Sarah Hart of Portland knows the dilemma well. Every Easter, as a child, she would weigh the possibilities: Should she gobble up the chocolate rabbit right away? Or nibble it slowly: First the ears, then a little off the paws?
What would a chocoholic do?
"I'd eat the whole thing," Hart confesses over a cup of coffee. "But
what a sweet tension that was: temptation, desire, pleasure and guilt. It
was wonderful."
Nowadays, Hart, 41, goes out of her way to re-create that tension. She
carefully tempers organic chocolate, molds it and then gilds it with edible
23-karat gold leaf. She makes miniature Buddhas, slightly larger Virgin
Marys, Celtic crosses and the extended palms of hamsa hands, all too
beautiful to eat and, somehow, too tempting not to.
"They are divine," exclaims Charmaine Schaack, who works at Fleur de
Lys, a beauty shop/boutique in Portland that has sold Hart's Alma Chocolates
since their launch in December.
"They fly out of the store," Schaack says. "I've only ever heard one
person ask if was OK to eat a Buddha."
It's a question Hart has dealt with more than once. People admire her
work and then ask if letting a religious figure melt in one's mouth is
kosher. Will it lead to bad karma?
Hart smiles. "I'm not overly reverent, but I'm not irreverent, either,"
she says. "I know that my work walks a fine line, but I am drawn to these
images and to how people find meaning in symbols."
Religion and symbols, of course, are practically inseparable. Ask anyone
who teaches world religions. Cecilia Ranger is a Catholic sister of the Holy
Names of Jesus and Mary, a professor who has taught world religions at
Marylhurst University for many years. She hasn't seen Hart's creations, but
she is delighted at the prospect.
"I love the playfulness of the idea," she says. "Especially in a nation
like ours, where fear seems to be the thing that's marketed (in religion).
In other countries that I've visited, there's a more playful approach to
symbols."
The candy skulls used in Mexico during Day of the Dead celebrations come
immediately to mind. Eating them does not suggest one either avoids or
invites death. "It's a celebration of life," Ranger says.
Hart sees herself as a spiritual person and she recognizes that other
people have their own, often more rigid, way of looking at religious
symbols. She knows that some folks just won't be able to swallow her
chocolate icons. But still she makes them. They bring together important
strands of her life.
Hart grew up in a Presbyterian family -- her father was a pastor, and so
are some of her siblings -- in Springfield, Mo., "the buckle of the Bible
Belt."
She sometimes still attends a Presbyterian Church, and she's trained as
a spiritual director, someone with a background in several faith traditions
who helps people discern their religious path. She meets regularly with a
diverse group that calls itself the Urban Spirituality Center.
Over the years, Hart says, she's become devoted to the Virgin Mary and
to Quan Yin, a Buddhist figure that symbolizes compassion and whose name
translates roughly as "she who hears the cries of the world." It seems only
natural to Hart to mold both figures in chocolate. The botanical name for
cocoa, she says, is theobroma, or "god food" in ancient Greek.
"These chocolates are my creative response to what I see in the world.
There are so many religious conflicts going on right now. People fighting
over which religious way is the right way."
Sometimes fundamentalists in any faith can lose a sense of the divine
and how it transcends any physical symbol, she says.
Hart sees food as a symbol of love. She named Alma Chocolates for her
fraternal grandmother, a solid Midwestern farm woman who canned every
vegetable to cross her path and had baked five or six pies by breakfast
whenever her grandchildren came to visit.
Hart is married with two children, one in college and another in second grade. She'd been a copy writer, worked in food preparation and had already fallen in love with the temperamental process of working with chocolate before the idea for Alma Chocolates came to her.
Now she may have found the perfect way to blend her interest in
spirituality, her bittersweet addiction to chocolate and her inherited need
to express herself in food. She can't quite make a living at it yet, but she
has hopes. She's broadening her line to include new twists on traditional
chocolates: caramels that taste of habanero, lavender and cardamom; a
Chinese five-spice truffle; creams filled with rosemary and Maker's Mark
bourbon; a toffee tinged with ginger.
She uses no additives and encourages customers to eat her chocolates
within a week of buying them. The gilt statuettes will last longer, she
says, but they will melt and, ultimately, they are made to be eaten.
"Think of it as an exercise in impermanence," she says. "A Buddhist
knows that nothing lasts forever."
