The Thursday Meal

The most I have to think about today is what to make for dinner.  (Well, that and how to get the dishes done and squeeze in a trip to the zoo because the active 5 year old is showing signs of cabin fever, or if we need to stay home because the toddler seems a little under the weather.)

Maybe we’ll make bread, so that I can at least break it at the table, and hand it out to my small congregation. I am still disoriented by a life that is not completely swallowed up by Holy Week (because that is the reality for most church clergy), but this year, I’ve got some small people who aren’t going to make it through a worship service that starts at 6:30pm. Eventually, that time will work for them.

But tonight, at least, the centerpiece of the evening at church would be the meal. And that’s the centerpiece around here anyway. The sacred and the mundane.

And besides: food is not all that mundane. I read this passage by M.F.K. Fisher this morning, handily included in readings for Maundy Thursday in this series.

People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?

They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.

The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it…and then the warmth and richness and the fine reality of hunger satisfied…and it is all one.

I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red win in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.

There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder , more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can’t find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we’ll be no less full of human dignity.

There is a communion of more than our bodies when when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?