Capon on writing

If writing wasn’t fun, I wouldn’t be doing it. Not for one years out of my twenty-five as a money-earning writer did I ever make a living out of it. If I were in it for the money, I would have gotten out of it long ago. But I didn’t. And not because writing is such unadulterated fun that every day I find myself chafing at the bit to head for my desk and romp my way through page after page of deathless prose. As I said, every vocation-avocation has its share of drudgery, and writing is no exception. There are, of course, days and even weeks when it goes well. But there are more that don’t: blank pages or blank computer screens are very blank indeed. Beginning a book can be hell; and writing a proposal for a book (writing about what you are going to write – which is not writing at all, but pure hot air) is the bottomless pit.

I have been in and out of the business of writing food pieces for magazines and newspapers; in, because editors like my work; and out, because those same editors moved on to other things. (You learn one thing as a professional writer: you may think you have a dependable relationship with, say the Times or Redbook; but when your editor leaves, the relationship disappears.

Pages 146/7 of Robert Farrar Capon's book, Health, Money, and Love and why we don’t enjoy them.

Dinner party

I wish you well. May your table be graced with lovely women and good men. May you drink well enough to drown the envy of youth in the satisfactions of maturity. May your men wear their weight with pride, secure in the knowledge that they have at last become considerable. May they rejoice that they will never again be taken for callow, black-haired boys. And your women? Ah! Women are like cheese strudels. When first baked, they are crisp and fresh on the outside, but the filling is unsettled and indigestible; in age, the crust may not be so lovely, but the filling comes at last into its own. May you relish them indeed. May we all sit long enough for reserved to give way to ribaldry and for gallantry to grow upon us. May there be singing at our table before the night is done, and old, broad jokes to fling at the stars and tell them we are men.

We are great, my friend; we shall not be saved for trampling that greatness under foot. Ecce tu pulcher es, dilecte mi, et decorus. Lectulus noster floridus. Tigna domorum nostrarum cedrina, laquearia nostra cypressina. Ecce iste venit, saliens in montibus, transilens colles. [Behold, you are beautiful, my love, and fair. Our bed is blooming. The beams of our house are cedar, the ceiling is cypress. Behold, he is coming, leaping over the mountains, jumping across the hills. [From the Song of Solomon) -- Ed]

Come then; leap upon these mountains, skip upon these hills and heights of earth. The road to Heaven does not run from the world, but through it. The longest Session of all is no discontinuation of these sessions here, but a lifting of them all by priestly love. It is a place for men, not ghosts — for the risen gorgeousness of the New Earth and for the glorious earthiness of the True Jerusalem. Eat well then. Between our love and His Priesthood, He makes all things new, Our Last Home will be home indeed.

From Robert Capon's The Supper of the Lamb, in the chapter on staging a dinner party.

The true Host

He has, you see, been willing to take me on as God takes me -- as a risk.  He pays me the supreme tribute of putting himself in my power.  The giver of a cocktail party is a man who hedges his bets and cops out of the dangers of entertaining.  He requires nothing of his guests but their physical presence.  If they turn out to be untempered duds or ill-tempered boors, it is no skin off his nose: They can simply find their own corner of outer darkness and fall apart any way they like.  But when he sits me down at his table, he declares himself willing to let me into his own life.  He puts me into my place; but he also puts me in a position to make or break his party as I will.  It is no small boldness; if you have such friends, treasure them.

Robert Farrar CaponThe Supper of the Lamb

The Great Materialist

There is a habit that plagues many so-called spiritual minds: they imagine that matter and spirit are somehow at odds with each other and that the right course for human life is to escape from the world of matter into some finer and purer (and undoubtedly duller) realm. To me, that is a crashing mistake -- and it is, above all, a theological mistake. Because, in fact, it was God who invented dirt, onions and turnip greens; God who invented human beings, with their strange compulsion to cook their food; God who, at the end of each day of creation, pronounced a resounding "Good!" over his own concoctions. And it is God's unrelenting love of all the stuff of this world that keeps it in being at every moment. So, if we are fascinated, even intoxicated, by matter, it is no surprise: we are made in the image of the Ultimate Materialist.

