Hypocrisy and the proper motive for all our actions

 

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

Chaplain

Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE)

Talamban, Cebu City

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com

IN a number of instances, Christ lamented over the hypocrisy of some of the leading Jews of his time. At one point, he said: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You lock the Kingdom of heaven before men. You do not enter yourselves, nor do you allow entrance to those trying to enter.” (Mt 22,13) And more “Woe to you’s” followed after that.

What in the end Christ was trying to tell us in these instances was that if our motive for all our actions is not love for God which will always involve love for everybody else, we cannot avoid falling into self-indulgence and all other forms of selfishness and egoism which we try to hide. In short, we cannot avoid playing the game of hypocrisy.

We need to realize deeply that all honor, praise and recognition should be given to God alone since he is the source of all good things. If we would just pursue our own idea of what is good, we can only go so far before we end up doing crazy things which we would try to hide or rationalize.

We have to familiarize ourselves with this Latin expression, “Deo omnis gloria” (To God be all glory) because that is how we should articulate our motive for all our actions. We actually are nothing without God. Without God the only thing we can do is evil.

Thus, St. Augustine once said that there is a fundamental choice we have to make in all our actions. It’s always a choice between loving God and loving ourselves in a way that excludes God. We have to make sure that we make the right choice of loving God always.

For that, we have to make some conscious effort to really offer everything we do to God as our way of giving glory to him which, in the end, is what should characterize our relation with God. To be blunt about it, we have been created by God to give him glory, that is, to love him, to follow his will, which is what would make us God’s image and likeness as he wants us to be.

But given our wounded condition due to our sins, we really need to ask for God’s grace and to exert our all-out effort. Perhaps, a prayer we can make in this regard would be the following: “Incline my heart according to your will, O God.”

It’s a passage that is drawn from a psalm (119,36) that expresses a plea for God to guide our heart, our will, affections and desires towards God’s will and away from worldly temptations.

It’s a plea that would certainly help us lead to the ideal unity and consistency of life, one that is lived with God always as it should be. That’s because as God’s creature, we are meant to belong to God. But also, as a rational and spiritual creature, we are not meant to belong to God in a merely physical way. We have to belong to God knowingly and willingly, to the point of sharing his life and very nature.

Thus, when we are not doing things with God and for God, we are contradicting the proper relation we have with God who is our Creator, Father and Redeemer. We would just be living and doing things purely on our own that has no other end but to be in the wrong side.

What makes Sauerbraten so unique to Germany, and why do some versions use horse meat instead of beef?

Volker Eichener

Professor at Hochschule Düsseldorf

Sauerbraten is one of the few remaining dishes from medieval cuisine which can be traced back to Roman cuisine. The typical elements are:

• a sweet-and-sour taste, which was very popular in medieval age
• using a lot of exotic spices like pepper, laurel, cloves, cardamon, coriander, mustard seed, allspice, cinnamon, ginger
• thickening the sauce with gingerbread
• adding raisins (or other fruit) for extra sweetness

Sauerbraten is marinated in a mixture of red wine, vinegar, spices and vegetables for 3–7 days, so it is also a way of preserving the meat. Then it is roasted and the sauce is made from the marinade and thickened with gingerbread. At the end, you add the raisins which swell up to grape berries again in the sauce.

The founder of French cuisine, La Varenne, abandoned the medieval cooking style and introduced modern cuisine. So, he finished the sweet-and-sour sauces, the ample use of spices and thickening the sauces with breadcrumbs. However, in Germany, with its many small principalities, the medieval Sauerbraten survived.

Originally, Sauerbraten was a dish for nobility which was made with venison. For poorer folks, beef became a substitute for venison. And horsemeat is another substitute. Sauerbraten is an excellent way to prepare horsemeat because it complements the slightly acidious taste of horsemeat.

Sauerbraten, Rhineland-style with horsemeat and raisins

BTW, another medieval dish that survived in Germany is Pfefferpotthast, a beef stew with exotic spices.

EDIT:

I was asked for a recipe for Sauerbraten. Here it is:

Ingredients:

1 carrot, diced

1 onion, chopped

1 piece of celery, diced

1 heaped teaspoon cloves

1 level tablespoon peppercorns

3 bay leaves

1 heaped tablespoon dried juniper berries

1.5 kg beef (or horse or venison), e.g. brisket

0.75 l red wine (preferably a full-bodied red wine, e.g. Cabernet Sauvignon)

0.2 l vinegar (preferably balsamic)

Ingredients for the sauce:

additional red wine, as needed

100 g raisins

crumbed gingerbread, as needed

pepper, cloves, cardamon to taste

1 piece dark chocolate

Method:

Brown the vegetables in a little fat (preferably lard), add the spices, stir once, and deglaze with a splash of red wine. Simmer until the vegetables are tender. Then let it cool and add the remaining wine and vinegar. Marinate the meat for 3 to 8 days, refrigerate, and turn occasionally.

At the end of the marinating time, strain the marinade. Puree the vegetables and spices. Dry the meat, season with salt, and brown it all over in fat (preferably lard) in an ovenproof casserole dish or goose roasting pan. Pour in the marinade and the vegetable and spice purée. The meat should be about half submerged in the marinade; add more red wine if needed. Cover and braise in the oven at 140°C (top and bottom heat is better than fan-assisted) for at least three, preferably five hours. Turn the meat occasionally.

One hour before the end of the cooking time, add the raisins, gingerbread, and chocolate. When the meat begins to fall apart, remove the pan from the oven. Stir the sauce well – it should be very creamy (add more gingerbread if necessary) – and season to taste with the spices. Finally, stir in the cream.

This dish goes well with pasta, spaetzle, dumplings, or potatoes, as well as baked fruit (apple sauce, halved pears, cranberries) and cruciferous vegetables (e.g., red cabbage, pointed cabbage, etc.).