“We take on God’s dye. And who has a better dye than God’s? Him we will worship.” -- The Koran, 2: 135
A few years back, Roberta and I were treated to a meal at Giorgio Baldi, a restaurant near Sunset Boulevard and the Pacific Coast Highway. It was pointed out to me that Hollywood notables were sitting at the tables around us. Clueless as I was about the identities of these personages, even then I didn’t get it that I we were in a super-star restaurant. Not until I placed on my tongue the asparagus ravioli I had ordered on a whim. It would not be correct to say that I ate that ravioli. Rather, it dissolved into my body in successive ecstasies of flavor, aroma, and texture. If I am what I eat, I was an ennobled being that night.
A few weeks ago, Roberta made an extraordinarily tasty dinner using the Arrabbiata pasta sauce produced by Giorgio Baldi. This sauce is the refined quintessence, the Platonic ideal of tomatoes, not the flawed mortal form. The cost of it is accordingly celestial. At $7 for a smallish jar, it’s not something one could afford to turn into a habit.
And there’s another reason not to make it a habit. This sauce is cooked down to its bosons. It is so utterly disintegrated from its original constituent elements that it stained our dishes, right through the glaze. The dishes were cheap but beautiful “seconds” from the famous Heath Ceramics studio in Sausalito; the glaze was thin, so the sauce seeped in.
A few Sundays ago, at Easter, I stood in line to receive communion with the other members of our church. We received the bread from Reverend Rachel, and dipped it in the wine, and put it on our tongues, and let it melt into our mouths, coloring our souls with kindness. We let divine love get through our skin, so we could be stained with the rainbow colors of holy compassion. “We take on God’s dye.” And the church (or the mosque, or the synagogue, or the temple) is the vat where we soak our souls.
We’re surrounded by God’s colors every day, all the time, everywhere. But often we’re glazed-over so that this brightness doesn’t get in. The fabric of our lives gets waxed-over by habitual ways of seeing and doing. We become tasteless and colorless. Meditative prayer, humble worship, selfless service open up the pores of our souls so that we can receive all the hues of the Holy One. “And who has a better dye than God’s? “