Being a city girl, there are just some things about life and Nature that don't always connect. There's a certain knowledge that comes from experience, and it's one of those things as we work towards living healthier lives - mind, body and spirit - we need to understand. Specifically it means getting our hands dirty, playing in the mud, running through the trees, growing our own fruits and vegetables...feeling that connection to our home and our Creator. Not living in such artificial urban environments, which produce artificial relationships, projects, everything...you name it.
This week's spiritual meditation is on Vayikra 2 (Leviticus 2). It's a short chapter that deals with the instructions for how the Hebrews were to give a grain offering. Firstly, when you give a grain offering of fine flour, you pour oil on it and lay frankincense on it. A portion is burned for a memorial. Secondly, you can offer a grain offering baked in an oven or a pan, has to be with fine flour and mixed with oil. No yeast. Thirdly, you can present a grain offering baked in a covered pan. It has to be made with fine flour and oil and is actually the most holy of the offerings (Interesting). If you make a grain offering as a tithe of your first fruits - so something not beaten into a fine flour - it has to be green heads of grain, roasted on fire, beaten from full heads of grain, you lay frankincense on it.
Special Note - When you offer a grain offering - it has to always be seasoned with salt, no honey can be burned with it and no yeast. Got it! Sounds simple right?
One thing we need to remember when we read Vayikra is that the Hebrew tribes that this was directed to lived very agrarian, rural lives. They were connected to the earth and lived off the land. As we discussed last week, giving an offering is about making a sacrifice on a physical level and a spiritual level. It's something you do because you want to - you're not coerced into it. It requires a certain level of maturity where you are not just thinking about yourself. The world does not revolve around you. The metaphysics of this grain offering can be decoded pretty simply by understanding what goes into harvesting grain and making it into a flour.
The answer is ALOT OF HARD WORK!
We found this cool blog site called Gluten Free Girl. She wrote this fab article on an Ethiopian grain staple food called tef. Check this out:
Teff (also spelled tef or t’ef) is the staple grain of Ethiopia. Packed with protein, calcium, and iron, tef is also one of the gluten-free grains, along with amaranth, buckwheat, millet, and quinoa. In fact, one cup of cooked tef contains as much iron as the USDA recommendsfor adults in one day. It’s nutritionally rich because most of the grain is made up of bran and germ, where the nutrients live. The whole grain is made into flour. It takes 150 teff grains to equal the weight of a single wheat grain. The name, in Amharic, means “lost,” perhaps because each individual grain of tef is so small that, if dropped on the floor, it would be lost. Perhaps this explains why it’s so soft in the mouth, almost melting away immediately.
Teff was almost lost to the world. Grown exclusively in Ethiopia for thousands of years, teff was cultivated by Coptic Christians in Ethiopia. Isolated by their geography and religion from the rest of Africa, the teff farmers did not trade their grain, which is also quite labor intensive to grow.
The meditation for this week centers on a couple of questions.1. How does Grain Become Fine Flour?
Any grain offering that was baked had to be made with fine flour in order to be a sweet offering to Yahweh. Think about that process and how that relates to our lives. In essence how do we become fine flour? How do we become the best we can be in our personal relationships, in our work, with our individual gifts and talents? What kind of work does it take to get to that spiritual place where we become like a teff - full of life-giving properties that nourish those around us.
Watch these short little videos on how grain is turned into fine flour? I mean it's labor-intensive and hard.
Grain and Flour In Ethiopia
Ethiopia's Stape Food Teff Gains Popularity Across The World
2. What is grain and why is it important to our diet? One thing to think about when you read this chapter, is the focus on nutrition, life giving properties. Even, the presence of oil placed on the grain offering. In the Hebrew metaphysics, oil has to do with the spirit, which gives life.
Teff, for example, is amazingly rich in iron. Iron is an essential mineral for our life and for our blood. Our whole physical body's life depends on getting iron.
"Iron is a part of all cells and does many things in our bodies. For example, iron (as part of the protein hemoglobin) carries oxygen from our lungs throughout our bodies. "
Also a grain of teff is so small that if you dropped it you wouldn't be able to find it. So imagine, you eat just a small cup of this grain, and it has everything you need to function and be healthy for a whole day.
Green heads of grain/teff
3. Another interesting tidbit is that with the grain offering, the grain offering baked couldn't be made using yeast or be fermented. Yeast makes bread rise or gives it a sour taste. Yeast represents things that make life sour....most notably our pride which can often rise to the surface, and of course causes problems in small ways and big ways.
To kind of put this whole chapter in perspective, you may want to try injera. It's a yeast-risen flat bread. It's got kind of a sour taste and is a bread that can be made from the teff grain. It's really delish though.
This week - go try some Ethiopian food and understand that the sweetest offering and most holiest offering, you can make to your Creator is the hard work you put into every task of your life no matter how big or small that comes from a willing and humble heart and gives life not destruction to those around you.
Food for thought eh?
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