Brad Sumner is a pastor in Canada, and a student together with me in Portland Seminary’s Doctor of Ministry program in Semiotics. In our program, we read lots of deep and heady books, then comment on them to each other in a weekly forum. In the following post, Brad ruminates on wisdom garnered from Jean Leclerq’s The Love of Learning and The Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture
On Textual Mastication and Being a Sommelier of the Scriptures:
The post where I finally get to use my wine knowledge in the comments on a book we are reading
One of the things that struck me in the reading was the approach to interpreting Scripture undertaken by those in the monastic tradition. Len had mentioned how they read it out loud to cultivate that sense of aural memory. But taking it a step further, LeClercq notes that as monks vocalized these sacred texts, it was kind of “repeated mastication of the divine words… sometimes described by use of the theme of spiritual nutrition” (73).
The vocabulary is borrowed from digestion and eating, but it immediately took me to the notion of how to taste a wine. Let me walk you through it so next time you look like an expert and then I’ll draw the link to textual mastication and being a sommelier of the scriptures.
Step 1 – Assess the wine for clarity.
You want to hold it up to a white or neutral surface in good lighting (restaurants are notoriously bad for this). The objective here is to determine visually and quickly if there might be any faults in the wine. This is the least important part of wine tasting (and please, please I beg of you: don’t get sucked into buying a wine by a ‘cute’ label).
The parallel:
Taking in the scriptures by the eye gate is good, but really has limited possibilities. You need more information in order to fully appreciate the complexity. Doing this individually also has its limits. Just because a wine has sediment or crystals does not mean it is bad. You need help at this stage of the wine community to think about things like natural wines containing haze or sediment or small tartrate crystals that are not flaws but indicate age.
Step 2 – Smell the wine.
This is actually one of the most important parts. Your sense of smell is incredibly more acute than your sense of taste. It also begins to prime your brain for connections – scents or tastes you might have encountered before. This is why you swirl the glass, as contact with oxygen releases the aroma in a dynamic way.
The Parallel:
As we approach the scriptures, there is also this invitation to making connections. What other stories resonate here or inform this text? What else have you come across in your own life, in the world or in the biblical story that might help you make more sense of this particular text? Take your time here. Inhale deeply. See what comes to you from the margins or the third or fourth sniff.
But beware: the nose fatigues very quickly and easily. And it can easily be tricked by chemical compounds (the famous example in the wine world is Yellow Tail Chardonnay. Sorry to rain on Steve and Naomi’s parade, but Australian wine laws are notoriously lax, and so there is a chemical compound in that bottle that makes you THINK that that wine has been exposed to oak and thus bumps up the quality estimation in your mind. This is why the chemist and not the winemaker is the highest paid employee at Yellow Tail)
The nose is easily tricked so beware when you think you have a nailed down connection… keep with the process till the end so you can be more sure of what you are sensing at this stage.
Step 3 – Taste the wine.
But tasting wine is a bit of an art. When I was in putting my way through Bible College by doing tours and tastings in the Niagara Wine region in Ontario, I would ask people, “what do you taste?” The most common answer: grapes (insert face palm here).
Pro wine tasting tip: You don’t just gulp it down. Like the monks, you masticate it. You chew it. You push it around to all the areas of your mouth until you have literally chewed it thoroughly. If you get really good, you tilt your head forward and draw in additional oxygen across your tongue to really release the flavours. (Pro tip: Please practice this at home before you try it in public – you are likely to lose your wine on the floor the first few times :)).
You are now looking for totally different elements in this wine: things like the texture, the weight or feel of it in your mouth. This will tell you about how the wine has been made. Has it undergone malolactic fermentation to soften the acidity? Has it been barrel-aged? Is it a blend? If so, what grapes and in what percentages?
You are also now checking and testing the flavours you expected to find from the nose. Start first with the primary flavour: it will usually be a fruit flavour (for example, strawberry for Tempranillo grapes; Bing cherry for Pinot Noir). Then push yourself to find secondary flavours: maybe another fruit (like both blackberries and blue berries and green bell peppers in a Cabernet Sauvignon from Washington State’s Red Mountain AVA or Guava or Pineapple in a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc grown on a warmer site) or perhaps another flavour like coffee (from South African Pinotage grapes) or slate (characteristic of Chardonnay grapes grown in limestone soils in northern locations like the Champagne region of France).
Then, finally, some wines have tertiary flavours. These develop and amplify over time. A well-aged Pinot can have elements of forest floor or mushroom that come out in the bottle. A Cab can have notes of mint or a herbaceousness that will integrate over time. Rutherford soils in the Napa Valley of California have a dusty quality to the wine that is unapproachable early but is delightful over time. But this takes patience on the part of the wine collector. The deeper flavours also only reveal themselves on the palate after you develop your skills a bit. And after you leave it in the dark, coolness of your cellar for a season. Once you practice, you can begin to isolate things in ways that a novice can not.
Which brings us full circle back to our monks and their treatment of Scripture. They are seeking the FULL flavour of a text and so they apply themselves in deeper meditation than we often come to the text with. Leclercq notes that “to meditate is to attach oneself closely to the sentence being recited and weigh all its words in order to sound the depths of their full meaning. It means assimilating the context of a text by means of a kind of mastication which releases its full flavour” (73).
The sommelier of the scriptures is not content to merely think of primary things. They let it swirl and breathe in their minds until new meanings and insights open up. They sniff out connectivity and layers in things that others only see a superficial simplicity to. And when they chew on a text, they work it over and over, ensuring that it gets into every place of their lives (not only their brains). They do this, not to show off or to become a scripture snob. They practice their craft in secret and in community so that the richness and FULL BODY of the text becomes so delightful that they can’t help but setting the table and inviting everyone over to taste and smell and see what they have come to know: the wine at the wedding of Cana was only the beginning of the story.
