foods and many "convenience" foods are equally difficult to prepare from scratch. Can you imagine what it takes to duplicate a Chicken McNugget with Sweet and Sour Sauce?...Many people never learned how to cook, an equal number believe they don't have the time, and some define cooking as heating up frozen food in a microwave oven. Much of this stems from the fact that many members of the last couple of generations - myself included - did not grow up witnessing their mothers carrying on the traditions of their grandmothers...For all but the poorest of Americans, there remains an embarrassment of riches when it comes to food.  We are able to scorn leftovers, to buy almost every food preprepared - even salad! - to eat out daily, to rely heavily on frozen foods.  Yet although we may gain marginal amounts of time by doing these things, we lose the delights of working in the kitchen, the wonders of creation, the pleasures of time spent in the honest pursuit of tradition and the nourishment of our bodies and those of our family.
  

  • 1:23 PM
  • 927 Views
  • 20 eProps
  • 8 Comments