Busy Lives

44. Tricky Balance:Food Idolatry vs Quick, We Need to Eat!

~ This Side of the River ~ Leave a comment

Actually, food preparation is an important concept to think about. We are currently experiencing a rash of new writings about food- what constitutes real food, why fast food threatens our health and way of life, why we should consider eating only locally grown foods, and why the planet cannot sustain food production for the anticipated population of nearly nine billion people worldwide by 2050. The latter chapters of this book attempt to address our individual connection and ease of access to food in the United States with issues of food and water scarcity in much of the rest of the world. For now, suffice it to say that our present national attention to food is, perhaps, overindulgent, and a fascinating study in human nature. On the one hand, we idolize food and nearly make food practice a religion. Food critics, cable cooking shows, and internet bloggers remind us that the world of food has its own language and rules, where food takes on godlike characteristics. On the other hand, such obsession-compulsion and misplaced fidelity is contradicted by a post-modern and relatively mainstream insistence that food be characterized, above all else, by convenience. We don’t have time to fuss over food, and we just want something to mollify our hunger. Somewhere in this dilemma, most of us find ourselves having to work very hard to find middle ground. We want to provide healthy food for ourselves and our families, and wish we could enjoy it together more often.

Unless you have hired help, procuring, storing, and preparing food is a necessity that someone in the home must meet on a consistent basis. Because nutritional needs across the age span can only be met by regular consumption of a variety of healthy foods, we need to understand the importance of the roles of planning menus, buying food, keeping ingredients on hand, and making time and space for preparing food in ways that are appetizing, wholesome, and, yes, even convenient. What’s more, most of us need to do this on a tight budget.

More often than not, this obligation falls to the adult women of a household, but more and more, men are taking an active role in a family’s food needs. One of my colleagues is a single father with two elementary school-aged daughters. The three of them have a routine for the four nightly meals they share each week. On Mondays after school, they go together to the grocery store. Each girl plans the menu for one meal and dad plans two. They walk and talk themselves through the store, picking out the ingredients they need for their planned meals. Once home, they work together in the kitchen to put foods away and begin the evening meal prep. It is not unusual for some of the girls’ friends to stay for a meal with this little family. Each meal begins with prayer, and dad intentionally guides the conversation around biblical stories and themes while having the girls replay the day’s events. My colleague says that this activity of planning, shopping for, making and sharing meals has bonded the three of them together like nothing else they do. In the process, the girls are learning to shop and compare prices, consider substitutes, store and prepare food, and entertain friends in their home over a shared meal.

No matter who sees to the food provision in your home, that person must be well-versed in the age-appropriate nutritional needs, within budgetary limits, of all of the family members being fed. And, if time is tight, it is a job that requires planning, discipline and creative thinking. In Post #45 we will begin to address where to start.

~Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

Photo credit:  K. Luymes

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43. Table or Trough? Does Your Family Dine or Feed?

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Have you ever stopped to wonder if the shared meal is less about food and eating as it is about the time set aside (meaning sacred) for coming together? In this way, the shared meal sets us apart from the animals. Animals feed, eating whatever they find on their sorties, and as their appetite dictates. Humans, on the other hand, dine- a process of planned menu and shared dishes and, in families, companionship (com meaning with, pan meaning bread). When eating at home is degraded to each family member grabbing food whenever it suits them, we lose much of what it means to be both human and family.

For those with children still at home, you might, at this point, be tempted to say that although this all sounds great, it would never work in your family. Your table is messy and noisy, and people are distracted. Your mealtimes are more like boxing matches or a three-ring circus, with fights over food, over who sits where (or won’t stay seated at all), over who manipulates the conversation and hijacks attention. The hour is not settling but restless. I have a friend whose three children argued constantly over who got to sit in between both parents at their round table. With one more child than parent, it always turned out that at least two of the siblings had to sit next to one another each night without a parent on both sides. The poking wars, verbal as well as physical, were endless. I know of another family whose table was always in such constant motion that the mother began reading children’s adventure stories during the meal as a way to keep the children seated throughout the meal’s entirety.

