Steven Purcell, the director of Laity Lodge, recently said that a retreat center should not be a spa where you purchase leisure time and spiritual nourishment as a packaged commodity. Instead it should be an outpost or hospitality house for people engaged in the rigors of a spiritual journey.
That’s why I say that Laity Lodge is both a beautiful and a dangerous place. You can get hurt here. The retreat leaders are not safe. They are good and righteous people, but no, they are not safe. They might rub salt in an ancient wound or, if they can’t find one of those, open a fresh wound for you.
That kind of honesty sometimes hurts. But it’s the sort of pain that leads to deep joy, the good stuff. The surprising, full-bodied and robust burst of pleasure that wells up inside you until you laugh and cry at the same time.
I’ve known this about Laity Lodge for some time now: that it can hurt you. So I’m asking myself why I chose to come to the Food Retreat. Because I have not been particularly healthy with food and eating in my life. It’s been a little secret of mine, this bad eating. I have a tendency to see every meal as an opportunity for pleasure and escape. Lunchtime comes and I say, “Hmm, what do I most want to eat right now?” Then I go and get that food, whatever it is. I also tend to eat compulsively, cramming cheetoes or some other horrible processed food into my mouth in a ridiculous attempt to silence a demon or deal with my anxiety. And even when the food has lost its taste and clearly is making me feel worse and not better, I keep eating.
And now I’m at this retreat listening to Cliff and Christine Warner talk about their family with its wonderful Sabbath tradition of sharing carefully planned meals with their children and how they like to invite friends over for nutritious, locally grown, beautifully prepared meals that feed both body and soul. They seem to be living Babette’s Feast while my life looks like the cafeteria scene from Animal House.
Like I said, sometimes coming to Laity Lodge can hurt. This is one of those times for me. I was struggling with feelings of regret and feeling overwhelmed by all the changes I need to make to the ways I relate to food. Then we were brought into the dining hall where we spent an hour in a guided meditation with an onion. Seriously, we spent an entire hour with this onion. We peeled the outer layers of our onions and examined them carefully. We smelled our onions, talked about onions around the table, then carefully pulled them apart, section by section, and laid the sections out on display.
Which is kind of how I was feeling. As if I had been filleted and laid open, my inner secrets being revealed, not to others, but to myself.
It turns out that the thin, desiccated layers of skin on the outside of an onion used to be the inner layers, plump and full of juice. An onion grows from the inside, forming new layers deep within its core. As the outer layers are pushed to the surface, they lose fluid and become thin and papery.
To get to the meat of an onion, you have to peel away things that were once alive but now are dead.
Later on the front porch I watched Tim preparing the BBQ that our group of retreatants were soon to enjoy. I smelled the onion on my fingers and in that moment, the truth I will take away from this retreat was revealed to me.
I don’t have to become perfectly well with eating and food right now. I just have to peel back a little dead tissue, find something alive and well on the inside, and make one small move toward health and goodness.
Pilgrim.
My Onion
You can write on onion skin. Who knew?
Layers
Spirit of Food, M.K. Fisher, Shrek the first, and you……
Kathleen, lol.
Yeah, I hesitated with this because the onion is so often used with ham-handed life analogies. But the fact is, we did the onion thing. And it meant something to me. So, trite or not, I had to write about it.
No implications of triteness. At all. I sincerely lumped this piece with heroic words.
One of the best places I’ve found for reflection on food (including encountering an onion!) is Robert Ferrar Capon’s theological cookbook “The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection” I think it is the only cookbook I have ever read!
Bethany, that book was mentioned a number of times over the weekend retreat.
I can only imagine the tears…
burning and cleansing…
the way only he can do.
Just in time for Thanksgiving. Great stuff, Pilgrim, especially the details about smelling onions on your hands and being able to write on onion skin.
Your onion papyrus made me smile