“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.”

I believe I have reached the age where I start to exhibit charmingly eccentric quirks. Well, maybe they’re not charming. I don’t know. In any case, I think I am getting more eccentric. I mutter aloud to the copy machine at work, I insist on using a wobbly old wooden lectern in class, and I eat the same thing almost every day for breakfast and lunch.

The breakfast and lunch thing started a few years ago when—uh oh—my cholesterol went up. Also my blood pressure. Maybe this had something to do with eating our way through the pandemic quarantine? Stress? Or just age. Anyway, I decided I needed to alter my diet. So these days, I eat almost no meat except some fish, I hardly eat eggs (a good thing for our wallet), I try to cut down on cheese (very hard: cheese is life), and I eat no-fat, no-sugar, no-dairy oatmeal for breakfast and totally virtuous bean soup for lunch. With an apple.

The soup is nothing but beans, veggie broth, and vegetables. OK, there’s a little salt. I say it’s virtuous not with pride but with a sigh. We’re talking Lenten sorts of virtue here. Is it a little boring? Yes. Is it really perfectly virtuous? Of course not. Nothing is. Come on, I’m a Calvinist, and we’re still talking about a food system full of injustices, etc. But the soup tastes pretty good, it’s better for me than a lot of other options, and I don’t really need lunch to be exciting.

Please understand that I’m not making diet changes—or talking about it—to show everyone how very virtuous I am. I have no illusions on that score. I’m eating bean soup in order not to die of heart disease.

So do I feel better now that I’m eating so very virtuously? Actually, yes I do. I’ve lost ten pounds, my cholesterol is better, blood pressure under control. But here’s the point: I have started to craaaaaaaaaave this food. I just got back from a few days of traveling for a speaking engagement, where I had to eat whatever was put before me, and I missed the bean soup. Isn’t that weird? It turns out that, with enough practice, one can develop cravings for virtuous food.

We all know that junk food is designed by teams of industrial food designers in order to respond to and then exacerbate our most fundamental human food cravings: fat, salt, sugar. That’s why we salivate madly when we pass a restaurant and smell the burgers a-sizzling, or when we see a pizza ad at half time and suddenly, and we’ve simply got to have pizza. But it turns out that one can lose those cravings and develop virtuous ones. (Sigh.)   

If you have been suspecting an imminent turn to metaphor, here it comes: In our public life, have we been flooded with the equivalent of industry-designed junk food? Have we been fed a diet of grievance, self-interest, obsession with leisure and luxury, enmity, scape-goating, lies, and the thrill of domination? That was a rhetorical question. Of course we have, and we have developed the social equivalent of chronic heart disease and diabetes because of it. What’s more, even though this noxious brew is terrible for us, we have developed cravings for it. Not only is all of this ickiness clogging our cultural arteries, it is also filling us with toxins. We are sick.

If you have been suspecting an imminent turn to Aristotelian ethics, here it comes: habits get ingrained. Bad ones, but also good ones. So if we want to develop virtuous public character—so that we all crave it—we have to first grind through and practice the virtues, maybe with gritted teeth. After a while, virtue becomes habitual and more natural. After a while, virtue becomes public character. If all goes well. I would add: if we depend on the Spirit to sustain us.

That all sounds great, of course, but it’s so hard. What do we do with our current cravings for anti-virtue public-discourse junk food? I don’t know. Don’t feed the cravings, I guess. Somewhere, deep down, I think we are built to long for the Spirit-fruit virtues: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. I would add that we also long for integrity, honesty, and prophetic truth-telling, since we seem to be suffering from a deficiency there. I want to increase my longing for those things by practicing them together, making them habits. In fact, let’s toss in as many virtue ingredients as we like. Season with prayer. Try to make ingesting it all a daily practice.

Actually, shouldn’t faith communities be simmering up gigantic pots of virtue soup these days? Feeding each other with it, feeding our communities with it? I believe there is an important role for laws that protect the vulnerable from all kinds of abuses—oh, for those laws to work!—but to create public virtue, in which we want to practice the virtues, well, I think that only comes from compelling modeling. Maybe eventually, if we people of faith all work at creating batches of virtue soup, public cravings for virtue will increase.  

This is getting cheesy, and I’m trying to cut down on dairy. So I’ll end by confessing that I still do crave potato chips, pizza, and chocolate. I still eat all those things sometimes, but only at dinner time (mostly). I like feeling better, and that helps me stay motivated. I really, really want to feel better. I want us all to feel better. In every way.

Here’s the recipe for the soup, in case you want to try it.

Nothing-But-Virtue Bean Soup

Start with the 15 Bean Soup packaged beans (found in the bean aisle at the grocery) and soak the beans overnight in a slow cooker. Throw away the little flavor packet. It’s gross. I have tried the 16 Bean Soup beans, and they’re not as good for this. Is it that 16^th bean?

Drain the beans. Now add the rest:

5 medium carrots, peeled and sliced into rounds
2-3 celery stalks, chopped
2 c. chopped cabbage
2 14-oz cans diced tomatoes—I use Red Gold as they really do taste better
            (in the summer, I use some tomatoes from my garden along with 1 can)
2 medium onions, chopped
4 c. veg broth (I make mine with low-sodium veg broth paste from a jar—it tastes better than boxed broth)

Stir it all up a bit. Cook on low for 8 hours. Stir once in a while.

To finish, add

Juice of half a lemon
Salt to taste
Lots of pepper
A couple teaspoons of turmeric

Makes… I don’t know. A bunch. I freeze most of it and thaw as needed.

Thanks to Jennifer Holberg for tolerating the bean-y, cabbage-y smell of this soup at work and challenging me to write a post about it.