The Theology of the Artichoke

Christine Venzon offers an intimate take on finding spiritual meaning in her father's decline, through the surprising wisdom of an artichoke.

My father is exfoliating. It’s not a pretty sight.

It started one Sunday afternoon in mid-January. My parents and I had driven to a small town about an hour from home. It had a historic courthouse, and we had cabin fever. Dad drove, as usual. The role defined him more than most fathers. Previously, by occupation: he drove a coal truck back when families still used coal to heat their houses; later a milk truck, when they still got home delivery. And always by avocation. Sunday drives were a main source of family entertainment when we kids were young, and Dad never seemed happier than when he was behind the wheel.

After we strolled around the courthouse, admiring the edifice, Mom spotted a sign pointing the way to a Catholic church: church-spotting was a hobby. We searched the town for half a mile. Ranch houses and regular streets gave way to farmhouses and uncertain intersections. “We’re going out of town,” Dad warned. He had a low tolerance for adventure. At an Italian restaurant, he would order spaghetti; at the Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors ice cream shop, the chocolate.

A few long, country blocks later he was growing angry, accusing, “You’re getting us lost.”

Not likely: we’d driven a straight line due north. “If we don’t find it,” we assured him, “we’ll just turn around and come back to the courthouse.”

Doubling back didn’t bring results fast enough. “I don’t see a courthouse! You don’t know where we’re going.” And so on – until the street ended at the north side of the massive stone building.

Heading home, we retraced our route to the highway. All the while, Dad verged on panic. “Where do we turn? Is that the street? Left or right?”

I was seriously spooked. Dad had driven a truck for 36 years, all over town, learning his way around new subdivisions before the asphalt had set. Even retired some 25 years, he never lost that homing pigeon sense of direction.

One night not long after that, Dad disappeared. It was around 11:00. Pulling up in the driveway fifteen minutes later, he reported, “I went to church, but there was nothing going on.” He sounded surprised.

“What did you expect to be going on?” I asked carefully.

He shrugged. “Church.”

Around that time, he and my mom went to an afternoon church function. He was to drop her off and park in the lot. When he didn't show after 15 minutes, they set out in search. Eventually they found him, walking from some unknown tavern a half-mile away where he'd left the car.

We might have seen this coming. He was just a few months shy of his 91st birthday after all. His hearing has been going for a decade and was iffy at best. He’d been giving up his lawn customers, a few dozen neighbors and others for whom he mowed grass, cleaned gutters, planted tomatoes. Now he was down to one, a widow across the alley, a neighbor since forever who was even older than him.

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Last summer too, I noticed signs of disengagement. A gerontologist’s word, and a good one.

Major events hardly seemed to register. In May my cousin died just ten days after being diagnosed with cancer. She was the only daughter of Dad’s only brother, the closest relative living in town. She used to watch my folks’ cat when they were away. They had her over for Christmas and Easter and her birthday every year. Yet I don’t think he as much as sniffled at her memorial service.

In June his nieces and nephews came from Australia; his late sister’s children whom he hadn’t seen in ten years, traveled halfway around the world to celebrate his 90th birthday. Dad enjoyed their visit, the big family dinners, showing pictures from his and Mom’s last trip to Italy. But he didn’t talk about it before they came, didn’t mention it afterward, as if it had left no imprint.

Next year, three of my siblings came for Dad’s birthday. He never asked about their kids or work. He didn’t talk much at all.

Eventually Dad couldn’t dress and barely fed himself. He used Depends more than the toilet. He shrieked and moaned and thrashed when Mom woke him up and transferred him from bed to wheelchair. (An unsuspecting passerby would have called 911 to report elder abuse.)

One comfort: the decline was gradual; by time the worst of it hit, Dad was too far gone to care much.

My father had been a green-thumbed Midas. Our backyard produced a cornucopia, tomatoes and green beans, eggplant and peas and butternut squash. Peach trees' heavy-laden branches were propped with tent poles. The grapevine he planted before I was born grew a shady arbor beside the house; the trellis stretched the length of the yard. From its Concord grapes he had bottled sweet jug wine; Mom canned quarts of jelly. Until I was 10, I never knew that people bought grape jelly in stores.

That spring he took hedge trimmers to the arbor, littering the lawn with soft green leaves and baby bunches of grapes. He'd stood looking at the carnage, just a flicker of realization, too late and mercifully brief, at what he'd done.

The harvest that fall was a sorry one.

I wondered, as people of faith are wont to do: where was God in all of this? I knew he was there; he always is. What was he up to all that time, as we watched and wondered?

The answer, I think, lies with the artichoke.