Despite the chaos, it is good to remember that the table is probably the best place in the home for teaching children about respect, manners, and service and sensitivity to the needs of others. It is at the table we learn firsthand what it means to work for the common good. This helps fortify the notion that each child is indeed a member of the family, this tight little community called “us.” At the table a sense of belonging, of kinship is born and nurtured. Will there be times of conflict, of petulant teenage resentment, of childish behavior?   Most certainly. Just remember, there will also be times of shared joy where drama and comedy play out around the table every night as food is shared. If you want to build family, share the table.

There are, of course, other barriers to regularly sharing meals at home. Often, children are so hungry when they get home from school they fill up on snacks then aren’t hungry for dinner. For some children with attention disorders, medication has begun to wear off toward evening making this a frustrating time for parent and child alike.[1] What’s more, it is not unusual for a family with two or more children to have something scheduled for every night of the week. It is also typical for one adult in the family to bear the lion’s share of food-related acquisition and preparation; let’s face it, somebody has to be in charge of the food, a responsibility that is difficult to sustain in very busy families.

~ Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

Are you NEW to Shared Table Blessings?  WELCOME!  I invite you to join a growing number of people interested in the importance of the shared meal amongst family, friends, and strangers. Each post is numbered that you may follow the book I have written about the Christian Practice of Shared Meals.  For the best understanding, start reading posts in order, and send comments or questions my way using the LEAVE A COMMENT box found at the bottom of every post.  ~JAPW

[1]Families with children with attention disorders may experience evening mealtime challenges related to both behavior and medication side effects like appetite suppression and insomnia. When the last dose occurs at noon, a behavioral rebound effect (in particular hyperactivity) around late afternoon is probable, and if a subsequent medication dose is taken, appetite for the evening meal will be blunted, and the child more likely to have trouble sleeping at bedtime. Sometimes, a lower dose at 4:00 p.m. is helpful. In these cases, it is often advisable to delay the evening meal so that appetite is less negatively affected. Working closely with a pediatrician is highly recommended.

41. Be GENERATIVE. Sit. Eat. With. Your. Kids.

~ This Side of the River ~ Leave a comment

You must make it happen. There is NO OTHER WAY.  The evening family meal is restorative; it provides time, space, food, and companionship for soothing the rough patches created by the demands of both this day, and of the day anticipated tomorrow. It helps cement people together and organize the family as a team. Table time as a family is for discovery too. We share our experiences and the things we’ve learned, and can discuss whether our responses to particular situations were the right ones.

When our daughter began fourth grade at a new school she encountered her first bully. Week after week, we spent time as a family, almost always at the dinner table, discussing what the bully said today, how she acted on the bus, and what we, as a family should do about it. We prayed together. My husband and I advised our daughter to adopt a “kill the situation with kindness” attitude, but not because we wanted to teach her non-confrontation.[1] On the contrary, we felt that intentionally-responsive smiles and kind words on our daughter’s part comprised precisely the type of loving confrontation Jesus would have practiced. At first, our daughter’s responses only infuriated this bully to grander displays of meanness (all verbal), but, to give her credit, our daughter persevered and trusted that this decision, made as a family at the dinner table, was the right course of action. We also counseled our daughter to try her hardest to imagine what could make another little girl so angry and mean, and to pray for her to experience the joy of a changed heart. Was this bully unloved at home? Was she sad? Did she really just need a friend and not know, socially, how to make one? Our daughter prayed for this girl for many weeks. Eventually, the bullying stopped. Our daughter learned that responding in kind is never as good as responding with kindness. She learned that some people are unloved and unloving. She learned to pray for an enemy, and to ask for prayer. And, she learned that, as a family, we took her problem seriously and were concerned for the outcome. All in the intimacy of the family table.

This helps demonstrate how a shared family meal is powerfully generative, meaning that it has the power to produce, or generate a way of thinking, acting, and responding to circumstances. In particular, children learn from the adults at the table not only civilized table manners and social customs, but about life and death, good and evil, right and wrong. In short, the table is a place for a child to observe what it means to be an adult. For believers, this becomes even more significant, because this is our shared practice for learning what it means to be a man, woman, child, and family of God.

