Real Food: Spirituality of the Eucharist Paperback – 1 December 1993
by Robert Fabing (Author)
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Rediscover the Eucharist in everyday eating
Food crises and unhealthy approaches to food obscure our vision of sacramental nourishment.
Our Faith Patrick Saint-Jean, S.J.Published July 6, 2022
“I am the bread of life,” Jesus told a crowd of hungry people. Jesus used symbols from the physical, tangible world to help us understand who he is. But no matter how hard he tried to explain himself, his listeners, even today, often don’t grasp what he was saying.
“Food,” Jesus said, in effect, “is a metaphor for me, the incarnation of God. If you think about what food does physically, you’ll see what I am doing spiritually. I’m nourishing you. I’m helping you grow.” However, physical hunger distracted the people listening to Jesus. Today, in the modern United States, our issues with food may be different, but we still miss the connections between the food we eat and spiritual nourishment.
Many of us, myself included, get food’s physical and spiritual aspects confused. We do not always eat to give our bodies what they need. Sometimes we eat to feed our hearts, the starved, needy core of our beings. We soothe our emotional and spiritual pain with starchy “comfort foods,” as though they could offer us as much hope and meaning as any miraculous bread from heaven. No matter how much we eat, the emptiness remains.
“Why do you waste so much energy pursuing something that will one day spoil and leave you empty?” Jesus asked. Our need to eat is a fact of life, and food is one of our surest pleasures. However, no food, no matter how satisfying, can fully nourish our inner being. When we seek the symbol itself instead of the divine reality it points to, the symbol becomes a lifeless idol.
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Our culture is obsessed not only with eating but also with not eating. Fad diets are a $72 million industry, and dieting has become a spectator sport, drawing millions of viewers to reality shows that focus on spectacular feats of weight loss. Even as we’re bombarded with ads for mouthwatering foods, we also receive constant and confusing messages: Don’t eat fat. Don’t eat carbohydrates. Don’t eat meat. Don’t eat dairy. Don’t eat sugar. Whether we are driven by health concerns or the desire for a particular kind of beauty, few of us are truly immune to this constant onslaught on our diets.
Other aspects of our society further complicate our relationship with food. Our lives are so busy that processed and fast foods have become attractive options. We don’t often have time to linger around a table with family and friends, so we eat on the run. Twenty percent of all American meals are eaten in the car. At least 25 percent of Americans eat fast food every day. We don’t have time for the slow, intentional love of a home-cooked meal.
To make things worse, fresh foods simply aren’t available to all. More than 6 percent of our nation’s population—some 19 million people—lives in food deserts, geographic areas that lack access to fresh food. People living in these areas buy much of their food at dollar and convenience stores. And when they do get to a grocery store, they tend to stock up on packaged and canned goods rather than pricey fresh foods.
In the midst of this snarl of societal factors, how can we find the face of Jesus in our “daily bread”?
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When I look back into my childhood memories, I rediscover the metaphor that gives me a true picture of the divine. I grew up in a Black Haitian family where everything that mattered was celebrated at the table. Whether it was a death or a birth, a good grade at school or a new job, a birthday or the arrival of a guest, the table was where we gathered. My family’s meals were holistic experiences: not only sacred ceremonies but also beautiful to behold, nourishing to consume, and therapeutic to smell.
“Sharing food is what pulls our family together,” my dad used to say. “It’s what solidifies us as a Black family.” At the table we told stories, found ways to process both good news and bad, discussed politics, studied the Bible, and prayed. Mealtime was a spiritual encounter, a sacramental experience. Each bite I took spoke of pleasure and love, of variety and flavor, of family and home. My family’s food was more than a biological necessity. Mealtimes were slow, sweet moments of togetherness and grace. Our meals were sacraments, symbols of love spaced throughout each day. Eating truly gave us life.
Jesus used many metaphors to help us understand who he is, but food is the only metaphor that became a formal sacrament. During the Eucharist, we eat real food. Those pale, thin wafers of wheat are broken down into simple sugars by the saliva in our mouths and pass into our stomachs and intestines, where they are digested. Yet these bites of physical food are Jesus.
How can we truly understand the meaning of the sacrament when our perception of physical nourishment has become so twisted and obscured? Food ties us to the Earth; everything we eat is given to us by the natural world around us. We act as though human beings are a separate, isolated life-form, but in reality each act of eating weaves our lives into nature’s web of prey and predator, a living network where every organism has a part to play. I live because of a million blades of wheat, thousands of cows, tens of thousands of chickens, and countless rows of green growing plants. The cells of all these lives become a part of mine.
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When Jesus claimed his flesh was food, he forever knotted the spiritual world with the physical world. God is not “out there” somewhere, floating like an ethereal dream. Instead, God is flesh and blood. God is the bread we eat and the wine we drink. God nourishes us and becomes a part of our very cells.
The Eucharist is also called communion. This small meal is not meant to be taken alone, as a moment of private spirituality. It is the symbol of our unity, our dependence on one another, just as my childhood meals were. During the Eucharist, we eat the bread of life together, and we who are the body of Christ are both nourished and knitted together. The divine comes to us as shared food.
