Between the Onion and the Parsley

Have you ever gone on a God Hunt? A God Hunt begins when you teach yourself to look for God’s hand at work in the every day occurrences of your life. Here’s one of my personal God Hunt Sightings:


I found three journals hidden away behind a stack of books in the bookcases in my home study ... one brief line intrigued me. I had written, “Enjoying reading and copying out quotes from Capon’s Supper of the Lamb—such lovely thoughts on being attentive.”

I do not know exactly where I copied out these lovely thoughts on being attentive, but this hidden-away journal reminded me that I had delighted in reading Robert Farrar Capon’s amazing book. An ordained Episcopalian minister, and at the time of the writing Professor of Dogmatic Theology and Instructor in Greek at The George Mercer Jr. Memorial School of Theology, Robert Capon captures in all his writing the exquisite beauty of the commonplace experience of living sacramentally. The book is subtitled “A Culinary Reflection.” Taking the ingredients for “Lamb for Eight Persons Four Times,” the author builds what simply looks like one meal reconfigured four ways into a profound meditation on finding God in life.

I pulled the book again from my cooking library, which is in the old post office desk in our finished basement and read my comments recorded on the frontispiece:

This is a mighty book with an original and daring metaphor.
Capon is an incredible writer & has made the common holy & the holy common.
Wondrous work! Would that all Christian writing was so incarnated with the meaning of the world & with the world of meaning.

So I give to you just a few of the lovely thoughts on being attentive I highlighted in one of my numerous readings of this volume:

“The whole world looks as it if has been left in the custody of a pack of trolls. Indeed, the whole distinction between art and trash, between food and garbage, depends on the presence of absence of the loving eye. Turn a statue over to a boor, and his boredom will break it to bits—witness the ruined monuments of antiquity. On the other hand, turn a shack over to a lover; for all its poverty, its lights and shadows warm a little, and its numbed surfaces prickle with feeling.

“Or, conclusively, peel an orange. Do it lovingly—in perfect quarters like little boats, or in staggered exfoliations like a flat map of the round world, or in one long spiral, as my grandfather used to do. Nothing is more likely to become garbage than an orange rind; but for as long as anyone looks at it in delight, it stands a million triumphant miles from the trash heap.”

Or how about this quote?

“Between the onion and the parsley, therefore, I shall give the summation of my case for paying attention. Man’s real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are. That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God’s image for nothing. ... If an hour can be spent on one onion, think how much regarding it took on the part of that old Russian who looked at onions and church spires long enough to come up with St. Basil’s Cathedral.”

This book is an outrageous, extravagant and breathtaking look at the real Supper of the Lamb when believers of history will sit down to an unending banquet with the Son of
God. Appropriately, the vehicle for this meditation is a work the publishers have classified under “cookbook.”

And I had forgotten how wonderfully it is written or how worthy of another read except that I rediscovered the notebooks I had hidden on a shelf in my writer’s study.

It makes you want to take up journaling again, in earnest, to finish the incomplete pages, to record life for that time, perhaps, when the timeline is waning so that I can remember what have been the real lessons—that “only miracle is plain; it is the ordinary that groans with the unutterable weight of glory.” —Robert Farrar Capon

I spy God!