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Robert Farrar Capon Biography

Robert Farrar Capon (October 26, 1925 – September 5, 2013) was an American Episcopal priest, author and chef. He was born in Jackson Heights, Queens in 1925. A lifelong New Yorker, for almost thirty years Capon was a full-time parish priest in Port Jefferson, New York. In 1965, he published his first book, Bed and Board, and in 1977 he left the full-time ministry to devote more time to his writing career. He authored a total of twenty books, including Between Noon and Three, The Supper of the Lamb, Genesis: The Movie, and a trilogy on Jesus’ parables: The Parables of Grace, The Parables of the Kingdom, and The Parables of Judgment.

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Robert Farrar Capon Quotes

The world is by no means averse to religion. In fact, it is devoted to it with a passion. It will buy any recipe for salvation as long as that formula leaves the responsibility for cooking up salvation firmly in human hands. The world is drowning in religion. But it is scared out of its wits by any mention of the grace that takes the world home gratis.

Buy, Home, Mention, Passion, Responsibility, Scared

But all the while, there was one thing we most needed even from the start, and certainly will need from here on out into the New Jerusalem: the ability to take our freedom seriously and act on it, to live not in fear of mistakes but in the knowledge that no mistake can hold a candle to the love that draws us home. My repentance, accordingly, is not so much for my failings but for the two-bit attitude toward them by which I made them more sovereign than grace. Grace - the imperative to hear the music, not just listen for errors - makes all infirmities occasions of glory.

Act, Attitude, Freedom, Jesus, Knowledge, Mistake

Salvation is a gift given, not a bargain struck.

Bargains, Gift, Given, Salvation, Struck

The world exists, not for what it means but for what it is. The purpose of mushrooms is to be mushrooms, wine is in order to be wine: things are precious before they are contributory. It is a false piety that walks through creation looking only for lessons which can be applied somewhere else. To be sure, God remains the greatest good; but, for all that, the world is still good in itself. Indeed, since He does not need it, its whole reason for being must lie in its own natural goodness; He has no use for it, only delight.

God, Lessons, Lying, Mean, Reason, Wine

The bread and the pastry, the cheeses and wine, and the sugar go into the Supper of the lamb because we do. It is our love that brings the city home. It is I grant you, an incautious and extravagant hope. But only outlandish hopes can make themselves at home.

Bread, Cities, Home, Incautious, Love, Wine

One real thing is closer to God than all the diagrams in the world

Diagrams, God, Real, Thing, World

Man was made to lead with his chin; he is worth knowing only with his guard down, his head up and his heart rampant on his sleeve.

Guard, Heart, Knowing, Lead, Men, Sleeve

With Jesus, however, the device of parabolic utterance is used not to explain things to people’s satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all their previous explanations and understandings.

Jesus, People, Previous, Things, Understanding, Unsatisfactoriness

I like a cook who smiles out loud when he tastes his own work. Let God worry about your modesty; I want to see your enthusiasm.

Cooking, Enthusiasm, Food, God, Worry

The church, by and large, has had a poor record of encouraging freedom. She has spent so much time inculcating in us the fear of making mistakes, that she has made us like ill-taught piano students: we play our songs, but we never really hear them because our main concern is not to make music to avoid some flub that will get us in dutch.

Avoid, Inculcating, Large, Mistake, Play, Song

At the root of many a woman's failure to become a great cook lies her failure to develop a workmanlike regard for knives.

Become, Knives, Lies, Lying, Roots

Heaven is populated entirely by forgiven sinners

Christian, Entirely, Forgiveness, Populated, Religious, Sinners

The Christian religion is not about the soul; it is about man, body and all, and about the world of things with which he was created, and in which he is redeemed. Don’t knock materiality. God invented it.

Body, Christian, Created, Men, Soul, World

We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.

Appetites, Forget, Goodness, Make, Taste, World

What are you going to do with your freedom?

Blame Game, Freedom, Your Freedom

Even to this day, grace remains hard to swallow. Religiosity and moralism go down easier than free forgiveness.

Grace, Easier, Remains, Moralism, Down

. . . the divine knowing - what the Father knows, and what the Word says in response to that knowing, and what the Spirit broods upon under the speaking of the Word - all that eternal intellectual activity isn't just daydreaming. It's the cause of everything that is. God doesn't find out about creation; he knows it into being. His knowing has hair on it. It is an effective act. What he knows, is. What he thinks, by the very fact of his thinking, jumps from no-thing into thing. He never thought of anything that wasn't.

Father, Thinking, Knowing, Fact, Activity, Eternal

Salvation is not some felicitous state to which we can lift ourselves by our own bootstraps after the contemplation of sufficiently good examples. It is an utterly new creation into which we are brought by our death in Jesus' death and our resurrection in his. It comes not out of our own best efforts, however well-inspired or successfully pursued, but out of the shipwreck of all human efforts whatsoever.

Best Effort, Contemplation, Example, Felicitous, Jesus, Salvation

Only miracle is plain; it is in the ordinary that groans with the weight of glory.

Glory, Groans, Miracle, Ordinary, Weight

The shock of unemployment becomes a pathology in its own right.

Becomes, Pathology, Right, Shock, Unemployment

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