LONG FORM: The Carrot, the Onion, and the Pomegranate

This food is adequate to our need

Long Form features spill out a little more slowly, making possible a deeper encounter with the essay’s central themes—and with the author, too. Pour a cup of coffee, settle in, and enjoy. It will be worth your while.

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One of the first events I experienced as a new Geneva faculty member was the retirement of psychology professor Dr. Paul Holland, who had a long fruitful career as a classroom teacher and counselor. On the day I have in mind he was clearing out his office and needed help. He handed me the typescript of his doctoral dissertation and told me to throw it in the dumpster. I do not know how he was feeling about this purge but thirty years later the memory of that experience still strikes me to the heart. It seemed somehow wrong to do what he asked, but I obeyed.

Now I have thrown the typescript of my doctoral thesis into the recycle bin in preparation for my own retirement. It and nearly all my papers, files, course binders, and books must go. It is not possible to take them home. I am saying goodbye to my inanimate friends, a necessary but difficult goodbye, one that calls forth reflection.

This past year Geneva graduate and filmmaker Andrew Calvetti asked me to work on a film project with him. I played what he called a version of myself as he imagined me. I was a mysterious figure in a long purple velvet gown, sitting in a kind of fantastic setting, preparing a young man to travel the journey perilous. In preparation for this scene Andrew commissioned artist Nathaniel Taylor to make three visual works to adorn my “room.” These three works are patterned on the iconic tradition. With gold-toned backgrounds, they are otherworldly images of a carrot, an onion, and a pomegranate. Like saint icons, each picture names the figure pictured. Here the iconic carrot is “fugitivus,” which is “the fugitive, deserter, the runaway slave.” The onion is “servus,” which is the “servant” or “slave,” as in “your humble servant.” And the pomegranate is “suavitatus,” which is “attractiveness” and “sweetness.” It is these iconic images, Andrew thought, that best capture my teaching legacy. These “icons” have prompted me to reflect on what these images capture.

The Carrot

Every Geneva student since 2003 has taken HUM 103: Invitation to the Humanities. In the second week of each semester I have called students into a life of adventure. It is during this hour that I offer students a carrot.

To begin they hear directly from J.R.R. Tolkien who, in speaking of adventure in “On Faerie Stories,” reminds us there are real prohibitions that must not be transgressed: “Even Peter Rabbit was forbidden a garden, lost his blue coat, and took sick.” This simple story, in which the eating of forbidden vegetables constitutes an egregious act, captures something foundational to all my teaching: the very bad news of our human condition. We have all violated prohibitions.

In Confessions Augustine laments that as a young person he tried to get along in life without understanding the human condition. As a bishop he believes he must look unflinchingly at the human situation. Without honest examination, self-deception prevails. So he writes,

I intend to remind myself of my past foulnesses and carnal corruptions, not because I love them but so that I may love you, my God. It is from love of your love that I make the act of recollection. The recalling of my wicked ways is bitter in my memory, but I do it so that you may be sweet to me, a sweetness touched by no deception. . . .

It is essential that he and all his readers “reflect on the depth from which we have to cry to you.” And thus I have tried to break through the notion that being “nice” and “positive” and full of “self-esteem” capture what it means to be a good human being. I have tried to help myself and students see with Flannery O’Connor that a good man is in fact very hard to find.

In short, we are in serious trouble. We have gone into Mr. McGregor’s garden, we have stayed at the ball past midnight, we have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We have descended into a kind of unreality where with Augustine we have become a vast problem to ourselves. This diagnosis is cause for despair. The icon of the carrot, however, represents the grace that calls us fugitives home.

I have read to all Geneva students Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runaway Bunny. In this classic tale we meet a little bunny who is, for reasons unknown to us, very angry with his mother, so angry that he threatens to run away. He says he is going to run away to a trout stream, to a high mountain, to a hidden garden. He will become a bird, a sailboat, a trapeze artist. But with each threat the mother bunny patiently explains how she will run after him and find him, for he is her little bunny. When the bunny says that he will become a little boy and run into a house, the mother bunny says, “I will become your mother and catch you in my arms and hug you.” The anger finally drains away from the bunny, who says, “Shucks, I might just as well stay where I am and be your little bunny.” His mother responds, “Have a carrot.” 

