Red Beans And Rice And Bishop Katharine

When I saw the post at OCICBW about Bishop Katharine, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, mentioning red beans and rice in a sermon in Dearborn, Michigan, I thought surely that it was a joke, but, indeed, it is not.

From Episcopal Life via MadPriest:

The Executive Council is meeting in a hotel not too far away, and usually when we meet in hotels we're not the only group there. When we met in Chicago last year there was a convention of North American Roman Catholic nuns. This time it's a missionary Baptist gathering. I was walking through the convention center yesterday morning, and some of the doors to the meeting rooms were open. One group was hearing about family ministry, and from another room came a booming voice talking about prayer. He said, with the wonderful cadence of the best of Baptist preaching, "fasting and prayer go together like red beans and rice."

And of course, he's right. Fasting is enriched and made meaningful through prayer, and prayer becomes deeper when it's connected to some kind of fasting. And the combination of beans and rice is significant -- in order to get a complete protein, you have to eat them together -- either one alone is incomplete, and a healthy diet needs both. The same is true for prayer and fasting.

But the more I thought about that image, the richer it became. There's a wonderful irony in comparing fasting to eating. Particularly when you think about the emotional aura around red beans and rice -- it's not just survival food, it's the kind of comfort food you bring out for a feast, like those great and abundant images of the heavenly banquet. In a deeply real sense, we can't know the gift of either fasting or feasting without the other -- the feast that comes at the end of Lent is a greater joy when we've really fasted. The daily evening feast in the month of Ramadan is spiced by the discipline of fasting through the sunlit hours. Prayer is deepened through fasting, both the prayer of desire and hunger, and the prayer of gratitude at being filled.

Then, Bishop Katharine continues on to preach about the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. I'll let you go to Episcopal Life to see how she connects one to the other.

Now MadPriest believes that this sermon is conclusive proof that the PB is a secret reader of OCICBW. Again, stooping to quote myself, I said this in the comments over there, with only the barest trace of irony:

Of course, the Baptist preacher and her visit to New Orleans had nothing to do with the PB's forming the rich image of a heavenly banquet consisting of red beans and rice. It is definite confirmation that she reads OCICBW.

The PB's recipe is surely not for eating.

Yes, please, do not eat the red beans, if you use the recipe for cooking them in the cartoon over there.