It is also deep mystery how shared table time as a routine practice helps children develop a healthy attitude toward ritual and tradition. It has a potent and lifelong carryover effect on their sense of family and belief, acting as a liturgy of sorts for creating that daily rhythm of how a flourishing family life should flow. And, in this day and age, when culture kidnaps our children at younger and younger ages, this table time protects them. The physical food they eat with us is a symbol of God’s ever-present provision, help and sustenance. This family table is the place we can teach our children what we know of God, and where they can watch us live that love out.

[1] This particular eight year-old girl was not a physical threat, nor did she act as part of a larger group of bullies picking on our daughter, and this happened before social networking made e-bullying a reality. This little girl was just miserably mean. One reason we monitored the situation so closely each night at the supper table was to discern if adult intervention was called for.  But, we also wanted our daughter to learn to positively handle life’s challenges on her own with God’s help and wisdom.

Until next time!

Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

40. Family Supper-Are You Kidding Me???

~ This Side of the River ~ Leave a comment

With schools starting, this is a great time for us to start Chapter 6:Table Time at Home for Families in this blog book called Come Back to the Table: A Countercultural Call to the Christian Practice of Shared Meals.  Hopefully, the preceding chapters have convinced you that sharing meals, as a distinct Christian practice, should be an important part and pattern of your daily family life.  But, as any parent will tell you, mustering the family around a nightly meal can be a harrowing, energy-sucking experience. This may be particularly true for one-parent families, those in which both parents work full time outside the home or in homes with children with special needs. When I began working full time at our local hospital after years of being home all day while going to school at night, I was not prepared for the panicky rush that the dinner hour became. One of us had to eat and run back out for a meeting or school event. A child forgot to tell you on the way home that she needs a large neon-green poster board (no, the white one in the closet simply won’t do) for an ecology assignment that’s due tomorrow. Your spouse ate a big lunch out today with co-workers and isn’t hungry. Dirty breakfast dishes in the sink need clearing out before dinner preparations can begin. Lunchboxes need cleaning out. You forgot that the frozen ground beef you were counting on for tacos tonight got used up in last week’s meatloaf.  The dog is starving and needs to go out, and the laundry should be started before supper to ensure that the volleyball uniform is ready for tomorrow’s big game.

Is it any wonder that the shared meal becomes sacrificed to the tyranny of more pressing issues? Yet, for me and my family, dinner together around the family dining table remained a critically important activity, and we were determined to make it all work even after I began putting in 45-hour weeks at the hospital around the same time our daughter started middle school sports. This is because the table is where we build family. It is the one time each day we can each sit in a place we call “ours” and, for even twenty blessed minutes, know we are in this life together, and that God is at its center. Miriam Weinstein believes a family evening meal “sort of forces an environment when everyone has to stop and sit down. It creates a boundary when you’re sitting around a table. It’s a designated time. It focuses attention on what is going on here and now between the people around the table. It gives us a specific time to review our day”[1] together.

In our next post we will start to “dig in” to what this kind of family life can look like.

[1] Miriam Weinstein, The Surprising Power of Family Meals: How Eating Together Makes us Smarter, Stronger, Healthier, and Happier (Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2005), p.74. Weinstein’s treatment of the challenges facing the regular family meal is excellent.

39. What if WE ate like this?

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A Summary of the Shared Meal in ACTS

Eating together, sharing food, inviting any who would come, and using those meals to testify to the life, death, resurrection, and saving grace of Jesus was a common theme throughout the earliest days of the nascent church. What would it look like if we “did” meals the same way?

Most importantly, our tables would no longer be empty, instead reclaiming a rightful place as the central gathering place in our homes, and standing as a visible testament to the importance of shared meals in the life of believers. In our homes, we would not only participate in regular family meals, we would create a new habit- a practice if you will- of intentionally inviting others to join us- people from church, our neighbors, our work colleagues, our children’s friends and their families, visiting missionaries and scholars, and even the stranger we just happen to meet on any given day. Food could be simple fare like bread, soup, cheese and a piece of fruit- anything that would stretch to serve a tableful of guests and family, and be easy to prepare. And every table would always be capable of accommodating “just one more” hungry person.

