Smells and Bells

Most of the readings and class discussion from this week were about one concept -- God tasting sweet. This correlation of God with sweetness and sweetness with good can strike us, with our modern understanding of sugars and calories, as strange. Sweet, to us, doesn't have the same associations as it would have had a few centuries ago. As understanding of our perceptions is filtered through experience, we now associate sweet with "junk food," with artificial sweeteners, diabetes and obesity. We now understand too much sweetness as a negative thing, something that leaves us feeling queasy and bloated. As Rachel Fulton tells us, this helps explain why modern translations of many of the medieval texts she deals with choose to translate the repeated words for sweet as other words, such as "dulcet" or "mellifluous," because modern readers would would react negatively to what they call "an untruthful impression of saccharinity" (180). In add...

Enduring God through food is a multi-sensory experience that brings near what is sensed from afar. Specifically, eating, in a religious context, involves internalizing God, a being whose home is heaven, an entity that surrounds us and extends into the universe. When speaking of this class, it may be easy to wrongly associate good tasting food with good, positive experiences. While there is a sort of network association between eating something delicious and feeling good, there could also be positive effects of bitter flavors. There could be some sweets, like the cuban, "pastelito de guayaba y queso," that are not appealing to all people. The desire or aversion to the flavor is unique to each individual-- as is each person's positive and negative life experiences. Sometimes life is bitter and other times life is sweet. "Hillel's Sandwich," served each Passover Seder, sends us a simple religious message: approach all hardships in life with positi...

People claim to have heard God’s voice, even see Him. People feel God’s presence. It is the rare person indeed who claims to have tasted or smelled God. However, as Rachael Fulton suggests in her writing of The Flavor of God in the Monastic West, taste is vital. She states that “reading texts and looking at images may transform us intellectually, emotionally, or even spiritually, but eating food   This difference is thought to be due to all of the slight variations and meanings of words, but this book really looks into those that believed they truly experienced the taste of God. might poison us…” (173). The most repeated quote in the reading was “’Taste and see that the Lord is sweet’” (Ps 34:8), which in many other translations is translated to be “Taste and see that the Lord is good”. One example came from Beguinages and convents of northern Germany, most famously thirteenth-century Gertrude of Helfta. I found her descriptions to be frankly shocking. I quote ...

The Fulton piece we read for Tuesday, and even the translations we read for today's class, really had me thinking about a class I took last year, "Demons, Melancholy and Madness." During a particular section of the course we talked about monastic life, and religious experiences described within them. I didn't realize how much the five senses played a part in these experiences until now, which I find very fascinating. This is Saint Anthony of Egypt. We studied him extensively in this religion class on demons. He's considered the Father of Christian Monks because his life was written down by the Greek writer Athansius around 360 CE and many monks took after his example in terms of fasting and other monastic traditions. In a particular section of "The Life of Anthony," he is tempted by Satan a number of times while he is fasting in the Egyptian desert. There are a number of sensory components to this story. There have been many, many artistic interpreta...

During Rachel Herz talk on Thursday I kept thinking of my cousin Steph. I found out a few years ago that she cant smell but I had never thought to ask her about it. Like many people I assumed losing your sense of smell wouldn't be that big of a deal. After class I decided I would interview her to see what it is like.  I didn't know if she had absolutely no sense of smell so I started out the conversation with food. Can you taste anything past salty, sweet and sour? "No I cant really. When people have really intense reactions I get the most sad about not being able to smell. I kinda live through their reactions to the food." When did you know that you couldn't smell? "At a young age, maybe seven. Everyone would describe certain things as smelling like chocolate or tomato sauce, and I would kinda just go along with it. My parents took me in the doctors and they thought that I was making it up. They issued me a scratch and sniff test and found out that I...

My divine encounter with food….                                                                                                                                     https://everythingburger.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/burger-337-donut/ As we began to discuss taste and medieval rituals I could feel my stomach begin to grumble, the mere mention of chocolate, and bacon made my mouth water. I like to consider myself as a pretty big foodie, but never did I expect to associate God with a particular taste. I had never really thought about how many divine revelations dealt with food, or the various mixed metaphors the bible uses to discuss God that include taste. My hunge...