Students learn that I call my children “Bunny” even now, when they have children of their own. Students understand that this little book showed me and my children what it was going to mean for me to be their mother and for them to be my child. It meant forgiveness and fidelity. It meant grace.

This story of grace comes more forcefully to us later as we watch the film Wit. In this film we observe English Professor Vivian Bearing dying of cancer after apparent academic success—but success that has led to a life misspent, marked by a view that one can conquer and control knowledge and win a fierce competition with colleagues.

Near the end of her life, when she is inarticulate with pain, Vivian receives her only visitor. Her old teacher Professor Ashford gets into bed with Vivian and cradles her as best she can. She asks Vivian if she would like to hear one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, Vivian’s academic specialty. Vivian groans, “No.” As it happens Professor Ashford is on the way to her great grandchild’s fifth birthday party. She pulls out the gift she is taking: a copy of The Runaway Bunny. She gently reads a little to Vivian, and murmurs, “Look at that. A little allegory of the soul. Wherever it hides, God will find it.” Indeed, if the Triune God does not come after us, embrace us with his right arm, and offer us a carrot then we are done for. We will be runaways with the circus, always hoping for a more successful show in the next town. What students need to know is that their God has found them, come after them, and prepared a welcome. A carrot awaits.

The Onion

I have frequently taught an English capstone course in which I teach Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. J.I. Packer, a reformed theologian in the Anglican tradition, makes the bold claim in The Gospel in Dostoevsky that in the pages of Dostoevsky “a supersensitive giant of the imagination projects a uniquely poignant vision of the plight of man and the power of God. If it makes you weep and worship, you will be the better for it. If it does not, that will show that you have not yet seen what you are looking at, and you will be wise to read the book again.” He fleshes out his point:

Dostoyevsky is to me both the greatest novelist, as such, and the greatest Christian storyteller, in particular, of all time. His plots and characters pin-point the sublimity, perversity, meanness, and misery of fallen human adulthood in an archetypal way matched only by Aeschylus and Shakespeare, while his dramatic vision of God’s amazing grace and of the agonies, Christ’s and ours, that accompany salvation, has a range and depth that only Dante and Bunyan come anywhere near. Dostoyevsky’s immediate frame of reference is Eastern Orthodoxy and the cultural turmoil of nineteenth-century Russia, but his constant theme is the nightmare quality of unredeemed existence and the heartbreaking glory of the incarnation, whereby all human hurts came to find their place in the living and dying of Christ the risen Redeemer.

While I know that Dostoevsky has serious blind spots that I cannot ignore, I agree with Packer. I too would describe Dostoevsky’s work in these grand terms, which makes it perhaps surprising that one of the central images of The Brothers Karamazov is the humble onion. For this image Dostoevsky draws on Russian folklore.

In the novel the atheistic opportunist Rakitin brings the grieving Alyosha to see Grushenka, an orphan who has made her own way in the world and who for a variety of reasons does not have the respect of a suspicious community. Her general posture has been one of spite in the face of societal rejection. Consequently she has been seeking to toy with the monkish Alyosha. In his grief he comes, vulnerable to her seduction as she sits on his lap. But when she learns Alyosha’s beloved Father Zosima has just died, she leaps up. She comes to her senses: “Lord, but what am I doing now, sitting on his lap!” Alyosha says to Rakitin, “did you see how she spared me? I came here looking for a wicked soul—I was drawn to that because I was low and wicked myself, but I found a true sister, I found a treasure—a loving soul . . . She spared me just now . . . I’m speaking of you, Agrafena Alexandrovna. You restored my soul just now.” It is then Grushenka recalls the folk tale of the onion.

In the fable a wicked woman without one good deed is taken by the devils and thrown into the lake of fire. Her guardian angel wonders what good deed of hers he could remember to tell God. Finally he remembers! Once she pulled an onion out of the ground and gave it to a beggar. God tells the angel to take that onion, hold it out to her in the lake of fire, and let her hold it. Then the angel is to pull her out of the fire. If she holds onto the onion she can go to paradise. If the onion breaks she will stay in the fire. So the angel holds out the onion to her and tells her to hold on while he pulls. As he pulls, other sinners hold onto her, hoping to be pulled out as well. But the wicked woman kicks them away, yelling that it is her onion, not theirs. When she utters these words, the onion breaks and the woman falls back into the fire where she is to this day.

