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Thomism of the Table

A French Catholic crunchy con talks about God and food
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Daniel Rabourdin is my kind of guy. He’s a French Catholic living in America and serving as a lay apostle of everyday gourmandise. In this interview, he explains where he’s coming from, and how his faith and his Frenchness inform his EWTN program, “Theology of the Table”. Excerpts:

Why do you think so many Americans have problems with food?

In America, we live in a rather Protestant culture. “By faith alone” tends to make the works of this earth count for nothing for Heaven.

It puts an abyss between faith and real life on earth. So people pray one way but work in other way. From this duality, we get the expressions of “business is business” or “war is nasty anyway”.

But a Catholic culture wants the grace to save this real body, this real life. It wants grace to fall like rain on earth and go deep into it. And it embraces the works of people to participate to the salvation of Christ.

That participation should be in business, in politics, in arts and in the way we eat too. And remember that this “eating act” is major: that is the way we survive as individual.

We need to make people conscious about applying love and soul to the way they eat too. “Food is not that important’, many think. But why then do they run for the fridge when, lonely, they arrive at home in the evening?

This is a mirror of what Mother Theresa had told us: “the poverty of the West is that we are not wanted”. So not being loved, not being wanted, we resolve most of the time to over-eat bad food.

To many, food is like pornography. It is high in sweetness, high in salt, high in quantity. But it does not feed them. …

This culture has a rather Puritan inclination: it condemns fun and pleasure all together. It cannot imagine that there is a civilized way to have fun or pleasure. That civilized way to have entertainment is walking hand in hand with virtue. Like Jesus at the wedding at Cana who accepted to have more water transformed into wine.

In the Puritan environment, pleasure only means gluttony or promiscuity. Between the over-tyrannical and the over-indulgent they do not see a balanced way to enjoy life.

More:

What is happening in terms of culture and religion in France?

The good news is that there are the New Communities, the Emmanuel Community or Taize movement or the Beatitudes. They are slightly charismatic.

They are like the villages growing around monasteries in the early middle age while chaos is all over the rest of the land. In these communities, there is a social loving life. People in there have different roles as leaders, priests, members. New chanting is created, new art, new housing and new crafts. And other people can see that from outside as a place of joy and acceptance.

There are also the Latin Mass parishes. They share a meal after Mass. People on the outside see how they love one another. All of those are like ‘bubbles of love’, where the heart is visible to others.

Certainly, in France, they still know how to eat well. But in my opinion, people have often lost the memory of how to work well, which is still strong in the Protestant cultures.

In America, I enjoy so much the encouragement of initiative, the respect for success. There is so much more positive thinking here.

In some ways, I come to the conclusion that there is in France a sort of Puritanism towards success, toward prosperity. More often that here, people ‘pooh-pooh’ winners. It is a leftover of Marxism I think.

But that is as hypocritical as the puritanism toward the flesh. Because at the end of the day, French people still enjoy their nice shoes, nice pastries, and nice vacations. Each of those need prosperity, need someone to be successful at those and to be rewarded for it.

Different countries and nations have their strengths….

Read the whole thing. I love this guy. Thanks to the reader who sent this in.

By the way, another reader sent in this funny dispatch from the Telegraph, in which an Englishman expresses his “what’s the big deal?” dislike of foie gras and truffles, both French obsessions. Excerpt:

I turned to my companion and said: “I think I prefer a country pâté to this foie gras.” She looked at me as one looks at the insane, started talking about Mozart, and a great friendship was nipped in the bud. Admitting this foie gras state of affairs has, however, lightened my life. I would certainly never argue that people shouldn’t produce, sell or eat foie gras, any more than I would campaign against bananas just because I don’t like them. What I will do is stop bothering to eat the stuff, and perhaps take it down from number 17 to number 56 in the list of causes I need to defend.

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