I do not want spiritual cream

Reminds me of previous posts on peaches.

From The Night is Far Spent:

...suppose the honey-colored stone we see in Costwold manor houses is only a sketchy hint of the real, solid thing awaiting us in the new heavens and the new earth. Or suppose the sweet tang of wild raspeberries is itself the thinned-down, subdued hint, given to us here temporarily, until we reach the state of being known as sanctity, where we will be able to sustain the hitherto insupportable bliss of real raspberries. (I myself hope there will be double cream from Jersy cows to flood our raspberries with, and I must say, I do not want spiritual cream.)

--Thomas Howard

Peach season continues

The peach I ate was so juicy it was more drinking than eating.

Peaches are magical.

He's built perfection out of hunger

The Rumi poem in the previous post from this morning echoes the theme of a separation between truth and love.

It reminds me of an exhibit I saw a few years ago at the Corning Museum of Glass; a collection of unbelievably lifelike plants, flowers, and fruit all made of glass.

They were in cases and could not be touched but were so incredibly real that in many cases you could not tell that they were not.

So there they were, these creations of man, mimicking the wonder of God's creative power, but lacking the softness, the scent, and the fruition of His work.

Beautiful imitations. Brittle and fragile and forced, like facts without love.

The poem below says it well (and even mentions peaches).

The Ware Collection of Glass Flowers and Fruit, Harvard Museum
by Mark Doty

Strange paradise, complete with worms,
monument of an obsessive will to fix forms;
every apricot or yellow spot's seen so closely,
in these blown blooms and fruit, that exactitude
is not quite imitation. Leaf and root,
the sweet flag's flaring bud already,
at the tip, blackened; it's hard to remember
these were ballooned and shaped by breath
they're lovely because they seem
to decay; blue spots on bluer plums,
mold tarring a striped rose. I don't want to admire
the glassblower's academic replica,
his copies correct only to a single sense.
And why did a god so invested in permanence
choose so fragile a medium, the last material
he might expect to last? Better prose
to tell the forms of things, or illustration.
Though there's something seductive in this impossibility:
transparent color telling the live mottle of peach,
the blush or tint of crab, englobed,
gorgeous, edible. How else match that flush?
He's built a perfection out of hunger,
fused layer upon layer, swirled until
what can't be swallowed, won't yield
almost satisfies, an art
mouthed to the shape of how soft things are,
how good, before they disappear

Know me more

In future I may call this the summer of the peach.

I found a longer and a shorter version of this poem, but preferred the shorter (below).

Upon reading, it occurs to me to wonder if the fruit Eve bit was a peach...

Know me more

Share a peach with me
softly ripe
and by it
know me more.

--Chantelle Franc

Day 13: Synchronicity

Yesterday's sermon centered around the spiritual gifts, and God's plan in giving each of us specific gifts according to His purpose. He used the analogy of us all being different types of fruit trees, and more specifically, comparing apples to peaches.

Yes; he centered on the peach tree.

Though it wasn't his main focus, the deacon connected with my own meditations of becoming fully ourselves.

I love the way He interweaves things.

Day 11: more on peaches

I woke with peaches on the brain again.

This time I thought about how the fullness of a fruit's existence isn't realized unless it is consumed. If it sits on the tree until it falls off and then withers and rots, God will make use of it by providing food for creatures, fertilizing the soil, and maybe even growing a new tree. But for the true magnificence of a peach to be realized, it must be eaten by a human, who can not only comprehend the beauty of its deliciousness, but can also wonder at its creation.

That made me think about what this means for us, which led me to CS Lewis' quote:

"...it is in the lover that the beloved tastes her own delightfulness."

For our true magnificence to be realized, we also must be consumed. We must share the abundant fruitfulness of our being, even to the point of complete ravishment.

Perhaps utter ravishment should in fact be our goal.

So... my tasks are to identify what parts of me are delicious, to work on building up those parts, and then to be generous even to the point of pain in sharing them.

Sounds simple enough.

Day 10: the perfect peach

I woke thinking of peaches this morning. Not sure why, except that I ate one last night. It was very good, but the color and texture on one side was just a bit off. Not nastily so, but enough.

In my peachy waking I thought again about our becoming more intensely ourselves in the fulfillment of time, as I wrote of here. When the banished world returns to the garden of Eden and we dance there, partaking of the fruit of all the trees growing on the banks of the river of life, what will that fruit be like?

Will a peach lose it's peachy essence at the end, becoming some sort of washed out spiritual form? Is that the type of meal Yeshua himself plans to eat with us in paradise?

It seems unlikely.

The peaches there must be intensely, purely, and perfectly peachy. Without blemish. Firm of flesh and juicy beyond belief. Inhaling their perfume alone must be nearly orgasmic.

And if the fruit of the trees and vines are to reach perfection of their very selves, becoming a distillation and concentration of their very beings, how could we do less?

Do we become spirit which simply reflects the shape of Yeshua, having lost our "us-ness"?

It seems unlikely.

I wonder what distillation of Eva will be like? What aspects of me will intensify, and which will burn away? Which parts are the real me, the essence of me, the true and the beautiful and the delicious?

Gives me something to think about, and to start working on now...