Whenever I go to a place, I have the habit of asking people where I can find the best of a particular fare, or the original of a delicacy for which the place might be famous.
Usually I check on the place myself and try the food out. Not infrequently this would take me to the inner city and the port area, places whose resident flies keep me waving with one hand while eating with the other, a difficult hand coordination exercise, but which the gastronome in me considers worth the effort.
The wife and I too have our own finds in the matter, and could give hard information if someone approached us with a similar inquiry. For instance, we were served our best ever egg noodles in a small restaurant that doubled as a stationery store on a side street beside a university. We found the place by accident. With our two small children in tow, we were on our way to the jeepney stop when hunger struck. Of all places, this happened in front of the stationery-store-cum-little-restaurant. Such is Providence.
But discoveries like that are not just of food. They can be of places too. The first poem I wrote was about a secluded beach called “Jones’ Hole,” which a priest, Father Jones, had come across and liked, and which my classmates and I likewise liked and would repair to during breaks, along the way passing under an ancient stone arch, which, according to legend, would fall down if a handsome youth passed under it (obviously no bonny lad had passed under the arch for centuries).
In fact each of us has his or her own dearest things, items valued regardless of their objective worth. Myself I insist on wearing a pair of shoes despite the wife’s comment about their being antediluvian, and in the coffee shop I make a beeline for my best-loved nook, which others avoid for being near the water dispenser, not knowing that the latter’s Alpine gurgle is what draws me to the corner in the first place.
And then, when I fall for another set of footwear or a spot in a coffee shop with a more sonorous Zen fountain, I move on. For always the fickle heart insists that a greater treasure lies in wait some place else.
Is not this broadly the message in Jesus’ parables?
“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls. When he finds a pearl of great price, he goes and sells all that he has and buys it.”
The Italian artist Domenico Fetti (1589-1624) rendered both parables in oil. The first bears the title, “Parable of the Treasure Hidden in the Field.” The second, “Parable of the Pearl of Great Price.”
Fetti was among those who brought Caravaggio’s realism to Venice’s use of colors. In the second painting, a merchant examines the pearl before a table lined with gold and in the presence of others of his trade. In the first painting, a man is about to hide a box in a hole while in the distance three figures lurk.
Apparently, the man in the first painting believes that he has no company except the windblown trees and the overarching silence. Fetti ‘s landscape is the lonely landscape of the human heart, in which ultimately all treasures have their value.
There was a time when I held nothing more precious than the writing of poems. The one about Jones’ Hole, which a magazine published and paid me for, only encouraged me to burn my bridges and pick my way across the field of poetry.
But later a yearning came, a hunger that only God could satisfy, and while the writing continues, I now see the poems in the context of God’s love.
In this I am not alone. The normally irreverent Dylan Thomas declared in the introduction to one of his books that he wrote his poems to the glory of God. For me there is no other way. The best food art can serve is the one offered by the Holy Spirit, the treasure that lies hidden in each of us.