Here We Go Again

Back in the same coffee shop, and I've been confronted with a similar experience.

This time, the dear friend I brought along purchased a small piece of dark chocolate. Small in the interest of quality without exorbitance of price, and also in the interest of preventing overindulgence. 80% cacao was not intended to be consumed gluttonously.

My friend offered me a taste, and I broke off a square inch of the artful brick. Familiar with the experience of intense cacao, I put the whole thing in my mouth. One does not chew this as milk chocolate. The latter is a treat of immediacy. One bites into milk chocolate to chew, taste, and enjoy the creamy sweetness. And oh, I do enjoy that!

But dark, bitter chocolate is a different animal. It's a more careful treat. It's meant for precision, intensity and patience more than immediate gratification. One must wait for it. One must allow time for the chocolate to melt, even to be partially digested, before swallowing. This process brings out the flavor, the sweetness. In patience, the bitterness is made into beauty.

It took a while for me to learn this. I used to bite into dark chocolate, chew, and swallow right away. Such an approach yields almost no flavor, and thus no pleasure. Today, I exercised the patience to let the square slowly dissolve in my mouth, swallowing bit by bit. Delight abounds.

Even as I write this, I find myself cringing at words like "digest" and "swallow" and "saliva" (not that I used it before this, but it inevitably comes up in the mind). This only makes me think more. How true is is that we must experience ickiness, revulsion, even pain, to find a greater revelation of beauty? Scripture gives examples of refining souls by fire (Zechariah 13:9), a terrible process through which creatures are made more like their creator, more beautiful.

I seek in every entry to write something that more fully explains why I chose such a ridiculous title for my blog. For those wondering why I keep writing about beauty in food, know that I frequently experience worldly goods that prod me to think of heavenly realities. More often than not, these goods come in the form of food and drink. Thank you, gracious God, for the pedagogical wonders of food and drink!