Composing a Life

these materials, around the day and the calendar, have a transformative value. The old Anglican catechism defined a sacrament as “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” I prefer the statement that turns up in some Catholic theological discussions: “a sacrament
effects
what it signifies.” * The lighting of Sabbath candles, the giving of gifts, the preparation and sharing of food—all have the potential to bring about human closeness, as well as simply referring to it.
    When my husband and I visited his family in Beirut on our honeymoon I was frustrated to find that my courteous and highly educated in-laws answered me in English whenever I spoke to them in Armenian. Then, on the fourth or fifth day of our visit, his mother set out to make
chee kufta
, a dish in which finely ground lean lamb is kneaded at length with bulgur wheat, parsley, and onions until the raw meat simply disappears into the wheat. It’s one of those dishes, shaped by their mothers’ hands, that sons go home to eat. Greatly daring, I went into the kitchen and took over the kneading. After that day, my in-laws began to answer me in Armenian, the handling of meat and grain and the sharing of what I had prepared having transformed me into a different person, just as the mother of a new priest is suddenly shy with her son after he has been touched with sacred oils, just as desire becomes holy after the exchange of wedding rings.
    For most of us, the extraordinary superstructure of symbolic meaning created by money—money far removed from its connection with the beads that Joan has studied, or shells or gold, no longer even used for decoration, but instead spun off into mythic systems of abstract debit and credit, leveraged to monstrous proportions—has become a self-contradictory paradigm for the corruptions of materialism. Ironically, the notion of sacrament is both more material and more abstract than the notion of money or wealth. Money, which represents so many possibilities, becomes impersonal as it passes from hand to hand until it is reembodied in the shared comforts and conveniences of life. We have all been lucky in never facing severe poverty, but each of us uses these tangible symbols differently in shaping our lives.
    There are vast differences in the way material tokens are used in ordinary life. Alice talked about the experience of poverty in postwar France, where people would share food and somehow, even during periods of scarcity, the food was tasty and the conversation good. She compared it with life in Baltimore when her father was unemployed, with the focus on those possessions that would not be shared from person to person. “It was very different from not having money in Paris. In Paris someone would always help, but here it was much colder. Even in the academic environment, we’re a little more materialistic and don’t exchange things so readily. People would discuss the prices of furniture or dishes without offering to help. And I thought the cooking was abominable.”
    Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving; Americans often find it difficult to tolerate the level of interdependence involved in carpooling or sharing a laundry room in an apartment building. My efforts to stretch resources at Amherst by promoting sharing and interdepartmental cooperation were regarded as both galling and sinister.
    Specific everyday tasks can be life-giving, binding individuals to each other and to the past. They can also be opened up as areas of choice, becoming the building blocks of identity. The immense diversity of foods and labor-saving devices available in America today have transformed food preparation for the affluent from a survival skill to a form of self-expression, obscuring the basic fact that human survival depends on the transformation of foodstuffs after their original production in agriculture. Almost all of the great staples of human nutrition, particularly the grains, are edible only after processing. In many parts of the world, the growing shortage of cooking fuel is almost as much of a threat to life as shortages of food itself.
    The bountiful sharing of food on community occasions was central in the southern black community in which Johnnetta grew up. The fried-chicken feast that followed the Sunday service forms a single narrative strand with the preaching that made people “get happy,” with the stamping feet and the familiar hymns. Yet, with this enjoyment of festive