Such a meal would begin with praise and thanksgiving. Today, we might call this “saying grace”. After the meal proper, invited guests would be asked to bring a word, a letter from a missionary might be shared, and Scripture read. A hymn would be sung. There would be prayer. And these types of meals would happen over and over again throughout the year.

At church, we would gather frequently to share meals and we would be intentional about inviting anyone in the neighborhood to join in. And, just like our home-based meals, the shared meal at church would contain specific components of praise, thanksgiving, breaking of bread, testimony, Word, and prayer, a model we’ll consider later in this book.

As a reminder, these posts are numbered in a specific sequence because they each contain pieces of the chapters of a book on shared meals and Christians.  So, they are meant to be read IN ORDER.  If you have comments or questions, send them via the LEAVE a REPLY box provided.  I am more than happy to discuss the topic with you!

~Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

38. Lamenting a Lost Practice

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Every Sabbath morning at the start of worship, my pastor invites us to the meeting. He makes it clear that our presence for fellowship and worship and praise is the intersection where we, the gathered, meet with one another, God the Father, and Jesus the risen Christ in the counsel and care of the Holy Spirit. As a result, I have come to embrace the notion that the congregation of believers- those who congregate for an encounter with God and for his glory- does, truly comprise a meeting.

Likewise, I think the earliest believers, despite all their ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity, viewed their shared meals together as a meeting, (i.e., as worship) and I like to imagine that they looked forward to these regular meals with great anticipation and joy. This is why I also think of their gatherings as meal-meetings, or what I also like to call fellowship meals, because I also believe the common shared meals and the meetings of the early Church were inextricably connected, not necessarily to the extent of actually being Greco-Roman meal-symposiums, but of at least having evolved out of that prototype.

Of course our worship today, particularly on the Sabbath, is much different, crafted around centuries-old liturgies, creeds and doctrines, not to mention overt cultural-sensitivity to people’s lack of time for multiple meetings in a week. Thus, compared to those first Christians, our worship is much more formal, and our meeting together for shared meals far, far less common. And, it is this general loss of the shared meal- in families and church families alike- that I believe is something to lament because the places at our dining tables are so consistently and symbolically empty.

Our tables are empty because we no longer view a shared meal as a fundamental way to also share the gospel, and because we are unwilling to share our lives in such intimate, selfless, and demanding ways as hosts, who take, thank, break, and give bread to others. But most of all, we should grieve because we are so distracted, and always, always in such a hurry to be doing something else. As I wrote at the start of this chapter, regularly breaking and eating bread together is a practice meant to make us think of Jesus, to recognize his presence at our meal fellowship, and to remember his incomprehensibly great love for us. Our determined failure to practice shared meals on a regular basis should make us stop and think about why we no longer eat together and what we’ve lost in the process.

~ Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

Please make comments in the LEAVE A REPLY box, and contact me if you need further information about using this text for a small group or Sunday School study, or as the theme for a weekend retreat.

15. Evening: the New Day Starts Now

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The truth is, we find getting together at the table (even just getting the food into the house) a practical challenge in a today’s world. In Eden, God invited Adam and Eve to eat all sorts of plant life.  God fed them well.  There was, of course, that one forbidden food.  Now, forbidden foods have a way of not being good for us.  A diabetic must avoid sweets.  Walnuts or shrimp are life threatening for people with a nut or seafood allergy.  But, Adam and Eve, driven by what Griffiths calls the vice of curiosity, made a fatal mistake for all of Creation.[1]  The intimacy we had with God was broken, and not until Jesus came- eating and drinking, suffering, dying, rising, forgiving our sins, and inviting us to the feast of the Lamb-did we have any hope for restored relationship with God.