God is flesh and blood. God is the bread we eat and the wine we drink. God nourishes us and becomes a part of our very cells.
In Nourishing Wisdom: A Mind-Body Approach to Nutrition and Well-Being (Harmony), Marc David, a nutritional psychologist, describes what he calls “ordered eating.” This approach to eating, he writes, is “intentional, conscious, reflective, transformational, nourishing, strategic, communal, intimate, connected, and mindful.”
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What David describes is consistent with Ignatian spirituality, where the goal is always to find God in all things. If you and I can consciously bring eating into our relationship with God, we will encounter the divine in a profound way, opening ourselves to new perspectives on food.
Sadly, I must confess, along with St. Paul, “Not that I have already obtained this . . . but I press on to make it my own” (Phil. 3:12, NRSVCE). Those of us who have complicated relationships with food may find that healing takes time. As followers of Christ, we are each on a spiritual journey—and on that journey, even our failures and struggles can be conduits for grace. When we surrender to God our feelings and beliefs about food, we create openings where the Spirit can heal us at many levels of our being, and we gain greater insight into our woundedness in relation to food. At the same time, we may come to understand more deeply the ways in which solidarity with the poor, care for the environment, and respect for those who provide our food can shape our eating choices.
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“The table is a place for us to be truly ourselves,” my grandmother used to say. “It is a place where we can simply be.” You and I may not yet have arrived at that place of simplicity (though I hope you have)—but let us “press on” with faith, patience, and intentionality. The Spirit of Truth has the power to heal our wounded hearts and restore order to our eating.
“Each time you eat,” David writes, “know that you are feeding more than just a body. You are feeding the soul’s longing for life. . . . Ultimately, the most important aspect of nutrition is not what to eat but how our relationship to food can teach us who we are and how we can sustain ourselves at the deepest level of being.”
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“Take, eat,” Jesus said to us. “For this is my body, the bread of life.”
This article also appears in the July 2022 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 87, No. 7, pages 21-22). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: iStock/FG Trade
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March 29, 2018
Real Food and the Eucharist
Shannon Jung is telling the truth. It is a moral crisis indeed when “fulfill[ing] our desires conflicts with others’ abilities to meet basic needs.” Those of us in the middle and upper classes in North America have bought into the “myth of unlimitedness” that Wendell Berry describes, a myth that leads to death, not only for those we deny and oppress, but for ourselves as well. It is true on so many levels – in our interpersonal relationships, our communal structures, our relationship with the land as well as with the people who work it, our participation (unwittingly or not) in the food production system that values quantity over quality and expediency over justice. We do indeed live in a “culture of narcissism.”
On the whole, Jung is dead on. He asserts that this narcissism is embodied in “the consumer who puts the quality of their food before the possibility of others’ even having food.” If he means that I insist on buying caviar while my sister cannot scrounge up enough to make simple cakes over a fire, then yes, he is right. Yet the quality of food does matter, if “quality” means that it was grown and made and brought to our tables in a way that honors the earth, and honors the people who harvest and produce the food – both in terms of economics and in terms of artistry.
We have indeed bought into the idea that there is a limitless supply of food, and that it’s all there for the taking. Greed is inevitably the result of living into that myth. Yet overeating is not always only about greed; often it is about constantly trying to feed a deep hunger that is not only physical. In either case, Jung’s question of how we are to “re-educate our desires” is key. Whether we have fallen prey to gluttony and the endless desire for self-gratification, or to insidious self-doubt and relentless seeking of whatever it is that will ease emotional and spiritual hunger, the Christian practices of gratitude, fasting, and eucharist are crucial. Here I would like to focus on what Jung calls the “master practice,” eucharist.
Jung points to several core meanings of the Lord’s table: the showing forth of the depth of God’s love; the hospitality expressed in Jesus life, death, and resurrection; the mission of sharing to which we all are called; the profession of loyalty to Christ and to the membership of his body that occurs in the eating of this meal; and the inclusive nature of God’s love, expressed in turn by those belonging to Christ’s body. One might also say that the practice of the Lord’s Supper meets the human need for being fed as well as the need for being in communion, with Christ and with one another.
In the eucharist we are fed, not just with vague spiritual experience, but with real food. Especially when the bread is hearty and good, and the wine is sweet and biting, the meal enables us to “taste and see that the Lord is good” – that in this meal, Christ meets even our deepest hungers, in ways we cannot fully imagine or understand. Good bread and wine also spark the imagination, eliciting questions about where this food came from and how it came to be. Who made this wonderful bread? Where did this amazing wine come from? We are connected with those who brought those gifts to our table. Does it matter that we serve communion bread that is made by someone in the church with organic flour from a food cooperative, instead of overprocessed white bread that is factory-baked with preservatives, packaged in plastic, shipped across country, carried from the grocery in more disposable plastic bags, then diced into precise cubes that go stale before they are served? Yes. It matters. For God feeds us well, with what is real and good; the elements we use on Christ’s own table should reflect the same richness.
