The Supper of the Lamb

by Elanor

(finally, as promised)

This post is about depression. Having recently emerged from several months of it, I would like to say some things about what it is like.

Whether or not I can blame my depression on the birth control pills does not matter. When I was depressed, I couldn’t see what was around me. I looked around my apartment, along the roads through Berkeley, and at my husband, and I couldn’t find anything worthwhile. I’ve heard depression described as a fog coming down over your vision; I would describe it more like a decaying of my spirit. I saw the same bright sunlight reflecting shapes and colors back at me that everyone else sees, but I attached no joy to the sight, I did not care to see it.

This post is also about the opposite of depression.

The Supper of the Lamb is a cookbook filled with the spirit of life. It is not, as most culinary books are, a recipe book. Those useful tools help pass on the knowledge of experienced, creative chefs to puling amateurs by recording the ingredients and process of preparing certain dishes. The Supper of the Lamb, by contrast, is a cookbook: it is a book about cooking. And, more than that, I believe it is incomparable evidence that the Bible is relevant to our everyday lives. It is proof that Christianity involves more than giving assent to some abstract propositions, but rather is a transformation of the mind and heart that works itself out in even the simplest aspects of going about our daily business.

The Christian spirit of the book expresses itself in its delight in things. Six whole pages of the book are devoted to describing an onion. This was not a description of the uses of the onion, nor did it cover its cultivation or anatomy. It was the author’s attempt to guide the reader in meeting an onion face to face. It helped me encounter the spirit of an onion.

Why on earth would it matter to encounter the spirit of an onion, you might ask. And the only answer that can be given is: because it is an onion, and nothing else. The Supper of the Lamb helps its readers to understand how God the Father was moved to create the world. It gives us a glimpse of His immense delight and imagination, because it opens our eyes to the individual objects of His creativity. Why did God make an onion different from a shallot? Why are there yellow onions and red onions, pearl onions and green onions—which are different from leeks? Because God was overjoyed at each thing in its own right. God looked at His array of onion species, He observed each one carefully, pointed His infinite divine finger at it, and proclaimed, “This is good!”

When I was depressed, all objects, events, and people in the world blurred together into a drab greyness. The Supper of the Lamb called attention to individual objects in all of their splendid individuality. The opposite of depression, therefore, is delight. It is the enjoyment of particular things—the ecstasy of particulars—that God has made. The Supper of the Lamb delights its way through the cooking of a meal from start to finish. It speaks of everything involved, the cookware, the place settings, the wine, and the cuts of lamb, with an intimacy borne of a long and affectionate relationship—thus teaching me how to look at the items in my own kitchen, and from there, objects outside my house, and from there, the people that God has given me to treasure.

If I go through each day seeing every knife in my kitchen as being its own unique self, if I can encounter the herbs in the pantry with my mind open to learning who they are instead of trying to find the one listed in the recipe book, I am relating to creation as God meant me to when He first presented it to Adam in the garden. And if, miracle of miracles, God bestows on me the blessing of seeing the spectacular individuality of each person I encounter, then I will be on my way to knowing what real love is like, I will begin to glimpse why in some cases it might make sense to send your only Son, so that this one single person, gloriously different from every other person ever created, should not perish but should have everlasting life.