Sweetness and Healing

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When I was a little kid I was terrified of dogs. I was scared of all animals, really, but being debilitating afraid of a pet found in many houses and any park became a real challenge. My parents took me to some kind of doctor who told me to take medicine that came out of a blue tube as white little balls, I was to take two or three of these under my tongue every morning. To my great seven-year-old surprise, the “medicine” was sweet! It tasted like little sugar pills. At the time, I was delighted. Taking medicine was usually a chore, but these pills were almost a treat. As a gold older and learned about things like placebos and “sugar pills,” I thought for sure my parents were trying to trick me. I thought by the nature of their sweetness they couldn’t have any healing properties, they must have just been to make me think I was getting over my fears.
Credit: https://www.amazon.com/Boiron-Symphytum-Officinale-Homeopathic-Medicine/dp/B00014FG0O

In more recent years I’ve run into the familiar little blue tubes and discovered that the pills I was given were from one of the most popular homeopathic remedies in the country, they offer homeopathic options to treat all sorts of conditions and ailments, not just fear and anxiety around animals.

I was so struck, in “The Flavor of God in the Monastic West” reading by the focus on sweetness and its relationship to healing. She makes many good points about the incongruity of this pairing, including what my seven-year-old self thought; that sweet things aren’t usually the best for us in terms of health and healing, so why were so many of the descriptions of Christ and salvation cloaked in this sensory sweetness? She explores different kinds of answers to this question by exploring different exegeses, especially around the Song of Songs and the importance of sweetness there, but the most interesting part of her investigation was the psalm that goes “Taste and see that the Lord is sweet. he was made sweet to you because he liberated you. You had been bitter to yourself when you were occupied only with yourself. Drink the sweetness; accept the pledge from so great a granary” (182). This connection between tastes and emotions made the most sense to me. Embracing Christ is characterized as sweet as opposed to the bitterness of being “occupied with only yourself.” The emotional or psychological kinds of healing seem more important here than the physical healing we associate with hospitals.

Comments

  1. Jonathan Brumberg-KrausFebruary 26, 2018 at 8:19 AM

    Great observations about sweetness and healing. I think you've gotten at some of the core religious insights of Fulton's essays on God's "sweetness." Sweetness isn't just a taste; it's also an emotion, or at least, an emotional correlate of sweet taste. Sweetness can have a powerful therapeutic effect, which unfortunately is overshadowed by our current (albeit justified) dietary fear of sugar.

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