I played along, even as I fought back the urge to retort “But it’s all gluten free!” This urge had nothing to do with self delusion or denial; I was fully aware of the nutritional contents of both my tube steak and handpicked side dishes. But my unaired protest had nothing to do with the meal set before me. I believed my meal to be healthy because, like life itself, it was constituted by what it lacked, i.e. gluten, which, I have come to be persuaded, is to the gut as smoke is to the lungs.
Although I am beginning to think that I was thusly persuaded in order to satisfy a longing much deeper than the not insubstantial need for some relief from the emotional peaks and valleys of my hypoglycemic carb-loading days. This is related to the notion I slipped in above about lack and its place at the center of the universe. Lest this sound nihilistic, no less a sage than the Kabbalah itself teaches that in order to create the universe, God first, to make room for it, had to absent Him/Herself from the scene. (The gender-inclusive pronouns are mine; not sure where the Kaballah stands on the question of whether God goes to the men’s room or the ladies room, or both.) The Kaballah, from the little I know of it, goes on ad infinitum to explain how despite God’s constitutive absence we nevertheless remain connected through what sounds to me like an elaborate version of the life lines on Who Wants to be a Millionarre? I will leave the parsing of the details on that to the Kabbalists, but the take home message is clear to me. The universe began with God’s absence. We exist because, at least right here and now, God, at least in all His/Her fullness, does not. We are all donuts bent around a primordial lack.
Two of the three Abrahamic faiths, Islam and Judaism, deal with this constitutive lack, at least in part, through their respective halal and kosher dietary laws. Food, especially when there is a plenitude, is the opposite of lack. The cornucopia, on our minds this week as we celebrate Thanksgiving, is the perfect symbol of God spilling over into creation in all His/Her abundance. This sounds like the ultimate good thing, until we remember that it was God’s very absence that made room for us to begin with. At which point the cornucopia is transformed into The Blob, and God’s abundance spilling over into creation, in the form of a table very much like the one we all plan to sit down to this Thursday, threatens to squeeze us into oblivion. Islam and Judaism defuse this threat by inscribing lack into nourishment, placing God at a safe remove under the guise of upholding His/Her law, like parents stealing off to work each day purportedly to put food on the table for their children but really just to get some time away from them.
Christianity, alone among the Abrahamic faiths, makes do without comprehensive dietary restrictions, but for the faint echo heard in meatless Fridays for Roman Catholics. Instead, Christianity made the radical move of inscribing lack on our very persons, in the form of Original Sin. It is perhaps no surprise that the cure for Original Sin, God the Son, made only a brief appearance, exiting the scene before His abundance Blob had time to grow into an existential threat, leaving behind the third member of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Ghost. Ghosts, of course, are pure lack, meaning that Christianity has made all the necessary arrangements for an ongoing surfeit of inner (Original Sin) and outer (Holy Ghost) lack, at least until the Second Coming.
Through its three major religions, western civilization had eased the tensions stemming from its missing foundation, the ground of all being that was, in fact, pure groundlessness. But after several centuries along came capitalism, overturning the “straight and narrow path” of lack’s prohibitions and replacing it with “everything in moderation,” which, if the last 250 years has taught us anything, can only ever lead to everything in excess. Where the three Abrahamic faiths have sanctified lack, capitalism has duped us into thinking we can become our own Blobs, consuming lack out of existence, even as in doing so we feed lack until it has grown into the existential threat that God once was.
People appear to be choosing one of three paths forward:
1. Continue trying to consume lack out of existence until it consumes us,
2. Return to the traditional straight and narrow path of one’s preferred Abrahamic faith, or
3. Like me, cede Christianity (or the Abrahamic faith you happened to be born into) to the Evangelical right (or its Jewish or Muslim equivalent), replacing it with a progressive secularism tinged with individualized spirituality, an arrangement that inevitably proves as unsatisfying as being “friends with benefits.” Then, unwilling to engage in option 1 or 2, reinscribe lack into one’s individualized creed by becoming either vegan or gluten free, and/or socialist, which is just spending most of your time thinking about how much people are lacking.
Personally, I recommend gluten free socialism, although my wife is covering all of her bases by trying to go gluten free (option 3) and become an observant Jew (option 2) at the same time. One thing she doesn’t lack is chutzpah.
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