A Taste for Sweetness

Alanna writes about the development of taste in infancy - sweet first, and only later salty, sour, bitter and savory - and how this progression mirrors spiritual growth. -Editor.

I recently listened to an interview of the chef Grant Achatz conducted by Terry Gross for her program “Fresh Air.” Achatz was diagnosed with tongue cancer. His treatments were ultimately successful, but he lost his sense of taste in the process. Remarkably, his sense of taste has been gradually restored, beginning first with sweetness and then progressively incorporating the others tastes- bitterness, sourness, saltiness, and umami. Achatz reasoned that this process followed the basic development of the sense of taste in infants, which begins with an appreciation of sweetness. This idea instantly reflected a few truths to me about the Lord and his relationship to us. It mirrors how the Lord leads us through pleasure.

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Meditate | The Context of our Human Nature

“He chose to be born and in fact to be born into a religion that had sunk all the way down into a hellish, diabolical kind of selfhood, through self-love and materialism. He was born in order to unite his divinely heavenlike selfhood to a human one, in the context of his human nature, by the use of his divine power, so that they could be one inside him. Had he not united them, the world would have ended in total destruction” (Secrets of Heaven 256).

This seems like the quintessential passage for my entire process up until now of learning about the dynamic of the inner and outer self, and how to live from the inner self versus the outer. This passage teaches what the Lord did and it is the task of our lives. This is the reason for being alive—to be sewn to heaven and the Lord the way the Lord did himself. We are that religion, that selfhood built of self-love and materialism, and the Lord uses his divine power to unite a heavenly selfhood to us, to make our human selfhood heavenly. He transforms it.

I love how it says that the Lord’s work occurred in the context of his human nature, which to me means that the Lord can bring about this transformation in me in the very context of my human nature—all of it, all of my evil tendencies, tendencies to be mean, to get frustrated, annoyed, impatient; the context of my everyday living is the stuff, the medium, through which I will and am undergoing transformation.

The Lord didn’t make an exception for himself. He didn’t remove his process, his experience, from the gritty stuff of the context of human nature. That would have made his work pointless and useless. The context is so essential. It is so essential to recognize that transformation happens in your very, current context—in your human nature.   

Meditate | Eventide

“When spiritual people (who are now the ‘sixth day’) begin to turn heavenly (a process first alluded to here), they have reached the eve of the Sabbath. In the Jewish religion, this was represented by the commencement of the Sabbath observance in the evening” (Secrets of Heaven 86).

I am glad to be reminded that evening happens even when we reach the sixth day. We have to go through the evening. It is so easy for me to get caught up in the idea that, “if I’m becoming more heavenly, then shouldn’t things be getting easier?” But no, cycles are essential and there is an evening before the morning of even the sixth day. This is the divine order.

Your thoughts?