The Five Stages of Gluten-Loss

As most of you already know, Fuego has Celiac's disease... basically this means that her body treats gluten (found in wheat, barley, rye, and oats) like a threat and attacks it (and her intestines along with it), so she can't eat it, drink it, put it in her mouth, freebase it, or really even look at it funny. Thus our home has become a safe-haven for her gluten-free needs and my cooking skills have been put to a new test as I seek new ways to make all of our favorite things and learn what our new favorite things will be (such as polenta medallions with homemade cilantro pesto, fresh grated mozzarella, and sliced tomato -- mmm).

What this has meant for me is that, since Fuego and I generally eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner together everyday (yes, this is uncommon in today's world unless you're independently wealthy or retired... but a family-friendly employer - aka "God" - makes a HUGE difference ;o), I have been almost entirely gluten-free except for those blessed Sunday morning donuts with my church-school class and the blessed Sunday evening pizza with youth group. What I have discovered has shocked me to my very core.

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Since about a year into seminary (now about four years ago) I noticed that my usual easygoing nature and mellow disposition were turning into an inner struggle for peace while my stress levels and blood pressure increased steadily. I blamed it on the work load and having to stop my normal exercise routine -- which doubtless contributed significantly.

I found temporary relief in Lenten disciplines of evaluating stressors and letting them go before they got to me, but these practices -- try though I might -- didn't solve the long-term problem that I was becoming someone I didn't want to be.

By the time Emjay came home to us, Fuego and I had pretty much just accepted that the stresses of constant over-scheduling and heavy workload were something that I could no longer simply absorb without feeling the common effects of stress and tension that most normal people feel under those circumstances, and that I needed to slow down (a bitter pill to swallow, mind you). Still we found that I was frequently grumpy without necessarily any explanation.

About two weeks ago we suddenly realized, when a bout of grumpiness set in, that I hadn't been grumpy in about two months. Although I had been under inordinate amounts of stress at work with St. ECWIW's haunted house, annual run to Disneyland, clergy retreat, and diocesan convention all occupying the space of a single month during which I still had my normal work to do, sermons to write, etc. -- I think this was around the time of my last post about having more to do than time to do it -- I still had been pleasant, relatively unstressed, noticeably NOT grumpy, and had been feeling more like myself than I had in years!

What had changed about two weeks ago? Well... it was our vestry meeting at church that day -- which meant that I had donuts for breakfast, a healthy vegetarian wrap for lunch, and pizza for dinner. Fuego was quick to point out: "Three meals of wheat."

I quickly dismissed the possibility that my elevated base stress levels, irritability, and impatience could possibly be caused by my favorite food in the world (no, not JUST donuts and pizza... but ALL bread, pastry, and bread-related foods!!). But the sinister seed of doubt had been sown, so I took note over the next week.

Here's the shocking part.

On the days when I ate products containing gluten I generally felt tired, bloated, and gassy. I felt irritable, I felt easily stressed out, I was less able to tolerate the normal neediness of my daughter, I felt more controlling and anal, and I quickly felt winded on my morning jog with Fuego.

So I decided to put this notion to rest. I ate whatever I wanted for the whole of Thanksgiving week. I had a bear claw and a chocolate croissant with my morning coffee on Monday, drank beer, ate stuffing, had pizza and donuts, and made an appointment on Wednesday to have a blood test done to see if there was anything to this field-research.

By Friday, I felt tired, my joints ached, I felt irritable, stressed out, grumpy, controlling, anal, gassy, I had diarrhea, I felt nauseous, my head felt cloudy, I felt drunk at the end of a meal without any alcohol, and I skipped my morning jog with Fuego. I basically felt like I had taken up smoking by consuming a pack of cigarettes and three cigars at one sitting -- about what I figure malaria must feel like, really ;o)

My doctor told me that gluten intolerances are fairly uncommon and that unless I was of Northern European ancestry, there was little chance that I would have either an intolerance or even less likely Celiacs disease, but that he would order the tests for me anyway.

As I come from a long line of Vikings, his words were not particularly comforting! Any further "Northern European" and I'd have to be offspring of a polar bear.

