[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Pomegranate

The fruit sat on my kitchen table for, oh, a week or ten days. I'd bought 
it on impulse -- something I'd never tried before. I've also never before 
tried a fruit that came with printed instructions. In colour, even.

But there it sat, biggish, hard-skinned, red and rather daunting, until 
Friday lunchtime, when I finally got up the nerve to deal with it. Reading 
the instructions, I lopped off the crown at the blossom end and cut the 
fruit into pieces. Immediately my knife and cutting board shone with 
garnet-red juice. I tasted it: sweet and sharp and full of flavour. I 
teased the beads of seed and juice, called arils, out of the papery 
membranes that enclosed them and into a bowl, stopping now and again to 
crunch a few, the flavour exploding in my mouth.

I thought all of a sudden of Joseph. Pomegranates were as common and 
well-regarded in his landscape as apples are in mine. You'd think nothing 
of picking an apple off a tree and giving it to your mate to eat; no 
orchard-owner would think twice about your tiny theft, because the flavour 
of an apple off the tree, warm with the sun, is a blessing nobody would 
refuse to give. The fruit's so abundant, after all.  I've passed orchards 
in late November with the leaves gone and the tree still hung with red 
fruit because there were so many apples that nobody got round to picking them.

Were there pomegranate orchards in Joseph of Nazareth's time? Did the trees 
belong to owners, as apple orchards do now, or did they simply grow on 
their own? I don't know. Doubtless there's a monograph somewhere on the 
subject. But I'd like to think that pomegranates were to him as apples are 
to us, a commonplace blessing.

I could see Joseph twisting the fruit from its twig and lopping off the 
top, spilling out the arils into a pottery bowl, and offering the fruit to 
his pregnant wife, who smiled back at him, the two of them drawn close by 
the child she was carrying. Maybe Mary took a basketful of pomegranates, 
opened the fruit and ground the arils up, squeezed and strained the juice 
through a rag and used it to dye the wool she'd spun, planning the coloured 
weft of a veil. I could see her teaching her small son how to separate out 
the arils from the papery membranes, the juice staining his fat brown 
fingers. I could see the apostles sitting around a campfire as the Teacher 
talked, opening pomegranates, eating the arils with their fingers, a 
welcome sweet-sour relish to dry bread and grilled fish and radishes.

That land is so foreign to me; I've never set foot there, any more than 
Joseph, Mary and Jesus know my landscape of rock and peaceful swamps and 
woods stretching 'way far, past where the roads end, all the way to the 
muskeg. Pomegranates are exotic to me, while to them they would have been 
as common as sweet corn is to me in August. We don't "do" gazelles; God 
alone knows what Joseph would have made of a moose.

But we share some things: wheat, milk, honey, eggs, cabbage, apples, 
grapes. We share the experience of living near wilderness, with the 
awareness that it's out back there. We share living with extremes of 
weather, even if the extremes are different ones. We share the experience 
of being *in* wilderness, which is different: of living through 
difficulties, loss, suffering. The Gospels make it very clear that faith 
does not make life any easier; quite the contrary.

We share being human. Perhaps that's the great point of the Incarnation and 
those who took the closest part in it, these three people, Joseph, Mary, 
and Jesus. Their humanity shines through the Gospel mentions. They ate and 
drank like the rest of us; their food may have been different from ours, 
but not that different. Mary knew how late pregnancy throws your balance 
off. Joseph knew how a baby's kick feels when you've put your hand on your 
wife's distended belly.  Jesus knew the taste of cold water and the ache of 
fatigue and the pangs of hunger. God's been here with us; he knows what 
it's like.

And now I know pomegranates. I know what they look like, inside and out; 
I've tasted the fruit. I've stained my fingers with the juice, the same 
colour as my garnet ring (the word "garnet" comes from "pomegranate", I 
learn). I've brought a small part of their life, something ordinary to 
them, into my life: sweet-sour, crunchy, cool, refreshing.

******************

I'm about to hit some sacred cows, and they moo so badly. -- Phyllis 
Tickle, aka The Divine Miz T.