The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
May 4, 2008
Vol. 11 no. 17

Everything But...
           Food and puns go together, at least in the way I eat and speak. Yesterday, both came together in an odd setting and both puns and food had to do with the Christian faith, so I guess it was a holy mess.
           For over a year, Dave Michelson, a young Princeton Ph.D, and I have been planning a small conference on my favourite guy, Philoxenus of Mabbug, held yesterday at the Center of Theological Inquiry with 5 speakers from 5 countries (US, Canada, UK, Romania and Germany) with about 25 in attendance. When you play with words, we couldn’t resist: we advertized this event as the Philoxenus Phest. But we were not phinished.
           Philoxenus, a Syrian Orthodox bishop, preached long sermons to monks, first about nice things - faith, simplicity, the fear of God, then the renunciation of the world. Once he gets down to the matter at hand he rails for two sermons, 100+ pages, about the evils of gluttony - literally, the lust of the belly - which he identifies and explains is the beginning of all sin. When our notice of the conference was posted on several websites, a few shrewd and amused observers wrote back about my presentation on “The Lust of the Belly is the beginning of all sin,” followed by a tea break and then dinner at a local restaurant. Were we really going to eat sumptuously after such a stern message of monastic abstinence? Darn tooting, we did!
           Philoxenus was actually all for food, the right kind, and not the Atkins Diet. His model was Daniel and the three young men who were adopted into the Persian court to be raised up in style. Offered the best foods, they secretly abstained, eating only plain Hebrew food and ending up more physically and mentally fit than anyone in the Persian royal household - and they could see visions of angels. You are what you eat.