So... Here I sit. My doctor says that my test results were negative for Celiac's disease but that I do, in fact, have a gluten intolerance, which can eventually lead to Celiacs, (at least if I slip up I won't be physically damaging my intestines and increasing my risk of GI related cancers like Fuego). But regardless I don't get to eat my favorite foods anymore. I don't get to drink normal beer anymore. I don't get to eat movie-theater popcorn anymore... because someone thought it might be a fun idea to put gluten in the hydrogenated oil packet they use to pop it. And, unlike Fuego, I'm not aglow with the light of a million fairies knowing that I've discovered the missing link to my relatively few symptoms. Plus I don't even get the satisfaction of having a disease named after my condition, so no one is going to take me seriously when I tell them that I'm "gluten intolerant" (and here I always considered myself to be a tolerant person!). What do they care if I feel like shit for a few days; so long as there's no lasting damage, they're off the hook!

Thus we reach the five stages of GRIEF in my process...

1. Denial... Fuego is really the only one who has to give up gluten, I can still have my pizza and donuts every week at church and a beer with friends. After all, I don't have Celiacs!

2. Anger... Hmm... why do I feel so much better when I'm not eating gluten?? Why do I have to take bicarb just to fall asleep after having ONE LOUSY beer?? Damn you, cruel fate, why do you mock me!?

3. Bargaining... I bet it's not really true, I can get by eating just a few things that only have a little gluten in them -- like my favorite tortilla chips at our taqueria that were just fried in the same oil as the wheat tostada bowls... oop... nope, where's the potty?!

4. Depression (my current stage, mind you), where I discover and lament all the things that suck about this. I think the worst is the fact that drinking a single beer makes my head feel cloudy and drunk and then I have indigestion that keeps me up for the rest of the night. (Apparently when you cut out an allergen you become more sensitive to it... *awesome*)

5. Acceptance (I'm getting here, but it's a bit slow). Here is where Jane already is, accompanied by the elation of feeling 500% better than she has in over 25 years.

Don't get me wrong, I really am grateful to feel like myself again. It has literally been years since I have felt so mellow and unstressed, and I know this is going to do wonders for my blood pressure. Plus the joy I feel at being a parent is finally what I always thought it would be (unless I've been "glutened," in which case I begin to understand what used to make my dad rant and rave and shout -- I wonder if he has a gluten intolerance/Celiacs too??). The positives do by FAR outweigh the negatives.

One of the plusses is getting to experience what REAL brewing is like! I will be going to the local feed store to select a combination of grains (rice, millet, buckwheat, and sorghum), which I will soak for a few days until they germinate, at which point I will dry them and then roast them (roasting while the grains are still a bit damp produces a nutty flavor that I'm looking forward to experimenting with), at which point I can finally boil them to make my "mash," from which I will brew the beer (the process will add about two weeks to the normal two-week brewing process). The enzymes present in barley grains that help to convert the starch into usable sugars during the boiling process are less in the non-gluten containing grains, so I'll be using about twice as much ingredient (roughly 10-15 lbs of grains for a single batch). What this boils down to (sorry), is that I'm going to need a bigger pot, a roasting pan, a book on "all grain" brewing, another book on gluten-free brewing, and a bit more patience than previously needed. The end result will likely take a bit of time to perfect, but I'm really looking forward to taking the next step in my brewing mastery!

Some major life changes are present at the Garnabus and Fuego household this Christmas season. What I can say with complete honesty is that we're both feeling better, healthier, more energetic, and more like ourselves than we have in years -- and it has done wonders for our little family in more ways than I have time or decency to mention in a public forum ;o)

Chocolate Rain

Ever come together over a song that is just so lame and ridiculous that you have to listen to it time and again?

Some-of-the-time-girlfriend was over last week and we discovered Chocolate Rain. Just one of those YouTube treasures waiting to be unearthed, this song will make you laugh, cry, and tear out your hair as it gets stuck in your head and plays over and over and over again -- but just the chorus since the verses are far too numerous and diverse to leave a lasting impression.

The song is about five minutes long. The first time through you'll want to turn it off after about a minute and a half. The second time through (oh yes, you'll listen to it again just to see if it really was as pitifully lame as you thought it was) you'll probably make it all the way through, but you won't know why and you'll want those five minutes back. The third time through (because now "Chocolate Rain" is stuck in your head and you can't get rid of it until you hear it again) you might actually start to make sense of the verses and the song will begin to grow on you. The fourth time through (yes, sadly you'll go back again because now you've been corrupted by the Chocolate Rain at a subconscious level) you'll just download the mp3 and call it a day. Then you'll text message the person with whom you first listened to it... the message will read "Chocolate Rain." They will call you and laugh.

Okay, so maybe this won't be YOUR experience, but it worked for me.

