Eat, Drink, and Be Merry for Today We are Whole
Whenever anyone sets a dish on the dinner table and says, “it’s healthy,” with just that hint of virtuous suffering in the tone, it means ignore the taste and texture (or lack thereof) and force that bite down.
It’s really the only right thing to do of course, for if you are not suffering, how can you know it’s good for you? In the pursuit of the heaven that is skinniness, the ultimate moral good in the realm of diet culture, we are commanded to deny ourselves nobly and doggedly, looking forward instead to that ultimate reward.
“Healthy” in the realm of diet culture is often synonymous with denial, restriction, and suffering, because it’s the morally superior option against simple enjoyment – to “eat, drink, and be merry” as the scripture goes.
The same phrase is our spiritual parlance is also superseded by a moral imperative to avoid too much enjoyment. Like “healthy” in diet culture, “righteousness” in the church means noble and dogged denial, restriction, and sacrifice because the reward of eternal salvation comes in heaven, not on earth. We cannot be serious followers of the faith if we are eating, drinking, and being merry now. The reward comes in heaven.
President Nelson in the recent October General Conference, following the lead of 2 Nephi 28:7-8, equates enjoyment with sin and calls the eat, drink, and be merry way of living “one of the most absurd lies in the universe.” In the same conference, Elder Cook aligned the 2 Nephi scripture with nonbelievers (you can infer his opinions about “nonbelievers” in context and it’s not complimentary) who “succumb” to such a belief.
But the phrase “eat, drink, and be merry” originates in Ecclesiastes, where a different interpretation is offered. In the NIV version of Ecclesiastes 8:15, the writer recognizes that life is difficult and often contrary, so it is earthy joys that sustain us through our earthly toil. Ecclesiastes 8:15 (NIV) reads, “So I commend the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany them in their toil all the days of the life God has given them under the sun.”
If food and faith intertwine, it’s in the tension between scriptures that welcome and warn us away from the joys of sensory experiences. Do eat, drink, and be merry because that is the joy God gives us on earth as we toil. Do not dare to eat, drink, and be merry because it is thoughtless, selfish, and sinful.
As a survivor of diet culture, who has weighed out her food in points and forgone bread and gazed longingly at the “unhealthy” foods that can only lead to that ultimate sin of diet culture – fat – I am tired of all messages of shame, fear, denial, and self-abnegation. Healing my relationship with food has given me a fresh perspective on what it really means to “eat, drink, and be merry.”
Diet culture demands that food should be stripped of its properties, like fat or carbs, or that daily caloric intake should be severely limited, or that there are limited kinds of acceptable foods. We are supposed to feel ashamed if we can’t sustain a trendy fad diet and we are supposed to fear fatness like the state will destroy all our inherent value as human beings. We’re supposed to feel superior by not eating dessert.
But to enjoy something completely, earthily, to wholeness and fullness – whether that’s a hearty salad or a slice of cheesecake – is a necessary part of existence. A dinner table loaded with variety and abundance is not necessarily excessive or gluttonous. It only needs to be whole. Wholeness provides the body with all the energy and nutrients it requires plus enjoyment and satisfaction too. Recognizing that food must be both has allowed me to feel much more at home in my body and much more settled in my being, like I’m putting myself back together.
The late, great Rachel Held Evans writes about a similar spiritual fragmentation in her book Wholehearted Faith:
The Faith that I had once possessed demanded disintegration. Of course I could use my brain – as long as it led me to the correct, predetermined conclusions about science, biblical interpretation, and public policy. Of course I could use my heart – as long as it didn’t empathize with the wrong people or end up on the wrong side of complex moral dilemmas. Of course I could use my conscience – until it grew troubled by certain teachings and actions of the church. Of course I could use my body – as long as it remained heterosexual, cisgender, attractive but not too attractive, feminine but not too feminine, modest, appropriately clothes, restrained, demure, uncomplicated, and especially sexually dormant until my wedding night, at which point it would magically transform into a sex carnival for my husband.
Rachel Held Evans
In other words, I could be Christian as long as I loved God with half my heart, half my soul, half my mind, and half my body. (Actually, maybe just a quarter of my body).
The 2 Nephi interpretation of eating, drinking, and being merry smacks of living a half-life, or even a quarter life, when we could be whole by embracing the Ecclesiastes version of the scripture.
If unseasoned chicken, listless un-spiced and unbuttered veggies, and a siphoning of fat are the morally superior choices of diet culture, it seems to me the morally superior options of righteous Mormon culture also ask us to forgo wholeness.
Wholeness in Mormon spiritual matters sometimes feels impossible when we are pressured to be (happy) stay at home mothers without context, study the scriptures but only ask the right questions, attend all our meetings and never mind the time commitment, serve more without tiring, pay tithing but don’t look at that 100 billion in the vault, and endure to the end without questioning how LGBTQ folks, women, people of color, and all the interplay of variation between these identities fit in the LDS framework. If you don’t fit, just sacrifice and suffer until you do. Eat the dang carrot sticks and call it a meal. It’s what a morally upright person would do.
A spiritual theology full of contradictions and nuance (The meat and the milk, if you will) need not invoke fear and shame. When church is a place where people can approach in their wholeheartedness, we can experience the full range of grief and love, anger and exhilaration. It’s a place that can take questions and hold joy.
Wholeness means no one is scavenging for crumbs under the table or denying themselves their very favorite dessert because everyone can sit and join, serve and be served, love and be loved. It’s a place where we get everything we need, especially those irreplaceable gentle pushes to do better and be better, and enjoyment and satisfaction too. Church can do both.
The physical body cannot survive sustainably on a 1000 calorie a day diet. The spiritual self cannot survive sustainably on the religious equivalent of broccoli sans Ranch dip and fat free cottage cheese. We are meant to thrive. We are meant to be whole.
Photo by Spencer Davis on Unsplash
