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No fast-food fix for faith
Reflections
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| By KAREN OSBORNE
14 January, 2007 |
Life has been hectic, so more than once this month I found myself careening down the freeway, left hand on the steering wheel and right hand catching chips to stuff into my mouth just to calm a rolling stomach that usually hasn’t been fed all day. I’m hungry!
Hunger doesn’t exist only on the physical plane, though. I hear people talk about having a “spiritual hunger” all the time. Spiritual hunger, the human need to believe, to reach toward something greater, to strive toward God, is something many different faiths agree upon.
But it isn’t always easy these days to satisfy that hunger, especially with this world’s “fast food” attitudes toward spirituality.
For example, going to church to “git’r done” or getting slightly annoyed when our prayers don’t go “our way right away.”
As I find on my busiest days, fast food provides the necessary calories, carbohydrates and proteins your body needs to keep running. But it does little else. Fast food satisfied my exterior hunger, the rumbling of my stomach, for example, but it didn’t do anything for my other needs: to be together with people, to have an experience at the table, to do something more than just “get it done.”
One of my favorite recipes is for samosas, spicy Indian dumplings. It takes me three hours to craft a whole batch from two cups of flour, eight potatoes and a list of spices as long as my right arm. It’s the absolute opposite of fast food: Each dumpling must be crafted individually. It’s an amazing experience.
Faith is meant to be a challenge as well as a comfort and a star to reach for as well as a foundation to start from. Faith is meant to be worked on, kneaded and carefully attended to, like a homemade samosa. It is not meant to be thrown together, nuked quickly and deposited with little ceremony in a brown paper bag for you to consume in the car on the way to your next appointment.
Some of my most affecting faith experiences were in places as varied as a Catholic youth conference with 20,000 teens screaming Jesus’ name to a backdrop of loud guitars, to a quiet Wednesday night Mass in a universty chapel attended by seven other students.
One thing was the same between them: They were full of good, healthy “faith calories” and low on fat and filler.
How can we differentiate fatty, empty fast-food faith from the “good stuff”?
Good faith experiences, according to theologian Marva Dawn, transform instead of entertain; they challenge instead of telling you what you already know; they focus on the betterment of others instead of wholly on the self; they use symbols instead of fame and “the new.”
Good faith experiences are pursued “with deliberation” instead of simply to “kill time.” It is like sitting in the kitchen pounding dough and creating a healthy concoction instead of stopping at the drive-through. It is taking time to read and understand instead of simply sitting back and letting words fill you like television. It is getting involved instead of getting entertained.
We often make a conscious choice to purchase fast food over a home-cooked meal if we’re strapped for time or just feel like a quick burger. But everybody knows that eating every single meal at McDonalds is bad for you; there’s no way a steady, unrelenting diet of fast food can promote good growth and development.
But how much of our spiritual life is the equivalent? How many times do we make a conscious choice for fast-food faith?
It’s something to chew on.
Karen Osborne is a CNS columnist.
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