Anyway, enjoy a little "Chocolate Rain"

Gluten-Free Goodness

Just because Fuego can't have gluten anymore doesn't mean that I can't have fun with new recipe inventions!

So for today I have two new ones...

The first is a simple modification of Pamela's Gluten Free Pancake Mix, which is hands down the BEST gluten-free baking mix I've found so far (the pancakes are actually better than gluten-rich ones!). Following the regular recipe, you would add 3/4 c water, 1 egg, and 1 T oil to 1 c of mix. Instead, add the egg and 1T of oil (I use olive), then add 1t of vanilla extract, 2T sugar (I use raw cane sugar), and 3/4 c milk (I use soy). The result is a fluffy and delicious treat with a built-in semi-sweetness that makes them as good plain as with syrup! This morning I added chocolate chips (yum!) and the other day I actually used them to make chili dogs and it turned out awesome! (no, I didn't use the chocolate chip ones for the chili dogs... I somehow don't think that would be very good ;o).

The second is a bit more strange... so if the pancake chili dogs were too much for you, you may want to stop here.

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In a hurry for a bite the other day, I decided to throw a couple of eggs in a pan, but as I wanted something more bread-like that I could wrap around a hunk of cheese, I made some slight modifications. While breaking the yolks and stirring the egg around, I quickly dashed in a bit of milk, salt, pepper, hot sauce, and then threw in about 2T of corn-flake bread crumbs. The result was a semi-bready textured egg wrap that could be folded around whatever -- in this case a big hunk of cheddar. I loved it... so, for once, did Fuego.

As a variation on that theme, tonight I decided to make egg wraps for some tofu-dogs for our dinner. In my typical fashion, I wanted mine to be a bit spicier, so decided to make it pho-Tai by adding in 1T of peanut butter, a generous sprinkling of extra hot cayenne pepper, and some extra hot curry. I beat the ingredients together with some diced Gouda tonight rather than mixing them on the stovetop, and the result was a fluffy, almost pancake in texture, wrap that was browned on both sides and had pockets of melted cheese inside. Jane's was sans PB and spices, but did have several dashes of Tabasco and the requisite cheese chunks.

Contrary to what you might expect, we did both enjoy them ;o)

Sermon of All Saints, Sunday the 4th of November, 2007

Here is this past Sunday's sermon. I've been bad about posting them, but I really enjoyed this one. I'll try to get the rest of the recent ones up soon.

Readings: Daniel 7:1-3,15-18, Psalm 149, Ephesians 1:11-23, Luke 6:20-31

The turn from Halloween on October 31st, to All Saints Day on November 1st is a dramatic contrast. Over two thousand years ago, the parochial superstitions about the roaming spirits of the departed gave rise to Celtic traditions such as the Jack of the Lantern where a turnip or large Beet would be carved out and a candle placed inside so as to scare off the wandering spirits of imps and other wily spirits sent to antagonize and otherwise torture the living. In addition, the spirits of departed loved ones trying to find their way back to the lit lantern on the threshold of the family homestead on the night before the Celtic New Year, when the boundary between the physical world and the spirit world was at its thinnest, could be appeased by placing food outside the door (as well as kept outside by that scary Jack o’ Lantern). One never knew whether the spirit at the door on Halloween night would be a trick or a treat. Most people were too afraid to go outside on this particular night, but those who dared would dress up as ghosts and ghouls so as to trick wandering spirits into thinking that he or she was just another of the walking dead.

The transition from Samhain, the eve of the Celtic New Year, to All Saints Day is a prime example of Imperial Christianity in the Roman Empire co-opting local traditions and attaching Christian meaning to them as a means of easing local customs and beliefs into Christianity. These and other non-Christian Celtic superstitions and practices surrounding the first new-moon after the harvest moon were normalized in the calendar year by the early church in the 9th century under the umbrella of All Saints Day, when we celebrate our communion with and continuing connection to the followers of Christ who have gone before us. All Hallows Eve, as the night before All Saints Day, replaced the Celtic Samhain celebration of the dead with a new custom of feeding the poor, who would go door to door seeking food in the form of what were called “soul cakes.”

While the ancient customs of ghoulish costumes, jack o’ lanterns, and leaving food out for the spirits is alive and well in today’s secular Halloween traditions, the deeper religious significance of remembering our connection to Christians both past and present in what the Apostle’s Creed calls the “Communion of Saints” draws our attention back to Christ on this Holy Day. Yet there is a close connection between the behavior of the wily ancient spirits that give rise to our modern Halloween and Christ as the embodiment of the trickster in today’s gospel reading.

