Wholehearted Diet

What makes for a good diet? As a child growing up in the days of the food pyramid, I recall that whole grains, fruits and vegetables, meat, and dairy were the core components of healthy eating. My parents instilled in me the goal of eating a balanced meal with foods from these four main food groups. When I went off to college I can remember being a bit overwhelmed though with the dining hall options.

McClurg Dining Hall—the cafeteria at Sewanee—provided a wealth of eating options: A home line with comfort foods like casseroles and mac n’ cheese, an Asian line with made-to-order stir fry options, a grill line with hot dogs, hamburgers, and fries, a salad bar, a sandwich bar, and a dessert bar! This does not even cover the wealth of back up options like a waffle bar, various cereals, numerous drinks, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The fifteen pounds I quickly gained at college were primarily from the wealth of choices, although I blamed it on wanting to bulk up to play college soccer… haha, yeah right! I can remember struggling that first year to make sure I ate balanced, healthy meals. There were even moments when I felt a little bad about not eating enough good stuff. Sound familiar?

In today’s Gospel lesson (Mark 7:14-23) Jesus has some concerns about people’s diets, but not in the way that I was concerned in college. The scribes and Pharisees—well-meaning religious folk of Jesus’ day—had become fixated on eating the right things. They even believed if people ate the wrong thing—something defiled, prepared with unclean hands, or not ceremonially washed—then it made someone unclean or bad. Jesus using basic anatomy outlined that food did not corrupt one’s heart, as it travels through the stomach and into the sewer—not into one’s heart. Even if we think we have surpassed this mistaken idea that some foods are bad, we only need to google diet books to find thousands of dieticians laying out what is good and what is bad. So what do we do?
Jesus challenges us to observe a different spiritual diet, instead of concentrating solely on what we eat. Of course, certain foods may not agree with us. Sure, some people are allergic or sensitive to certain items. Yes, particular foods provide a greater nutritional punch than others. Still, Jesus warns against believing that food makes one good or bad, instead of seeing how the actions of someone point back to the health of one’s heart.

We have all heard of a heart-healthy diet, well what about a whole-hearted-diet? Jesus laid out those terrible behaviors that stem from being corrupted within one’s heart—fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly—but these are not default behaviors. How does one end up acting in such a way? Or, better yet, how does one live whole-heartedly instead of greedily or sinfully? Augustine of Hippo may help us out here.

Augustine was a man who lived his early adult life pretty dangerously. He kept on searching for God in places that were not sustaining and life-giving. Eventually though he found that living a selfish life may have provided fun activities, but it was devoid of any spiritual nutrition! After a profound conversion he wrote, “My heart will not rest until it rests in God.” He succinctly described the way we might have a spiritually rich diet—not by filling up with things that lack any real substance, but by resting in God first.

That long list of terrible things that Jesus outlined for us all seem to be symptoms of the same problem. Today we might describe them as addictions, but all of these negative actions are truly ways that we avoid growing closer to God—ways in which we avoid that rest when our souls rest in God. This is the true challenge of living a spiritually rich life. We must start not with good actions, but with the truth that God loves us first and our souls’ homes are resting in God. Once we reside there our actions will fruitfully stem from that place of immediate and transcendent love.

How’s your diet? Not the one focused on food, but the one that comes from your heart? God invites us to start by resting our hearts in Him. Then, we will discover that those actions through which we sought to fill an aching void (things like envy, deceit, or pride) will no longer be hungering—for God will have filled the otherwise unquenchable places within us. That is how we will have a spiritually rich life by starting with our hearts resting in God.