‘Bacon Is My Beatrice’
Teaching the Divine Comedy to his students at Petra Academy in Bozeman, MT, Sam Koenen was trying to convey how the pilgrim Dante sees Beatrice sacramentally. Struggling for a way to explain to them how sacramentalism works, he drew on the Jim Gaffigan routine about bacon (“the most beautiful thing on earth”). This:
The pig is an amazing animal. You feed it an apple, it makes bacon. The pig is turning an apple, essentially garbage, into bacon. That’s magic…!