The Trickster is a character from Native American (and other) traditions, who intentionally transgressed boundaries and social traditions as a means of turning people’s deep held beliefs on their heads and challenging the structures and powers that formed and governed civilized society. The Loki character of European traditions mirrors the trickster in spirit form as does the character of the fairy king and the devil (not to be confused with modern references to Satan) in Celtic folklore.

This character not only provided super-human comic relief to stories of morality and stories about why things are they way they are, but also provided important counterpoint to the expectations and social conventions that so frequently needed (and still need) to be challenged in the ordering of society. It is the child that insists that the emperor is, in fact, naked. It is the Native American spirit guide, coyote, who, like the Holy Spirit, has a habit of unexpectedly calling us to a complete change of our lives. And it is Christ in today’s gospel, speaking in truths that challenged the way people thought (and still think), and counseling his followers to turn their thinking completely upside down as a means of challenging the status quo.

It was as much up to Christ’s listeners two-thousand years ago to figure out wherein lay the truths of his statements as it is up to us today. And I very much believe that Christ intended to challenge his listeners with his statements.

Christ lists as blessed those who are poor, hungry, distressed, excluded, reviled, and defamed, but lists as cursed (or subject to woe) those who are rich, sated, laughing, and revered.
In true trickster fashion, there is truth in his statements, though we have to dig for a meaning that may be different for each of us. For my own part, Christ’s words today force me to really look at the times in my own life when I have experienced each of these states of being.

As a starving student in seminary I was often forced to rely on God’s providence. Fuego and I were very newly married. We had rent to pay, undergraduate loans to pay, food to buy so that we could eat, seminary tuition to pay, and books to buy, but financial aid only for one. Fuego was herself just recently graduated from college and had relocated from Arcata, new to the professional world, new to being a wife, new to seminary, and was dealing with the terribly new loss of her father just two months after our wedding (about a month into seminary). For the three years we were in seminary, we lived on an average income of about seven thousand dollars per year over and above my financial aid. At the lowest, our first year, we only made five thousand dollars that wasn’t financial aid, prompting one member of the seminary grant committee in the Diocese of MyOldDiocese to clarify whether that might be our monthly rather than our annual income. There were whole months at the end of semesters where we weren’t sure how we were going to feed ourselves. Yet these years were some of the most blessed we have spent. We experienced community the likes of which we will likely never experience again. We, without fail, experienced God’s providence in the form of gifts from various unexpected sources that came just when we thought we had nowhere else to turn. Though we sometimes scraped by on Top Ramen and Peanut Butter, we never actually went hungry, and we truly felt that blessing of God that Christ, today, pronounces for the poor.

By contrast, the fourteen months I spent working at Intel in Santa Clara, CA before going to work for the Diocese of MyOldDiocese were some of the most vocationally unfulfilling months I’ve spent in my life. While I took the job purely motivated by paying off my undergraduate loans before starting seminary, and while I was incredibly blessed to have been able to do so, the rewards were purely in the pay check. Working long hours at spiritually meaningless tasks certainly brought the woe that Christ describes today.

I look at similar experiences in the roller coaster of life and realize that those times when I have been at the lowest ebbs: hungry, excluded, reviled, defamed, or desperately distressed to my emotional core, the experience of relief from any and all of these has been an experience of blessing, an experience of elation, an experience of the profound truth in Christ’s statement from today’s gospel of the joy and lifting up of my spirit in God. Conversely, when we are at the top, we truly do have the furthest to fall, and great is that fall when it happens.

I’ve never been so sated as after participating in a thirty-hour famine, nor so hungry as after a hearty breakfast followed by nothing for lunch or dinner.

For any of us who has lived to experience both the highs and the lows, Christ’s words, in all their truth, are cyclic, yet I believe the point of them, beyond their profound truth, is simply to challenge our perceptions, to teach us to look at life in a way that turns social convention on its head. If we can do this, if we can find the truth in these statements, Christ invites us, as those described as “those who listen,” to further challenge our perceptions and the conventions that have shaped us and predisposed us to think in a specific way.

“Love your enemies,” our trickster Christ tells us. “Do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” In essence, Christ is teaching us to spin the power balance in a world where wickedness and self centeredness have become the rule. ‘Act in defiance to the powers seeking to draw you away from God,’ he seems to be saying. Those who act out of hatred, and enmity, or seek to raise themselves up by cursing or abusing others live a life empty of God. They are described elsewhere as the “children of this corrupt generation” as opposed to the Children of Light. Instead of allowing ourselves to be dragged away from God by the wiles of the corrupt, Christ encourages us to pity them and to act out of mercy and compassion.