After telling the tale, Grushenka says to Alyosha, “I myself am that wicked woman.” But of course she has just offered Alyosha an onion. Her small gesture of leaping up and taking on his grief has brought Alyosha back to his senses, and he offers his own onion. She responds, “See what a wicked bitch I am, and you called me your sister!” This exchange of onions, small but deeply significant gestures rooted in love, is transformative for them both. Grushenka begins a long hard journey toward faith, and Alyosha goes to Zosima’s funeral, where he rises “steadfast for the rest of his life.”

Some readers of Dostoevsky critique this aspect of his work—his emphasis on the small gesture rather than an emphasis on large systems in need of radical change. As a young man Dostoevsky was passionately opposed to Russian serfdom. He became a radical willing to shed blood. Found out, he spent ten years in Siberia, four of them at hard labor in shackles, for his commitment to large social change. In his journalistic work particularly he addresses large issues, for example regarding criminal justice and censorship of the press. But he thinks large reform will always go horribly wrong apart from a humble faith in the God Man. The foundation of societal reform must begin with the small gestures of love that by grace change hearts so they can turn toward the good. Dostoevsky asks, Do you seek societal change? Can you spend one hour a week teaching a peasant child to read?

Under Dostoevsky’s influence I have focused on the small gesture, most foundationally the gesture of blessing. I was not trained in a tradition that practices blessing much beyond the pastoral benediction at the end of a service. But as I have been drawn into Anglican spirituality and worship, blessing has become central to my thinking and practice. The most basic practice is the exchange, “The Lord be with you!” Then: “And also with you!” It is with this exchange that I begin to teach students about the profundity of mutual blessing. As they seem open I invite them to practice on me! I explain how much I need their blessing if I am going to teach them well. I try to get them to see that they are priests who bless, who use the small gesture to build up others so they may live.

Blaise Pascal writes, “Do small things as if they were great, because of the majesty of Christ, who does them in us and lives our life, and great things as if they were small and easy, because of his almighty power.” In another pensée, Pascal says, “The slightest movement affects the whole of nature; one stone can alter the whole sea. Likewise, in the realm of grace, the slightest action affects everything because of its consequences; therefore everything matters.”

This is my message to myself and my students: Either everything matters, or nothing matters. Either everything is related to everything else or there is no possibility of any real relationship. I argue that everything matters; indeed there is a superabundance of meaning in the cosmos. So much so that even the smallest gesture has the potential to carry a meaning far beyond human intent or imagination. All our studies, all our efforts must be premised on the Lord who holds all things together by the word of his power. In such a reality onions matter.

The Pomegranate

After I had been teaching for some years I decided I needed further education, so I went to seminary. As I was planning my doctoral project my advisor said he wanted me to study beauty and to focus on the Song of Songs. He knew me well and sought my good; I accepted this direction. My project explored how I might teach students about beauty, and out of this work, “the beauty class” was born.

One might argue that with the pressing needs of modern life beauty is a luxury students can pass over when it comes to education. Dostoevsky considers with all seriousness whether young people need a theologically founded engagement with beauty. He concludes that such engagement is not optional.

In The Brothers Karamazov seventeen-year-old Markel says, “there was so much of God’s glory around me: birds, trees, meadows, sky, and I alone lived in shame, I alone dishonored everything, and did not notice the beauty and glory of it at all.” As he lay dying Markel says, “My life is coming to an end, I know and sense it, but I feel with every day that is left me how my earthly life is already touching a new infinite, unknown, but swift-approaching life, anticipating which my soul trembles with rapture, my mind is radiant, and my heart leaps joyfully. . . .” He wonders how he could have lived all these years “getting angry, and not knowing anything.” Making confession to God, to people, and to the very creation, he dies humbled but joyful, leaving a lasting impression on his younger brother, who years later will become the beloved Father Zosima.