The table, then, at home and at church (table and Table) is the place of invitation, nourishment, acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, learning, growing, and going.  It is as much about relationship building and disciple-making as it is about food.  In both instances, we come hungry for food and companionship with one another and with God.  In both instances, we are invited and fed by something or Someone who had to die for us to live.  God’s Word fills us.  In both instances, we leave with a co-mission to go and do likewise for our neighbor.  And, in both instances, we can stand with Jesus and proclaim “that we live by ‘every word that comes from the mouth of God,’ because that word has everything to do good things, with real nourishment for body and soul.  With the eyes of faith, Christ comes to be known as that word, incarnate, embodied, the Word of God, present then and now.  Christ is then the invitation, the way we have of re-creating that living relationship of intimacy with God that the original humans knew in the garden.”[2]

 Rethinking the Practice of a Shared Evening Meal

I believe we need to be at the table each night, fully present and alive to the invitation, provision, and gratitude a meal together involves, with a keen insight that compels us to keep families knit together and to regularly weave strangers into our midst. In our homes and churches, the time spent at the table, especially in the evening, is never wasted.  It slows time down, it reconnects us with those we love as well as with the guest, it provides a shared training ground for life’s challenges, and it generatively introduces the next generation to the saving ways and nourishment of a life in Christ.  Perhaps most importantly, I suggest that it affords us the time for opening a new day together because the rhythms and predictability and rightness of the Christian practices transform the way we view the world and time.

Dorothy Bass considers how attending to the practices shapes a day in her book Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time.[3]  This book unlocked for me an entirely new perspective on how a regular “day” could flow.  Our modern notion is that each day starts at sunrise and continues until bedtime. However, a careful study of the creation story in Genesis 1 literally flips a day on its head; God created, there was night, then day.  In practice, then, a new day actually begins in the evening.  Can you believe it?

After Adam and Eve sinned, God was strolling in the garden in the cool of the day looking for them.  Evening was a time for walking with God.   Imagine the implications of making it a regular faith practice to restructure your “day” so that a new day begins as you get home from work or school.  Then you can consider the place of the evening meal as a shared practice from the ancient Jewish custom of beginning the new day in the evening.

Gathering family, friends, and strangers around the table for supper might actually be considered a corporate event for greeting the new day.  In other words, the evening meal is a threshold we cross together, a natural transition from the work and school day that is behind us to the new day ahead, filled with all of God’s creative possibilities.  At the evening meal, we gather together to be nourished, but not just with food.  We prepare to spend the evening walking and resting with God as Adam and Eve did, putting aside a day in which we may have done or said something we should not have, or failed to do or say something we should have.   God intends for the day to be done.  And at the table, together, we transition to a new day in Christ that is immediately ahead of us.

I don’t know about you, but this was a revolutionary idea for me, that nighttime be less a time of recovery and more about active preparation.  For me, getting home from work was always about wrapping myself in the comforting insulation of house and family.  It was a way to hibernate and shield myself from the outside world, to recover from this day, and to literally shed this day’s responsibilities.  In doing so, getting a nightly meal on the table always seemed just one more obligation in a long day’s to-do list that included work, laundry, packing lunches, helping with homework, paying bills, and church committee meetings. Next time we will dig into this idea of new day like hungry teens into a pizza!

Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT ALL THIS!  IT HELPS AS I W RITE AND REVISE 🙂

Featured Image credit:  K.Richardson, 2016

[1] Paul J. Griffiths, The Vice of Curiosity: An Essay on Intellectual Appetite (Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 2006). In this short treatise, Griffiths discusses the darker nature of curiosity as a means to owning and controlling knowledge for power, the same kind of appetite Adam and Eve gave into.

[2] Cathy C. Campbell, Stations of the Banquet (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2003), p. 13.

[3] Dorothy C. Bass, Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000).

13. Cooking: a Lost Practice

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I am old enough to have had a middle school home economics course in which we (girls only that is) learned some cooking basics, long before the arrival of “baby” carrots.I remember learning how to make cooked carrots. Within two years, girls were taking shop class and boys were learning to cook, and I was being encouraged in the high school arena to set my sights high, because women were now truly free of the “bondage” of homemaking to be and do anything they wanted.  Today, life skills classes are rare.   Children are more apt to take technology classes than they are home economics.  Ironically, it’s  much easier today to find a recipe on the Internet than it is to follow its directions.

