Cooking with the Holy Spirit
A few weeks ago, I overheard a gentleman speaking about an experience he witnessed in which a cook in the church kitchen threw a dash of some previously unused spice into a recipe that was pretty standard. As the cook threw the spice in, they were reported to have said, "I wonder what made me do that. Must have been the Holy Spirit."
Hmmm.
I have some trouble with that line of thought. This is a kind of statement has a few implied ideas that I don't think we should overlook. Perhaps I am reading far too much into this, but hear me out.
To begin with, the first question that came to mind when I heard this story (and I know the cook in question and while I didn't hear them say it, I am quite confident that he did or certainly something akin to the statement) is this: can we have no good ideas of our own? I don't mean to demean this individual, but I had to wonder if the idea crossed their mind because they are a good and experienced cook. Certainly, like many things in life, the more you work at something the more natural that something comes to you. And, with regard to cooking, if you spend a lot of time in the kitchen, I would assume that eventually you would start to know what spice, sauce, oil, or whatever would go with a dish and what wouldn't. I would also assume that eventually you would find adding a dash of this or that into a meal to be something of a second nature.
Granted, there were a lot of assumptions in that last paragraph, but I hope you see my point. Eventually someone who is good at something moves beyond the printed recipe and branches out to create their own dish or to create a dish with their own particular spin or flourish. If not, there would only be one kind of potato salad in the world, I would think.
But the statement seems to imply that the added spice couldn't have been from this individual's subconscious understanding of the culinary arts. No. It had to be the Holy Spirit.
I won't go into the theological issues that arise with thinking that the Holy Spirit is busy inspiring cooks to add a dash of whatever while the leaders of the United Methodist Church are busy drawing up the dividing lines for a potential split over homosexuality. Actually, maybe that is why the Holy Spirit is helping a cook - no one else is listening!
I digress.
Anyway, another question that arose to me was that if the added spice should screw up the meal, would the individual say, "Nope. Not the Holy Spirit. Just my numb skull"? I don't know. Perhaps. I would venture to guess that this individual would go that route, because there seems to be some implicit idea that any good idea we have is from the Holy Spirit, but any cockamamie idea comes from our feeble, sinful brains. In other words, "Holy Spirit good, my ideas bad. My ideas certainly questionable if not always bad."
Is there no room for personal experience? It seems as if the answer is no. But that does put me in mind of a conversation I had in seminary about Christian musicians. Christians seem to want them to be successful, but if they are in any way shape or form by playing something that doesn't sound Christian or isn't explicitly Christian, then many in the Christian community will turn on them. Just ask Amy Grant.
That seems to be a somewhat connected ideology. If you succeed it has to be the Holy Spirit or God or Jesus' intervention. If you succeed without it or without acknowledging it, you are some kind of blasphemer. Likewise, if you credit your success to the Holy Spirit, it seems to be a given. But in offering your successes to the Holy Spirit, then you seem to be willing to dismiss the possibility that your own personal work and experiences have any real benefit or bearing on your life.
This isn't to say that God is somehow removed completely from our lives, but it certainly seems to me that to insist that only good ideas or recipes come from the Holy Spirit is to offer a difficult and depressing dichotomy: Only God works what is good and there is nothing good that I can do on my own. Not even cooking.
I'm not sure this is what we need to be thinking.
Or cooking.
Hmmm.
I have some trouble with that line of thought. This is a kind of statement has a few implied ideas that I don't think we should overlook. Perhaps I am reading far too much into this, but hear me out.
To begin with, the first question that came to mind when I heard this story (and I know the cook in question and while I didn't hear them say it, I am quite confident that he did or certainly something akin to the statement) is this: can we have no good ideas of our own? I don't mean to demean this individual, but I had to wonder if the idea crossed their mind because they are a good and experienced cook. Certainly, like many things in life, the more you work at something the more natural that something comes to you. And, with regard to cooking, if you spend a lot of time in the kitchen, I would assume that eventually you would start to know what spice, sauce, oil, or whatever would go with a dish and what wouldn't. I would also assume that eventually you would find adding a dash of this or that into a meal to be something of a second nature.
Granted, there were a lot of assumptions in that last paragraph, but I hope you see my point. Eventually someone who is good at something moves beyond the printed recipe and branches out to create their own dish or to create a dish with their own particular spin or flourish. If not, there would only be one kind of potato salad in the world, I would think.
But the statement seems to imply that the added spice couldn't have been from this individual's subconscious understanding of the culinary arts. No. It had to be the Holy Spirit.
I won't go into the theological issues that arise with thinking that the Holy Spirit is busy inspiring cooks to add a dash of whatever while the leaders of the United Methodist Church are busy drawing up the dividing lines for a potential split over homosexuality. Actually, maybe that is why the Holy Spirit is helping a cook - no one else is listening!
I digress.
Anyway, another question that arose to me was that if the added spice should screw up the meal, would the individual say, "Nope. Not the Holy Spirit. Just my numb skull"? I don't know. Perhaps. I would venture to guess that this individual would go that route, because there seems to be some implicit idea that any good idea we have is from the Holy Spirit, but any cockamamie idea comes from our feeble, sinful brains. In other words, "Holy Spirit good, my ideas bad. My ideas certainly questionable if not always bad."
Is there no room for personal experience? It seems as if the answer is no. But that does put me in mind of a conversation I had in seminary about Christian musicians. Christians seem to want them to be successful, but if they are in any way shape or form by playing something that doesn't sound Christian or isn't explicitly Christian, then many in the Christian community will turn on them. Just ask Amy Grant.
That seems to be a somewhat connected ideology. If you succeed it has to be the Holy Spirit or God or Jesus' intervention. If you succeed without it or without acknowledging it, you are some kind of blasphemer. Likewise, if you credit your success to the Holy Spirit, it seems to be a given. But in offering your successes to the Holy Spirit, then you seem to be willing to dismiss the possibility that your own personal work and experiences have any real benefit or bearing on your life.
This isn't to say that God is somehow removed completely from our lives, but it certainly seems to me that to insist that only good ideas or recipes come from the Holy Spirit is to offer a difficult and depressing dichotomy: Only God works what is good and there is nothing good that I can do on my own. Not even cooking.
I'm not sure this is what we need to be thinking.
Or cooking.
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