A very Special Paella Valenciana

Author: Padre Alejandro Cortés González-Báez  

 

 

Years ago, many of us attended a very large community dinner. One of our members, from Spain, prepared a delicious paella in such a quantity that despite our numbers, we could not finish it all. Fernando Linares who has since gone to reunite with Our Lord, prepared three huge ceramic pots, one of which remained untouched after we were all totally satisfied. We all decide that this third ceramic pot should be given to the ladies who cooked the meals for the teachers.
Unfortunately for the teachers and to the chagrin of the rest of us, we later found out that these good women who had never seen rice in this color or with such unfamiliar ingredients decided that the rice had gone bad and that it was better to give that meal to the pigs, who would not mind its color or its strangeness.
I remember this incident with predictable frequency, especially at times when I notice other incidences in life which show a loss of sacred meaning. From an ecclesiastical perspective this loss has been evident, slowly, for five hundred years and from the perspective of the philosophers, three hundred years. The transcendence of the supernatural has lost its classical meaning and has been replace by cultural, aesthetic and worst of all, economic models.
An example of this is the disgust felt by Jesus when He angrily expels the merchants from the temple: they had transformed the synagogue, a house of worship, into a den thieves, a place for marketing. That incident made His apostles remember a sentence from the Old Testament: “The Zeal of thine House hath eaten me.” God is not offended by commerce; it’s our forgetfulness of Him and our neglect of the divine intervention, of the existence of the supernatural.
Some time ago, on television I witnessed the demotion of a multi-storied building in the city of Pittsburgh. One of the goals of the demolition experts was to avoid damage to the windows of a church a short distance away. The goal was achieved. Was this goal a result of a love for God on the part of the engineers or was it a noble desire on the part of man to protect its manifestations of culture?
Little by little we have been sliding down the slope of the practical, of the pragmatic, of the economical, and we want to tabulate and catalogue the supernatural by those measures and outlines. It isn’t wrong to protect windows and engage in business dealings, but it might also be convenient to analyze our proper attitude before our God, a God who knows so well what is in our heart of hearts, and who nevertheless has decided to stay and live among us, vying for some of our attention and hoping that like a delicious and nourishing paella, He too will not be thrown to the pigs.