Despite my schooling, however, I was still in for some truly big surprises when I married because I had learned little at home about food preparation.  With almost no money my husband and I had much to learn about how to plan menus and meals on a budget, how to shop specials and maximize coupon values, how to read labels and stretch meals by making soups or casseroles that also served as work lunches later in the week.  Neither of us knew how to use a slow cooker, or make a healthy sack lunch, or can or freeze foods, or how to make traditional foods in healthier ways.  We didn’t even know how much milk to buy for two people, or what kind of milk to get, and had to phone home for directions when making our first pot roast (we promptly received a Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook the next Christmas which is still in use to this day).  We only knew how to make macaroni and cheese from a box, and had no clue how to grow our own garden or process its abundance for year-round consumption.

However, just out of graduate school, starting my first job, and embracing all it meant for a woman to be highly educated and employed, my biggest adjustment came with the realization that I had no sense of what it meant to serve with any shred of self-sacrifice.  After six years of university food service, I had never once considered that getting food on the table for my own family might take time, planning, sacrifice, and a less me-centered attitude. It took me by surprise (shock might be a better term) to discover that having a somewhat food-averse spouse meant that, unless I was willing to live on Cocoa Puffs and frozen pepperoni pizza, the responsibility for getting food from store to pantry, and from pantry to table was going to lie squarely and solely on my shoulders for the next fifty years or more.[1]  I was overwhelmed and far, far under-prepared for this role.  What’s more, income from our entry-level jobs in Washington, D.C. did not bring in enough money for entertaining others at our table once our tithe and living expenses were covered.[2]  Not that it mattered; I did not know how to cook for a crowd anyway.

Not long after, as a new mother, I had no idea what to feed this little girl after she was weaned, nor how much.  Is it true she shouldn’t have cow’s milk until after her first birthday?  What should we do when she refuses a food?  Is there a way to prevent her father’s food aversions from rubbing off on her? How should we teach her acceptable behavior at the dinner table?  What foods are dangerous for toddlers? How in heaven’s name is this supposed to work?  There we were with a baby, living far from our own families.  I thank God for my dietitian friend Eileen at church, whom I kept on speed dial.  She helped set me on a path of understanding about food, foodways, service to my family, and the importance of the shared meal.[3]

Today, our daughter lives in Paris. As a matter of fact, I am writing this piece from Paris. Just last weekend, the two of us took a Market Cooking class from Chef Lise at La Cuisine Paris.   lacuisine-paris    We toured the local market, selecting duck legs, 3 fine cheeses, beet root, white asparagus, blood oranges, strawberries, turnip, and several fresh herbs to take back to the kitchen-classroom and learn how to make a French feast, including duck a l’orange (see the featured image). It was a wonderful day of sharing the kitchen and table with each other and 6 strangers.

I encourage you to start cooking more often.  Be on the lookout for easy and affordable recipes that you can use when you invite someone to a simple meal.  If you have children at home, involve them in the planning, shopping, and preparation of the meal- it is an important way of teaching them about hospitality and sharing.

In the next post, we will consider how the shared meal (especially the evening meal) as a practice, in particular a Christian practice, has the potential for both common and sacred relationships in the daily lives of believers.

Until then, bon appetit!

~Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

[1] Lest you think poorly of my husband, let me defend him here.  Although he cannot cook and his tastes and texture issues create significant limits, he is the world’s best dishwasher.  We have always shared kitchen responsibilities with unspoken devotion; we share shopping, I prep and cook, he cleans.  It is a beautiful arrangement.  Chapter six will explore these duties in the context of family and food.

[2] I should note here that our apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland was directly across the street from my husband’s office.  As I was not yet working full time, my husband would frequently call around 11:45 a.m. to say he was bringing a coworker home for lunch.  I quickly learned to put out a simple meal that didn’t break the bank, and have always been grateful to him for helping me learn (to unbend really) to trust God to make the “bread and fish” multiply so that there was always more than enough to go around.

[3] As an example, Eileen invited me to drive out to a farm to pick broccoli one day.  I had never known that the “U-Pick” concept extended beyond apples, strawberries, and Christmas trees.  When I got home with about eight pounds of broccoli I had to undertake a crash course in prepping it all for the freezer.  We were graced with months of fresh farm-to-table and highly nutritious broccoli that winter.  It is still a family favorite to this day.

