Fussy Toddlers

I don't know how much you go in for evolutionary biology. But I was comparing notes with another parent of small children this morning. We had both noticed that our children had eaten what was put in front of them when they were quite little pretty readily but now are much fussier. I wondered where we'd gone wrong. My concience was salved by her suggestion that it's natural for children, once they start being able to move around, to be much fussier about what they eat. And that's a good thing. When the child can travel under his own steam, so much more toxic and harmful stuff is accessible and it's good for him to be very discerning and stick to tried and tested favourites. The downside is that your son may wish to survive on a diet entirely made up of sausages, bacon, ketchup, milk, raisans, chocolate, unbuttered bread, ham and shreddies. Even if its contrary to his genetic programming, the boy needs to realise that mum and dad only serve up good stuff (cf. Matthew 7:9-11). We can be trusted not to put poisonous food on the table - or at least, Mum can!

"They're just not ready for it!"

What would your attitude be if someone said someone else wasn't ready for studying a certain portion of God's Word?

I was pretty unconvinced. It's all God's Word and useful and we all need it all, and so on.

But on reflection, I think I'm a bit more sympathetic.

Imagine the Bible as rich, varried food. All of it is good and life-giving, and we need all of it, and a balanced diet. But some of it might be best for breakfast, lucnh, or dinner, or for a snack. Some may be a fine feast. Some is daily bread. We will naturally like some bits more than others. Some bits will be more or less nutritious, or appertising, or digestable. Some might neeed cutting up or mashing, or lots of chewing, or a good long stewing. Some bits will go together with other bits well, or be a nice change. Some might not taste good or upset us. Some bits might be an acquired taste. Some of us will suffer from defficiencies which mean that certain portions would be best for us. We must eat our greens too and not just have suasages for every meal or over-eat on pudding. And so on.

We don't all have to be able to eat everything in one go.

Bread of Life Recap

We saw from (or maybe sometimes "using" John 6) that Jesus is bread from heaven – eternal God made man.

Jesus is bread – the essential, fundamental, staple diet stuff of life.

Jesus is the bread of life – he gives real life, life to the full, eternal life.

Jesus is bread that uniquely does not spoil.

Only Jesus can satisfy.

This bread is always fresh, never runs out and is always freely available.

Jesus will keep us going to the Promised Land.

Simnel Sunday

Since we finished our Christmas cake on 2nd Feb I've been looking forward in hope to a Simnel cake for Easter, but it turns out that I need not have waited so long. If Wikipedia is to be believed, Mothering Sunday has also traditionally been known as Simnel Sunday and Refreshment Sunday. Families would often get together on this day and Simnel cake would be enjoyed in a lessening of the austerities of Lent. I'm afraid I've no Lentern fast to set aside, but any excuse for some Simnel cake...

Civilization at Oak Hill

It was marvellous that yesterday after supper in hall at Oak Hill, port and a selection of cheeses were freely offered round. This has apparently become a weekly tradition on Tuesday night thanks to some very generous first years. Some innovations are for the better. One could almost have been back in Oxford – except there would have been a big old fee to join an exclusive cheese and wine society!

Homemade Cake

There's little better than a good homemade victoria spongue and tea, is there?

Our previous church in London used to have good homemade cake and biscuits at its weekly Mothers and Toddlers group. It was an added selling point and provided a good homely and hospitable welcome. It all contributes to a good atmosphere for friendships and gospel conversations. People would bake on a rota so it wasn't too hard and the church would pay for ingredients as necessary. It was a wonderful way for those who couldn't help with the children's work in any other way to contribute to this vital outreach ministry: the body working together.

I bet any group in your church could use some homemade cake or biscuits. Why not offer to bake some for them? Indeed, your curate could use some....

A taste of semiology

I’ve spent the last 2 days with Jonathan Culler’s introductions to Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes, with a view to thinking about how semiotics (the science of signs, born out of linguistics) might be applied to the Bible and the Lord’s Supper, considered as a (visible) sign.

Semiotics is now used to analyse the significations of any meaningful human activities or systems (codes, art, music, literature, fashion, etiquette etc), and so as a taste of it, here are a couple of its key ideas applied to food:

For a semiologist studying the food system of a culture… parole consists of all the events of eating and langue is the system of rules underlying these events, rules that define what is edible, what dishes go with or contrast with one another, how they are combined to form meals; in short, all the rules and prescriptions that enable meals to be culturally orthodox or unorthodox. A restaurant menu represents a sample of a society’s ‘food grammar’. There are ‘syntactic’ slots (soups, appetizers; entrees, salads, deserts) and paradigm classes of contrasting items that can fill the same slot (the soups among which one chooses). There are conventions governing the syntactic ordering of items within a meal (soup, main course, desert is orthodox, while desert, main course, soup is ungrammatical). And the contrasts between dishes within classes, such as main course or desert, bear meaning: hamburger and roast pheasant have different second-order meanings. Approaching such material with the linguistic model, the semiologist has a clear task: to reconstruct the system of distinctions and conventions that enable a group of phenomena to have the meaning they do for members of a culture.

Culler, Barthes: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 1983, 2002) p59

Reading this stuff makes me hungry!