Dostoevsky also introduces young Ivan, who has recently left university. Brilliant, Ivan is also morose and reserved. Having absorbed Western ideas, he is losing touch with the Christ of Russian Orthodoxy. He is descending into a dark nihilism; visions of suffering children threaten to overwhelm. “I want to be there,” Ivan tells his brother Alyosha, “when everybody suddenly finds out what it was all for. All religions in the world are based on this desire, and I am a believer. But then there are the children, and what am I to do with them?”

Dostoevsky warns young people that without a deep faith in the beauty of Christ, and a deep sense of the beauty of his creation, they are in great peril. Without this faith they run the risk of becoming dangerous—even deadly—nihilists.

There are many texts that can help young people engage that Beauty so ancient and so new, but the Song of Songs is premier among them. Rabbi Akiba argues, “All the Scriptures are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.” If Rabbi Akiba is correct, the Song is a truly glorious thing: the one place in all the Scriptures where we see the Beloved and the Lover saying “Yes!” to one another with equal power and delight. The Song trains us to imagine ourselves in the intimacy of the Holy of Holies saying “Yes!” to our God, to one another, and to the creation. In this way the Song helps to heal our expulsion from Eden and “to repair the ruins of our first parents.”

In her commentary on the Song, Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis affirms that the Song is about the love between us and God while reminding us that the Song has multiple levels of meaning: 

Far from being a secular composition [like other ancient Near Eastern love poetry], the Song is profoundly revelatory. Its unique contribution to the biblical canon is to point to the healing of the deepest wounds in the created order, and even the wounds in God’s own heart, made by human sin. Most briefly stated, the Song is about repairing the damage done by the first disobedience in Eden, what Christian tradition calls “the Fall.”

She goes on,

The thing that intrigues and embarrasses us about the Song—precisely the fact that its language is so private—is surely also the key to its unique value. The Song is the strongest possible affirmation of the desire for intimate, harmonious, enduring relationship with the other. The fact that it is found within the canon of scripture suggests that genuine intimacy brings us into contact with the sacred; it is the means through which human life in the world is sanctified. No generation has stood more in need of that affirmation than does the present one. Our world is groaning under the burdens of instantaneous contacts and temporary relationships, high mobility, commitments lightly undertaken and readily set aside. Too many souls are stunted, arrested in permanent adolescence. Could it be that the cultivation of real intimacy is the greatest social and spiritual challenge of our time?

Jonathan Edwards gives us rich but accessible language for the intimacy at the heart of all reality. In The Nature of True Virtue, he describes God’s “cordial consent.” God from all eternity says “yes” to himself. It is this resounding triune delight that is Beauty. And it is this God who cordially consents to all being, including us. God has whispered to us a warm yes, and he has made a way for us to say yes back, not only to him but to others and to all creation.

In The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis takes us to Revelation 2:17: “‘To him that overcometh I will give a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.’ What can be more a man’s own than this new name which even in eternity remains a secret between God and him? And what shall we take this secrecy to mean? Surely, that each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the divine beauty better than any other creature can.”

According to Edwards this intimacy, captured in the shared knowledge of our secret name, will deepen and expand through all eternity. In his Miscellany #1948, Edwards writes,

How soon do earthly lovers come to an end of their discoveries of each other’s beauty; how soon do they see all there is to be seen! . . . And how happy is that love, in which there is an eternal progress in all these things; wherein new beauties are continually discovered, and more and more loveliness, and in which we shall forever increase in beauty ourselves; Where we shall be made capable of finding out and giving, and shall receive, more and more endearing expressions of love forever: our union will become more close, and communication more intimate.

The pomegranate of the Song thus bursts open, exposing countless jewel-like seeds, seeds full of sweet, life-giving beauty and the promise of evermore attractive fruit to come.

In this day we are standing before a generation of students more sad, more lonely, more anxious, more depressed, more suicidal, more truly at sea than we have seen in living memory. What food can we possibly give them adequate to their need? I have sought to serve them the carrot, the onion, and the pomegranate. The carrot provides the reality of grace, of recovery from their fugitive brokenness. The onion provides a model for humble service. And the pomegranate provides the grand vision, a vision of intimacy and beauty, of attractive sweetness, open to students now and for all eternity, the vision which makes their healing and calling sure.

Shirley Kilpatrick is Professor of English and Humanities at Geneva College.