 

12. Is There Food on Your Table?

~ This Side of the River ~ Leave a comment

In Acts 2:42, we are told about the first believers:  “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer… All the believers were together and had everything in common (v. 44)… They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all people.” (v. 46-47)

A study of the communal meal practice of the first century church reveals a radically different model from our present-day attitudes toward shared meals.[1]  Why did their shared meal practices disappear over time, and why, today, do our foodways and mealways look so different?  A foodway is an accepted term that describes the habits and practices of food consumption and production in a cultural, social, or economic context, and shows us “how societies construct notions of self and community.” [2],[3]

The North American approach to food has shifted most dramatically in the past forty years, and seems absurdly paradoxical even for Christians because our foodways swing between two poles, one of apathy and ignorance, the other of obsessive and compulsive control. We now have 24-7 cooking shows on television, yet very few of us actually cook anymore.  We say we have no time to eat, but most of us are overweight, a symptom of eating too much too often.  Time is scarce, while cheap (and unhealthy) food is overabundant.  We spend millions of dollars each year on dieting (i.e. we spend more in an attempt to eat less).  Some of us overdo, while others do nothing; some of us are indifferent to our health and healthcare, while others’ anxiety about their health creates fanatical control issues.  Most people shun regular exercise while others spend far too many self-absorbed hours in the gym. We either become overly fastidious about the quality of our food sources, or we consume vast amounts of processed foods we know are not good for us.  (As one example, boxed cereal, a highly processed food, once promoted as just one part of a healthy breakfast, has become the default nighttime ‘meal’ when we are short on time, energy, or creativity.)  Our dining and kitchen tables are repositories for mail and school papers rather than places for a shared meal.

Since the dawn of time, people have been hunters, gatherers, farmers and shepherds.  Today we are much more disconnected from understanding how food reaches our tables.  At home and at church, we take pride in our manicured lawns and landscaping, but rarely consider using the church property to grow food for others with no land.  It seems that we are hungry, but not for food, and that Christians in particular need to think and pray about their own selected foodways and mealways.

Thoughtfulness can go a long way to help us find a healthy middle ground where food and meals are concerned.

“To grow food and eat in a way that is mindful of God is to collaborate with God’s own primordial sharing of life in the sharing of food with each other.  It is to participate in forms of life and frameworks of meaning that have their root and orientation in God’s caring ways with creation… Food is about the relationships that join us to the earth, fellow creatures, loved ones and guests, and ultimately God.  How we eat testifies to whether we value the creatures we live with and depend upon… When our eating is mindful, we celebrate the goodness of  [all creation has to offer], and…acknowledge and honor God as the giver of every good and perfect gift.”[4]   In other words, we must relearn what it means to care about, and care for all creation, including ourselves.

Perhaps even more importantly, our inattention to meals and cooking means we have stopped teaching our children about foodways and meal practices (mealways).[5]  In my experiential nutrition class a few years ago, I handed a bunch of fresh carrots from the farmers’ market to a student to peel.  I can still see him standing at the sink, carrots in hand, exclaiming with confusion that these could not possibly be carrots, because in his world all carrots were the size of one’s pinky finger and had no peel or green leafy tops.

Fortunately, young people are beginning to show a resurgent interest in healthy (and just) ways to grow, prepare, and share food!

[1] A subsequent chapter discusses the meal practices of the early Church in detail.

[2] Angel F. Mendez-Montoya, The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p.6.

[3] I have coined the term “mealway” to describe the general habits and practices surrounding how a society or culture consumes meals.

[4] Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. xiii, 4

[5] This is a critically important point, as we will see.  Much is learned in the kitchen and around the table that actually has little to nothing to do with food.

10. The MEAT of a Christian Practice

~ This Side of the River ~ Leave a comment

In the last post, I introduced the idea that our customs are not the same thing as a practice, and promised to sketch out the common elements of a Christian practice.

Let’s start with the idea of customs.  As an example, meal customs are informative.  Why did Jesus recline at meals?  Why did the Jews wash their feet before entering the dining area?  Why did Jesus tell the story of the man who threw a banquet for friends who were no-shows?  As we will see in subsequent posts, the meals that Jesus attended were shaped by the influences of Greece and Rome, as well as Jewish tradition, and, as a result, diners’ behaviors were circumscribed by particular customs.  A fundamental question for us is how did Jesus’ first followers move from those religiously and socially-traditional meals into the practice of the first century church in which shared meals were an integral part of the worship experience?

