Expanding Your Palate
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One
Expanding the palate
One of the hardest jobs a parent has is trying to get the kids to eat what is put on their plate. Kids get fixated on one kind of food, usually something not very exquisite or nutritious, like French fries and chicken nuggets. Then the kids make a huge fuss if they’re expected to eat any adult food. And the spiritual life is like that.
St. Paul, in writing to the Corinthians (I Cor 3:2) complains that even though he’s trying to help them mature by giving them solid food, they keep wanting to regress by going back to their familiar milk.
St. John of the Cross also uses the same image: God is trying to expand our palate by giving us more and more sophisticated, complicated, and ultimately delightful goods so that, eventually, our palate will be so refined that we will not only desire but even taste the goodness of God Himself in this life.
(Ascent, II, ch. 11) John says, “Our Lord proves and elevates the soul by first bestowing graces that are exterior, lowly, and proportioned to the small capacity of sense. If the person reacts well by taking these first morsels with moderation for strength and nourishment, God will bestow a more abundant and higher quality of food.”
Two
Parents work really hard to get their kids to try different kinds of food
And sometimes the kids throw a fit because they like the junk food they’ve gotten used to.
St. John of the Cross (Dark Night, I, 9) says this is like the Israelites in the desert when God brought them out of slavery to the idols of the Egyptians so that He could give them what they really wanted and needed – Himself. Yet, what did the Israelites do? They threw a fit the whole way. They wanted to go back to their old ways, back to all their old addictions and attachments.
So why do parents try to expand their kids’ palates? For their kids’ own happiness. So that their kids can appreciate all kinds of foods, so that their kids can enjoy the full range of healthy, surprising, and sophisticated dishes. But to the kid, it looks like the parents are just punishing them by taking away what they like and giving them what they don’t.
And that’s what God’s process of detachment can feel like to us. It feels like punishment, even though it’s actually meant to expand our desire so that we hunger for God above all and delight in Him above all.
So don’t be like a spoiled kid who says, “I’ll only eat chicken nuggets. If you serve me anything else, I’ll throw a fit.”
Let God expand your palate. Whatever the situation He gives you, learn to appreciate it. And eventually, the whole world will become for you a richly varied source of joy.
Three
Not detachment for detachment’s sake
John is not saying the only things we need are the sacraments and prayer and everything else is bad. That would be inhuman. So, let’s step back and get the context first.
We have been designed by God to need many good things to be fulfilled and happy. We need a hierarchy of good things, three levels of goods to be happy: Superficial, Profound, and Divine.
Superficial natural goods: Protein, carbs, and, oh yes, coffee. A walk on the beach at sunset. Good books.
Profound natural goods: Physical goods, nutrition, sleep, exercise, safety, security…Psychological goods like stability and variety, family and friendship, knowledge, achievement, and meaningful work. Beauty from nature, art, music, literature, or a play well executed on the field or the court.
Divine Good – Union with God.
In this process of our transformation, God wants to get us ready to delight in Him by learning to delight properly in the lesser things. We learn to delight in God by delighting in the good he has given us and thanking him for it.
Recently I took my wife Sandy for a little vacation. I delighted in her presence, her goodness, I delighted in walking on the beach with her, watching the sunrise and the sunset, excellent meals with her.
See we were made to delight in God by being trained to delight in his gifts, recognize they come from Him, and invite us back to Him.
How well do you delight in the good things God has given you in each present moment? It is a necessary step in your training.
Four
God himself designed us to need the three levels of good.
He also designed us to have a desire, a hunger, and thirst for the things we need and be attached to them in the proper way. We should be attached to water to live, attached to our work because taking ownership breeds better care. We should be attached to our children so that we don’t just leave them at the rest stop when we had enough of a long car ride.
However, we must keep our loves and attachments in order. Love the lesser things less and the greater things more. And love and seek God above all. Be attached to Him above all things. It’s just about keeping our loves and attachments in order. Love the lesser things less and the greater things more - for virtue is rightly ordered love.
Five
Union with God is the goal – not Detachment.
Detachment keeps all things in their proper order.
CCC 226 It means making good use of created things: faith in God, the only One, leads us to use everything that is not God only insofar as it brings us closer to him, and to detach ourselves from it insofar as it turns us away from him:
My Lord and my God, take from me everything that distances me from you.
My Lord and my God, give me everything that brings me closer to you.
My Lord and my God, detach me from myself to give my all to you.