Tasting God
Flying Saucers and Edible Religion
The Book of Ezekiel opens with one of the weirder moments of the Old Testament (an impressive accomplishment, given the competition). The prophet is swept up in a whirlwind and a massive cloud of fire, out of which emerge four alien creatures, which have “the likeness of a man.” Except each of these humanoid figures is also decked out with hoofed feet, four wings and four heads: that of a lion, an ox, an eagle and a man. Their wings are linked together, and they walk forth upon the earth in a straight line, blazing a fiery trail wherever they go. Each creature is followed by a floating wheel, or ring, soaring far above them in the sky, “so high that they were dreadful.” And they’re made even more dreadful by a Kafkaesque detail stated with terrifying nonchalance: “And the rings were full of eyes.”
What are we to make of these fire Pokemon with eyeball halos? We are given no further explanation. But whatever they are, these creatures and their flying saucers draw our attention skyward, to the main point of interest: the sapphire throne of heaven, where God sits, radiating in power and glory. Ezekiel does what any of us would do. He passes out.
Awakening the prophet from his coma, God sets Ezekiel on his feet and calls him to preach repentance to Israel. First, though, an important instruction: “Open thy mouth, and eat that I give thee.” So like an obedient patient at the doctor’s office, Ezekiel opens wide and says ah. And what medicine does the Physician prescribe? A book. “Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.”
We’re told to feast upon the word of God, and it looks like Ezekiel has a head start. The Psalmist adds a second voice to the chorus. “O taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man that trusteth in him.” It seems right that God would be described as something that you have to taste to understand. Maybe it’s fitting that only creatures of such profound, mind-boggling weirdness could introduce the heavenly throne — something so utterly foreign and surprising that the only way to grasp it is to experience it for yourself. Because whatever image we’ve conjured up for God, whatever narrow boxes we’ve enclosed Him in, God is telling us that He exists beyond the bounds of our wildest imagination. “I AM THAT I AM,” He says — or, perhaps more to the point, “I will be whatever I will be.” He sees our constrictive theologies and rigid doctrinal prescriptions, and He is better and higher and holier than all of it. We can spend an eternity rotting away in the endless monotony of man-made definitions, but the only way we can really know of His character is to taste it for ourselves.
How fitting that Ezekiel would swallow a book. We’ve got to ingest the Word. We’ve got to eat the Logos. “I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”
Clearly the ritual act of eating Christ is meant to teach us something about His life-giving power and His ability to nourish and sustain. But it’s also got to do with ingestion, with receiving something so completely that it becomes a real part of you. When you consume something, you dissolve the distinction between yourself and whatever you have taken in to yourself. In other words, you really are what you eat. “He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.” And so the sacrament isn’t meant as a purely exculpatory exercise. Yes, it’s a weekly remission of wrongdoing and a recommitment to a Christian life. But at its core, it’s a ritual of oneness — a holy communion. And how is that oneness to be achieved? You have to taste the gospel, and swallow it, and make it a part of you. It’s not enough to accept a series of doctrines or recite a set of orthodoxies. Those are only approximations anyway. If you want the real thing, you’ve got to experience atonement for yourself.
The tasting goes both ways. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ speaks of a cup which He is willing to drink. Certainly the agony of the cross and the burden of sin would prove bitter enough. But perhaps one of the most powerful theological innovations of the Book of Mormon is how far it’s willing to go with its conception of Christ’s suffering. It’s true that Isaiah alludes to a Messiah who bears our grief and carries our sorrow. But Alma’s prophecy of Christ’s sacrifice states the scope of the situation with astonishing clarity. “And he shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind…that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.”
In this telling of the Christian story, God becomes mortal not only to loose mankind from the chains of death and sin, but also to fully taste for Himself what it means to be human. A conceptual, intellectual, or even a spiritual understanding of human suffering was insufficient. The intimate intricacies of our lives — our joys and pains, our triumphs and heartbreaks, our capacity to love and to hate — can only be understood through experience. And since human suffering takes place not only on the collective, but also on the individual level, Christ’s atonement grasps human life as each person encounters it. In Gethsemane and Calvary, Christ takes upon Himself the entirety of mortal experience — generally and particularly — and becomes a being of perfect empathy. He is able to become one with you because, in some very real sense, He knows exactly what it is to be you.
Maybe believers and nonbelievers have both fallen victim to their own hubris. Maybe we all struggle to accept that there are some things that our sophisticated systems can never adequately convey. We like putting things in neat categories: the natural and the supernatural, the holy and the heretical. Then we like chopping up those categories into tidy hierarchies, ranks, and orders. I think we like these systems because it’s terrifying to be honest about how much we can know for sure. So we stay safe in our little caves of certainty, fearing that if we ever let ourselves out to bask in the sun, it will shrivel us up. We’re afraid to feel God because we might get burned.
I’ve never understood the appeal of those cooking shows on TV. What’s the point of watching other people eat delicious food? Maybe you like watching the process unfold, or maybe you think the chef is charismatic. But at the end of the day, you will end up enjoying the meal just as much as someone who never turned on the TV in the first place.
That’s what we do with religion sometimes. We get so wrapped up in the performance that we forget what the whole enterprise is for. You might like going through the steps, or you might really like the people leading you along. But no amount of scrupulous observation is a substitute for eating the thing yourself. At best, those shows can teach you to make the dish on your own. Hopefully your religion will do that too. But it will never mean anything unless you sink your teeth in.
Don’t get me wrong — I like my religion organized. I wonder, though, if we sometimes become so rigid that we snuff out all the sparks that set our souls aflame in the first place. Ritual is good, and theology matters. But all of our best ritualizing and theologizing are no replacement for living. Properly applied, they are springboards to the real thing — something that can only ever be ascertained by trying it for yourself.
As much as it pains me to admit it, I have no way of demonstrating God with my own powers of reason or intellect, or even with my most circumspect behavior. I’ll do my best thinking, and I’ll play my part with gusto, but in the end it’ll all be woefully insufficient. I can never really express what it is that makes me believe in Christ. I can never really convey what it is to love Him and to be loved by Him. Not in a way that makes any sense.
I can only say that I’ve tasted for myself. And I can invite you to take a bite.
