An apple a day...

I’m sure we all have heard the old adage “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”. The original phrase ‘‘Eat an apple on going to bed, and you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread” had its first recorded use in the 1860, but the concept is quite old going back to Roman and Anglo-Saxon times. I know I heard it many times during my growing up years. And I must admit that in late years I have tended to relegate apples to an occasional rather than a daily fruit. That, however, is about to change!

The following landed in my inbox not long ago and made me rethink my relationship to the lowly apple. Any one of these claims is certainly a reason to add apples back into my daily diet.

“Did you know that –according to Medical News Today, which ranks apples as the Number One healthiest food based on research studies– apples can potentially:

* Have the same effect as statins in preventing vascular deaths…

* Improve neurological health…

* Prevent dementia…

* Reduce risk of stroke...

* Lower levels of bad cholesterol…
* Reduce the risk of diabetes…”

As someone who has lived through the rapid change of the last 70+ years, with all the accompanying discoveries and inventions, it is little wonder that I had dumped the lowly apple to a rank of just another fruit. I have lived at a time when our knowledge has been increasing exponentially, and things that we long thought were true were being discredited and replaced with the new. However sometimes we find that the new knowledge ends up giving us the reasons behind why those old adages actually worked. Our forebears didn’t know why that apple a day kept the doctor away, they just knew that it did! If something is true then new knowledge and understandings are not going to make it less true but rather enhance and strengthen its truth claim.

So why then are the mainstream churches so afraid to embrace the new story told by current research in biblical literacy? It is not normally preached from its pulpits. It is not present in the liturgy. It is denied by the words in many of the hymns. Embracing the new will only enhance the knowledge already held by those in the pews. However by not preaching it, the church is effectively closing its doors to those who have lived only with in the new paradigm, and to those few who have had exposure to what has been uncovered.

Like the apple, if it did, the church might well find itself again on the path to recovery.

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