What I Just Finished

"No matter how sophosticated or wealthy or broke or enlightened you are, how you eat tells all. If you suffer about your relationship with food -- you eat too much or too little, think about what you will eat constantly or try not to think about it at all -- you can be free. Just look down at your plate. The answers are there. Don't run. Look. Because when we welcome what we most want to avoid, we contact the part of ourselves that is fresh and alive. We touch the life we truly want and evoke divinity itself.

Since adolescence, Geneen Roth has gained and lost more than a thousand pounds. She has been dangerously overweight and dangerously underweight. She has been plagued by feelings of shame and self-hatred and she has felt euphoric after losing a quick few pounds on a fad diet. Then one day, on the verge of suicide, she did something radical: She dropped the struggle, ended the war, stopped trying to fix, deprive and shame herself. She began trusting her body and questioning her beliefs.

It worked. And losing weight was only the beginning.

She wrote about her discoveries in When Food Is Love, her first New York Times bestseller. She gave huge numbers of women their first insights into compulsive eating and she changed huge numbers of lives for the better.

Now, after more than three decades of studying, teaching and writing about what drives our compul-sions with food, Geneen adds a profound new dimension to her work in Women, Food and God. She begins with her most basic concept: The way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. Your relationship with food is an exact mirror of your feelings about love, fear, anger, meaning, transformation and, yes, even God. But it doesn't stop there. Geneen shows how going beyond both the food and feelings takes you deeper into realms of spirit and soul to the bright center of your own life.

With penetrating insight and irreverent humor, Roth traces food compulsions from subtle beginnings to unexpected ends. She teaches personal examination, showing readers how to use their relationship with food to discover the fulfillment they long for.

Your relationship with food, no matter how conflicted, is the doorway to freedom, says Roth. What you most want to get rid of is itself the doorway to what you want most: the demystification of weight loss and the luminous presence that so many of us call "God."

Packed with revelations on every page, this book is a knock-your-socks-off ride to a deeply fulfilling relationship with food, your body...and almost everything else. Women, Food and God is, quite simply, a guide for life."

Holy Violence

This week, in our Brit Lit I class, we studied the works of John Donne. I've loved his poetry ever since I first read it for my own undergraduate British Literature class--it's so shocking, so beautiful, so different from the poetry that comes before it, especially the religious poetry.

We laughed over his carpe diem poem "The Flea," and we all appreciated the conceits in his "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," but the poem that engendered the most discussion was this one:

HOLY SONNETS. XIV.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you

As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,

Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,

But am betroth'd unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Not every student liked it, of course. But most did. And not just in a "That's an okay poem" kind of way. The fervor of the poem was mirrored in their responses to it. In a world full of bland clichés about God, the idea of someone longing for Him enough to beg for his violent posession holds a strange attraction.

I love classes like that.

Righteous Indignation

I never thought of it quite this way before:

" . . . the wrath of God is a symbol of holy mystery that we can ill afford to lose. For the wrath of God in the sense of righteous anger against injustice is not an opposite of mercy but its correlative. It is a mode of caring response in the face of evil, aroused by what is mean or shameful or injurious to beloved human beings and the created world itself. Precisely because Holy Wisdom cares with a love that goes beyond our imagining, the depths of divine anger are likewise immeasurable. . . . [Divine anger] stands as an antidote to sentimentality in our view of God's holy mystery as love . . ." Elizabeth A. Johnson