This might be a bit of a google myth, but in my hunt for
recipes for wild cherry jam I came across a few comments about the pits.
Someone suggested cutting a few cherry pits in half and
popping the inner kernel into the jam, as the inner kernel contains arsenic and
gives a slight almondy flavour! There was a warning not to be too enthusiastic
here but to be careful how many you put into the pot.
I read that after I’d
accidentally swallowed one of these pits – very tricky to suck the cherry off
the stone without sucking the whole lot down your throat. Hopefully I won’t be
poisoned slowly over the next few days or weeks...
So the question is, why not just add a little almond
flavouring, or even a few chopped up almonds, if you want your cherry jam to
have a hint of almond? Why tinker around with arsenic?
Sometimes in life we hanker after a hint of the exotic. In
this busy world where we are often so harassed, we long for inner peace and
calm and we are persuaded by popular culture and celebrity practices to try out
‘new’ ways and mutter ‘new’ words. We flirt with crystals or palm readings,
fashionable eastern religious ideas or meditations, without recognising that
there is a hard kernel at their centre which can poison our spiritual beings.
The Bible is really clear about who God is. In the book of
Isaiah, God asserts several times that he is the only God, there are no other
gods, that he is the God who created heaven and earth, that he is the Lord who
loves his people. And he warns us off idolatry, flirting with other ideas of
god. Because he knows that at the heart of idolatry is a kernel of poison which
we may not notice until we’ve swallowed just one pit too many.
