Yes we do. It is the words to a hymn sung mainly during the Lenten season during communion service of the Presanctified Liturgy:
O, taste and see.
O, taste and see that the Lord is good,
That the Lord is good.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
It is interesting that this hymn is the core of the Presanctified communion during the Lenten season, a season of fasting. The Presanctified liturgy is the midweek communion to sustain us through our Lenten discipline which is intended to wean us from our worldly attachments and our inner passions and lusts. Our fallen nature craves food, we eat for taste and pleasure, our passions seek sensory experience, titillation and gratification (the sooner the better).
The ironic beauty of this Lenten hymn, in the midst of the fight to disarm the powers of pleasure and passions, it is about pleasure, it is about gratification and sensory experience. It is about the whole human person experiencing God, the eternal Manna for which we were created to eat and enjoy.
In the end, the only path to belief is to taste. Intellectual arguments can only list and discuss the ingredients, and perhaps convince someone that the Divine Condiment is good to eat. Until we squeeze It out of the bottle and put It on the French fries and eat It we have no Ketchup in us.
We can be convinced intellectually of the attributes of a Good God. We can discuss and theorize about the goodness of God without ever tasting God. But until we live in the goodness that we were created to experience as the icon of Christ , taste and experience the pleasures of holiness in our bodily existence, we cannot truly “see” how good the Lord is.
Taste and believe.
3 comments:
"In the end, the only path to belief is to taste. Intellectual arguments can only list and discuss the ingredients, and perhaps convince someone that the Divine Condiment is good to eat."
Well said, as usual.
In my experience, too much time spent on intellectual arguments produces a taste all its own--bitterness. Too much debating or proofing, or whatever you want to call it, can make a person doubt whether anything could possibly satisfy. I've seen it in myself and have watched it happen to friends.
Glad to hear some redemption has finally come to the ketchup world. ;)
Tee hee. I thought to myself, "what would make a ketchup Orthodox?"
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