Living al Dente
A recent session of websurfing was rewarded when I came upon a blog entitled, Living al Dente. The author of the blog defines al Dente as, “firm enough, but not too soft”. I am always on the lookout for internet sites that promote the subjects this blog lays claim to: faith, family, friends, food and fitness.
Since stumbling upon this new internet oasis, I have been pondering the idea of al Dente when it comes to the area of faith. It is wonderful description of what a healthy faith life looks like, but a difficult one to achieve. Cooking pasta al Dente takes experience and skill. It takes practice and a willingness to try again when one fails to get it right the first time. If the pasta is undercooked, it will be too hard and will break. If it is overcooked it is mushy and loses its flavor.
So too with the life of faith. We certainly need a firm foundation if we are to succeed in living our faith. Just this week one of my brother priests mentioned Fr. Cyprian Davis’ comment that, “you can’t change the creed because there is blood on the creed”. “True enough,” I thought to myself. There are certainly some hard and fast tenets that we Christians strive to follow in order to form our lives in the image of Christ. There is always the danger, however, that we will focus so much on “the rules” that we miss the point, becoming so hard and brittle that we break. This is not the only pitfall that faces one who is seeking to follow Christ. There is also the danger of being too soft, of losing our grounding in the elements of Christianity meant to support us in our journey. Too often these days we Christians tend to fall into the trap of relativism. It is the mistake of putting every aspect of our faith on the same level of importance. Sometimes it manifests itself in believing that the only truth is what each individual believes is true for him or for her.
One area where I am always reminded of the kind of healthy balance that can strengthen one’s Christian spiritual life is in the Eastern liturgy. Whenever I have attended the Divine Liturgy there is both at the same time the sense of God’s overpowering divinity and the complete feeling of the earthiness of this world. Neither is in any way diminished in the worship one participates in there. Amy Welbourn has a great description of this in one of her recent blogposts:
That said, there is a casualness to the Eastern liturgy that is both refreshing and unnerving. The church is practically empty at the beginning, but gradually fills up, until most people have shown up by the Gospel or so. Because there is this (what I call) freight train aspect to the liturgy – you get on and it just goes – it’s hard for a Westerner, accustomed to associating “prayerful” with silence and kneeling, to re-associate it with chanting and standing. But good.
(But I will say, too – that the other interesting thing here is that if you are tired of standing and you want to sit, it’s fine. There were times when about half the people were standing and the other sitting. It reminded me a bit of going to Mass in Italy. There is a sense that we are all here together, celebrating the feast, encountering the Lord, but we are still who we are,and that is fine.)
As I continue to reflect upon “Living al Dente,” it makes me realize the difficult task it is to maintain the proper balance between being too hard and too soft. But like learning to cook pasta I know I can continue to practice living a Christian life, making mistakes along the way, yet continuing to grow.
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