A simple and somewhat silly example is the difference I feel when I’m suck in traffic between joining in the chaos of trying to get ahead at the cost of all those around me versus taking the opportunity to show mercy to those who so desperately seem to be seeking to cut me off, run me off the road, or otherwise force me into a collision with them or others around me.

There are days when I simply can’t distance myself from the stresses of getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible. These are typically those days when I have over-scheduled myself and not taken into account the little unexpected delays, like poopie diapers, that keep me from getting on the road when I had planned too little time for myself in the first place.

Perhaps none of you has ever experienced this, but I’m guessing I’m not alone. You get in the car, promptly get back out to go back in the house for the first of about five things that you’ll forget and have to go back for before you can finally back out of the driveway. By this point, you’re leaving at least ten (or perhaps as many as thirty) minutes later than you had intended. Since you’re running late, you don’t have time to get that precious morning cup of coffee that can make or break the tone for the rest of the day. You’re out of gas because you had some good reason, that now eludes you, to rush past the gas station on the way home the previous evening – and the price per gallon has jumped five cents since last night, adding insult to injury. So you finally get on the freeway now fifteen (or thirty-five) minutes late, only to find that some other late person five miles up the road has given into the intense pressure to run into the guy ahead of him. And so you sit, frustrated, perhaps on the verge of tears depending on how important is was for you to be on time this particular day, and you’re surrounded by other frustrated, rushed, late, drivers who don’t seem willing to accept that you deserve to be allowed to pass through this sea of would-be road blocks more than they do. Suddenly the next lane seems to be moving faster and every car behind you jumps into it, leaving you stuck even though you were ahead of them in the first place and clearly deserved to get over before them. With grim pleasure, you note that theirs is the lane that is closed ahead, but instead of getting to gloat over your new found advantage, they simply cut you off without so much as signaling.
It is in this moment that we are given the clarity to choose between weeping bitterly as we instruct the driver ahead of us with a strategic choice of sign language involving an extended finger, or to simply throw up our hands and accept that the only path to sanity lies in refusing to play by the same rules as everyone else on the road anymore. So in the midst of the insanity, we stop trying to “win,” and simply allow these poor souls to get back over. The trickster Christ, in us at this moment, is given over to mercy when everything around us demands retribution.

Understanding this twist in the gospel, we are finally ready for the truly subversive instructions of Christ that went to the heart of an occupied and powerless people.

Each of Christ’s final instructions was a form of peaceful protest against Rome… turning the other cheek meant that a Roman who used a demeaning backhand as punishment would have to use a palm slap in order to complete his punishment, thereby recognizing his subordinate as an equal… To demand an outer garment of a subordinate was the right of any roman soldier, but to leave the subordinate naked was a social embarrassment and was forbidden, so to not withhold the tunic when the jacket was demanded was to put the soldier at risk for reprimand. Matthew’s gospel also includes walking the extra mile, which strikes at a Soldier’s right to demand that a subordinate carry their pack for up to, but no more than, a mile. By carrying a soldier’s pack an extra mile, the soldier is again subject to reprimand.

By contrast, Christ’s final words in today’s gospel, some of the most famous from the Bible, known as the “Golden Rule” of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” seems somewhat out of place in the midst of these strangely twisted truths, but in essence, they are the new rule for life after we have broken free of the constructs that bind us to the unreasonable social conventions that keep us from honoring one another as children of God. For many of us, this is the “rule” that we most try to live by in our daily lives, yet are constantly at odds with as we eek out an existence in a society and world that thinks more about how to get what we want for ourselves than about how to treat others around us.

So on this day of All Saints, we are reminded by Christ of those who have come before us, who have lived their lives as a holy example of what it means to seek and serve Christ in all others, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to strive for justice and peace, and to respect the dignity of every living thing. We are called into that communion of Saints that, led by our trickster Christ, defies the rules and structures in this world that tear down and alienate us from God’s kingdom and the Good News in Christ that we are each precious and loved by a God who will never stop seeking for us, and who will never stop reaching out to us as God’s own precious children – even if it means approaching us in the garb of the fool to get through to us.

Maybe it’s time for us to try on the wisdom of the fool, the trickster Christ is waiting to be our guide.

Amen.