If a Christian practice is an activity that is regular, shared with other believers, and designed to strengthen our common life together as Christians, then it might be helpful to try and sketch out what I believe are the common elements of a Christian practice on our way to showing how the shared meal qualifies as such a practice.

As noted, there are several distinct Christian practices which we do together in Christian community, including worship, prayer, fasting, Sabbath-keeping, stewardship, the Lord’s Supper, forgiveness, and, as I claim, the shared meal.  The common elements of these Christian practices are invitation, provision, gratitude, nourishment, and formation.

God invites us into a particular practice whether it is worship or prayer or a shared meal.  We are invited to enter the practice by entering into God’s and one another’s presence, entering into rest and restoration, and entering into community and communion with God and one another.  Thus, there is always a kind of prologue to each practice, in which we mindfully enter into the practice by divine invitation to do so.  From the perspective of a shared meal, we accept God’s invitation to take time out to eat and share and rest together at table and in God’s presence.

There is an element of mutually beneficial provision in each of the practices.  We are individually and corporately provided for with charitable care and concern out of God’s grace and abundance, paradoxically finding in each practice an opportunity to serve as a way of providing for others.  We commit to praying for others, we fast together in lament and petition for a particular provision, and, when we worship and share in the sacred meal of Holy Communion, we realize God’ provision for our own life through Jesus’s life, death, resurrection and coming consummation.  Moreover, we learn, with grace and humility, to accept others’ service to us despite our ever-undeserving state.  Most importantly, God provides this time that we may to set it aside for Himself, others, and for our in-common well-being.

Each of the Christian practices contains the attribute of gratitude.  There is nothing we practice together which does not raise up an unquenchable desire to thank God as the source of all things good, and praise him for being our Creator, Savior, Counselor and King.  When we share a meal, we say grace before eating because we are so grateful for God’s ongoing presence in and provision for our lives, and for the food before us that will fuel our service to the kingdom.

The Christian practices nourish us by both feeding and satisfying our physical, emotional, and spiritual hungers to the point that we, in turn, are energized and able to serve God and neighbor.  We often enter into a particular practice with a mindset that there must be “something in it for me.”  The reality, as is often the case in our Christian walk, is that God intends the practice to show his glory, and create in us as the body of Christ the deep love and sacrificial posture we need to love him and serve our neighbor.

Lastly, the Christian practices all share the element of formation.  The profoundly formative nature of the practices is nearly beyond comprehension.  The practices introduce us to the kingdom of God, then reinforce and direct our discipleship.  We begin to grasp that all the Christian practices are inter-related, and that the more we practice them simultaneously in community, the stronger the weave of our life in common together.  To put it another way, the practices of the first Christians give us a firm anchor in how to live out our common lives (Acts 2:44).  Moreover, the practices act as a compass to direct us-in Christian community– along a path of growth and maturity in our faith, what we often call our ongoing development in Christlikeness.  It is the daily practice of our shared prayer, worship, meals, Sabbath-keeping, and forgiveness that leads, over time, to human flourishing- for ourselves and those we serve- to God’s glory.

Finally, then, we can ask if, in the lives of Christians, the shared meal is simply a custom handed down from earlier generations, or if Christians should view it from a faith perspective as a Christian practice.  It has always been a universal custom for people to eat together, no matter what their belief systems entailed.  As far as family and church family are concerned, it seems to me that we treat the shared meal as custom, easily shaped by the culture and the times, when it may actually be meant to be approached as a central communal practice in the Christian home and in the Church.  The shared meal, like other Christian practices, embedded with invitation, provision, gratitude, nourishment, and formation has the deep potential to fortify and direct our individual and common lives in ways that might surprise us.  So, it is to the notion of shared meals as faith practice we wll turn next time.

Thanks for sharing this space!  We are steadily moving into the MEAT of the shared meal as Christian practice!  There is a button below to :LEAVE A COMMENT.  I would appreciate hearing what you think.

~ Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

(Featured image photo credit:  K.Richardson. 2016)