In the church where I worship, we are joined regularly by a handful of folks who do not have homes. There is hope, somehow, when we come to the Lord’s table together and there are big hunks of bread being passed out. This is no stingy God. Christ does not forget what we need and does not hold back that for which we hunger. And then, when we gather around the same lunch tables after worship, we remember that God intends goodness and fullness (of stomach and of life) for all God’s children.
Our need for communion is also met in this meal. We yearn for oneness with Christ and with one another; we long for reconciliation that is beyond our own power to bring about. In sharing this simple meal of bread and wine, we are tethered to a body, one which Christ and all of his brothers and sisters are a part. All of us are bound in this sharing. Even if we forget it as we live day to day, we are reminded here: we are all equally welcomed to the table at which Christ is host.
That this sharing anticipates the heavenly banquet, where there is room for everyone and plenty for all, is no small thing. It is the vision of that banquet that keeps us going, and fuels us for the living of the Christian life. It gives us a reason to keep striving for justice, courage to keep working and hoping for reconciliation, a pattern to keep act out the reign of God wherever we are. Without the vision of that heavenly banquet, our good deeds rely only on our best ethical impulses, which may not be enough to sustain us for a lifetime. In other words, the eucharist does not just keep us there at the table, but propels us forward into the world to live out the same hospitality, equality, and self-giving love.
Rightly celebrated, the Lord’s Supper makes us mindful that we are not just disembodied spirits at worship, but real bodies. The story of Christ’s own body being broken – and raised – insists that Christians attend to our own bodies and to the bodies all around us. In their book, Bodies, Bread, and Resurrection, Andrea Bieler and Luisse Schottroff put it this way:
“The Eucharistic life is about the real stuff: bread and hunger, food and pleasure, eating disorders and global food politics, private
property and the common good. . . . It is about holiness and resurrection; it is about gift exchange, sustainability, and the economy
of grace. When we share the holy meal together, when we bring our gifts to the table, when we intercede for the world, when we
collect money, and when we give thanks we are entering the realm of eschatological imagination.” And, they insist, “at the center
of all these things we do is the body.”1
In other words, our Eucharistic celebrations do more than feed and nourish those gathered around Christ’s table. Sharing in that meal heightens our desire to enact that banquet here and now – at tables in our churches, to be sure, and at other welcome tables, too. Sara Miles’ memoir of her coming to faith, Take this Bread: A Radical Conversion, paints a vivid picture of what this extension of the table looks like. She describes how she was converted to faith by the eucharist – how Jesus “happened to her” in the eating of the bread. New to Christianity, she was converted not only to intellectual assent and spiritual vitality, but to a new way of life. In eating the bread of the eucharist week after week, she soon discovered her call to feed others, and began a food pantry at her church.
Miles describes how she eventually became a deacon in the Episcopal church and began assisting with the Eucharist on Sunday mornings. Often she would don her bright yellow St. Gregory’s Food Pantry apron after the service, during the church’s coffee hour. Circulating among the parishioners while they sipped coffee and enjoyed one another’s fellowship, she would offer the remaining Eucharistic bread. “More Jesus?” she would ask politely, and then she would mention that the eucharist continued on Fridays, at the food pantry. “Same table,” she would say. “Come feed and be fed.”2 She made the connection clear between the two tables of feeding – the eucharistic table and the pantry table – where the body of Christ was broken and shared. If one were to visit St. Gregory’s Food Pantry, it would be nearly impossible to miss the link; the fresh fruits and vegetables, the cereals, breads and soups, are not set out in the fellowship hall or some storage closet. They are arrayed around the communion table itself, the very place of feeding.
As individuals and as a church, we are sustained as the body of Christ by what we receive at the table of the Word and the table of the Meal. Our deepest hungers are met there. But we are not fed only for our own sakes; we are sent out to be Christ’s own body. In exhorting his hearers to grasp the mystery placed before them, Augustine once proclaimed, “Be what you see. Receive what you are.” He urged the people to take the bread, the body of Christ, and to be that bread for others as they went out to live and work in the world – to become, in fact, the meal3.
When we gather around the Lord’s table, we do so not only for our own sakes, but for the sake of all God’s people. For the one who gave up his own body, that we might have life, demands that we tend to the bodies of others. How we share the meal at Christ’s table informs all of our meals – where our food comes from, how much of it we eat, how we take part in the sharing of food. Whenever we gather for worship, we do so as the very body of Christ — our bodies washed and blessed and fed, that we might be scattered, ourselves bread for a hungry world.
Notes
1 Andrea Bieler and Luise Schottroff, The Eucharist: Bodies, Bread, and Resurrection
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 127.
2 Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005),
140.
3 Augustine, “Your Own Mystery,” in Assembly, Vol. 23:2 (March 1997), accessed on line at
http://liturgy.nd.edu/assembly/assembly23-2augustine.shtml.
Possible Questions:
1. How do you see the family table linked to the communion table? In other words, how do you see your daily food consumption influencing your participation in the Lord’s supper?
2. Describe your church’s practice of communion as if you were talking to someone who had never experienced this. How does this description of your regular church practice compare to other experiences you may have had of the Eucharist feast? Are there certain rituals or ways of celebrating the Eucharist that connect more deeply with your spiritual hunger than others?
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