Robert Farrar CaponThe Supper of the Lamb

God's fingerprints

The "operating instructions" view of the Bible dies hard. Ever since the invention of printing in the fifteenth century, the temptation to see the Bible as a book in the glove compartment has been growing. And now, given the popularity of biblical literalism, many people seem to believe that's the only way to look at it. So much so, that even when some of us do get a glimpse of what it really is -- namely, a story -- we read it as the wrong kind of story. We take it as the narration of occasional interventions by God in human affairs rather than as the mystery story of God's hidden presence as the Divine Suspect behind all of history. We see it as the record of a series of Band-Aids that God put on the wounds of the world, or of medicines that he injected into the body of creation, when in fact it's a record of the fingerprints he's left on times and places to clue us in to the mystery by which he, in the Person of his eternal Word, has always been drawing all of history to himself.

Robert Farrar CaponThe Fingerprints of God

The Word speaks

The Word speaks all things into being at the beginning. But then, when his creatures deface the world by contradicting his speaking (by denying their own natures as he has spoken them), the Word just keeps on talking. At the very instants of their contradictions, without a single throat-clearing or a moment's hesitation, he counterspeaks their contradiction in his same, original voice. In him, creation and redemption are one act; both have always been going on full force in everything. True enough, it took time for Scripture to reveal that gracious gift. But when it's all set down in black and white, grace is its ultimate point. It proclaims that the Word who makes the world is identical with the Word who saves the world, and it says he's always been doing both jobs. No matter how lost the world may get, it's always been found in the mystery of its Maker.

Robert Farrar Capon
The Fingerprints of God

Creative

God makes wine.  For all its difficulties, there is no way around the doctrine of creation.  But notice the tense:  He makes; not made.  He did not create once upon a time, only to find himself saddled now with the unavoidable and embarrassing result of that first rash decision.... It was St. Thomas, I think, who pointed out long ago that if God wanted to get rid of the universe, He would not have to do anything; He would have to stop doing something.  Wine is -- the fruit of the vine stands in act, outside of nothing -- because it is His very present pleasure to have it so.  The creative act is contemporary, intimate, and immediate to each part, parcel and period of the world.

Robert Farrar Capon
The Supper of the Lamb

The King who dies...

The death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus -- especially the Ascension, since it is the final affirmation of the hands-off policy implicit in the other two -- proclaim that no meddling, divine or human, spiritual or material, can save the world.  Its only salvation is in the mystery of the King who dies, rises, and disappears, and who asks us simply to trust his promise that, in him, we have the kingdom already.

Robert Farrar Capon
Kingdom, Grace, Judgment

Robert Farrar Capon and Universalism

"I am and I am not a universalist. I am one if you are talking about what God in Christ has done to save the world. The Lamb of God has not taken away the sins of some — of only the good, or the cooperative, or the select few who can manage to get their act together and die as perfect peaches. He has taken away the sins of the world — of every last being in it — and he has dropped them down the black hole of Jesus’ death. On the cross, he has shut up forever on the subject of guilt: “There is therefore now no condemnation. . . .” All human beings, at all times and places, are home free whether they know it or not, feel it or not, believe it or not.

"But I am not a universalist if you are talking about what people may do about accepting that happy-go-lucky gift of God’s grace. I take with utter seriousness everything that Jesus had to say about hell, including the eternal torment that such a foolish non-acceptance of his already-given acceptance must entail. All theologians who hold Scripture to be the Word of God must inevitably include in their work a tractate on hell. But I will not — because Jesus did not — locate hell outside the realm of grace. Grace is forever sovereign, even in Jesus’ parables of judgment. No one is ever kicked out at the end of those parables who wasn’t included in at the beginning."

Quoted in the (all too brief) Wikipedia entry on Robert Farrar Capon, without any source, unfortunately.

Saving the world

The sad part of it all is that if the world could have been saved by that kind of relatively minor meddling, it would have been--long before Jesus and a hundred times since. But spiritual works no more bring in the kingdom than moral or intellectual ones. The death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus--especially the Ascension, since it is the final affirmation of the hands-off policy implicit in the other two--proclaim that no meddling, divine or human, spiritual or material, can save the world. Its only salvation is in the mystery of the King who dies, rises, and disappears, and who asks us simply to trust his promise that, in him, we have the kingdom already.

Robert Farrar Capon
Kingdom, Grace, Judgement