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The artichoke. A globular green vegetable, its thick, tough leaves grow in tight, tiered rows to resemble a rosebud from Mars. It is in fact the bud of a thistle plant. The leaves, its petals, are its armor, topped with tiny thorns to protect the core from aphids and other assault.

To eat an artichoke, you tear off a leaf and hold it at the pointed end. You rake your teeth across the base, dragging it through clenched teeth, to scrape off the fleshy morsel of good stuff. The payoff is the core, the heart, the tender prize that ‘choke connoisseurs crave.

This is not an elegant maneuver. It can get messy, especially if you opt for the melted butter and garlic. The stripped refuse litters your plate. The technique has inspired an Italian expression, la politica del carciofo, “the politics of the artichoke”: to deal with opponents one by one, picking them off, as it were, until you achieve your end.

I think God employs the same tactic. All our lives he is disarming us like artichokes.

Material things are the first leaves to go. Toys break. Cars crash. Family heirlooms are consumed by fire. But seen with the eyes faith, loss reminds us that these are “only things.” How many families, surviving a tornado, say, “We lost everything. But everyone’s okay.”

With God’s grace, loss can be liberating. Acquiring and maintaining stuff costs – in time, energy, and anxiety. Baubles can blind us to what’s really important. “Until I lost it all in the stock market, I never knew . . . that a family can be happy in a two-bedroom rental . . . that my friends don’t care that I shop at Goodwill . . . how much just being present means to my kids.”

When the body starts to go, it’s a little harder. Physical competence is a point of pride from the time we’re old enough to show off our shoe-tying technique. To be a productive, contributing member, our society demands a functioning body. Living with impairment requires “assistive technology”: wheelchair ramps, TTYs, portable oxygen tanks. It whiffs of neediness, of telethons and charities. Infirmity can be embarrassing. How many people talk about their colostomy bag? How many people want to hear about it? It can also be scary. “The (eyes, ears, legs) are the first to go,” someone says. We sigh and nod, thinking of the many things that will follow – and where the trail leads and ultimately ends.

Yet this loss too offers wisdom, reminding us that we’re more than physical beings. Think of physicist Stephen Hawking, his genius living almost apart from his ALS-ravaged body. Or Pope John Paul II, his zeal for God’s people dragged his crippled body around the world like a parent in a toy store by a giddy child? Or my friend Freda, whose humor and kindness packed ‘em in at her room at the nursing home, despite rheumatoid arthritis that left her painfully bedridden.

So God tears off these leaves too, to show us that our bodies – precious and personal as they are – are not what define us either.

Finally he plucks the leaves closest to our core, that sprawling, invisible nebula we call “the mind”: thoughts and feelings, intellect and personality. Why? What possible reason can he have for stripping us of our inner self, something so intrinsic, we literally can’t remember how we got by without it?

Here’s my theory: losing our minds removes the self-awareness that is the last obstacle between our souls and God. Have you heard that babies emerge from the womb with the vestige of the beatific vision? A baby is the least self-aware of all human creatures, a veritable Zen master when it comes to oneness with the universe. (Granted the womb is a pretty small universe.) But soon, prodded by the outside world, the infant makes the distinction between “me” and “not me.” Pretty soon she’s defining herself by gender and ethnicity and income, self-protective layers of identity.

What if mental decline is just that process in reverse? Suppose that’s the infantilism we revert to, along with toothless gums and adult diapers. Suppose we retreat from this impermanent reality to the greater, ultimate one. Suppose that vacant stare is actually the eyes of the mind turned inward, discovering the divine essence that’s been there all the time.

It’s not pretty to watch, any more than eating an artichoke (especially to the artichoke). But it’s how God gets to the heart of us and reveals it to us. We see our soul and the state it’s in, and get a chance to let him heal it before the ultimate reckoning, to make us fit company for the heavenly crowd.

So what about people who die of sound mind, or quickly and painlessly, the so-called happy death? (Perfectly illustrated by an old priest I knew, a kind-hearted pastor, whose hour came with feet up on the recliner, a bowl of ice cream on his lap.)

I’m working on that. I’m thinking it has something to do with popcorn, but it’s too soon to say.

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Freelance writer Christine Venzon was a textbook editor before turning her hand to fiction and essays. Her work has appeared in general interest magazines and literary anthologies. She was runner-up in the Saturday Evening Post’s Great American Fiction Contest in 2014 and 2017, with an honorable mention in 2021. She lives in Illinois.

Images:

Artichoke and lady bug by Christopher Martyn

Blooming artichoke by Edward Howell

Artichoke close up by Magdalena Raczka

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