AUGUST 26, 2007

For support last night I had sliced tomatoes that I popped into the broiler with some Parmesan cheese and garlic sprinkled on top. For lunch I had tomato quarters in a vinegarette dressing. For breakfast this morning I put tomato slices on an English muffin with a dab of butter. And I just finished a snack of a whole tomato dusted with salt and pepper. For supper tonight, I plan a tomato and green onion sandwich on pita bread with horseradish mustard. I love tomatoes in late summer/early Fall.

For most of the year, what we call tomatoes - that fruit that pretends it is a vegetable - are really pale imitations of the genuine article. They are approxiamtely the same shape - although real tomatoes are always malformed; they are red (kind of) - although real tomatoes are a deep, deep red with many irregular spots on them. The insides are mostly seeds and watery liquid - but nowhere near the bursting juiciness that squirts out and runs down your chin, like real tomatoes. Throughout most of the year, what we call tomatoes are hothouse varieties, mostly tasteless, whose only actual purpose is to keep the memory of honest-to-goodness tomatoes alive.

But in August and September the authentic product arrives - misshapen, miscolored, ripe, juicy and delicious home-grown tomatoes! The problem is, they all arrive at once: everybody's crop ripens at the same time. And after 10 months of wan imitations, there is a superabundance of the real thing. Even to the most ardent of connoisseurs, the indefatigable fan of the fruit, "enough" too easily becomes "too much." A surfeit becomes as much a difficulty as a dearth. In an ideal world, this pendulum effect between too much and too little would even out to just enough the year round. But this is no ideal world.

Nor is our spiritual life an ideal either. Sometimes we feel very holy, very close to God. All of our prayers seem so consoling, all of our liturgies seem so inspiring and uplifting, all of our fellowshipping with others seems so satisfying. But sometimes we feel the opposite: our prayers are empty counterfeits of communication with God; our participation in liturgy is mostly a matter of habit; our relations with others are merely civil just for the sake of convention.

If we find ourselves in the latter half of the spiritual cycle at any given time, it would be good to remember that "what goes 'round, comes 'round" and that if we put up with the hothouse offerings, the home grown varieties are not far behind.

"Do not lose heart; pray without ceasing." Amen.