The Simple Gift of Food

For as the rain and the snows fall from the heavens and do not return there, but water the earth, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall the word of the Lord go forth. It shall not return to God empty, but will accomplish God’s will, and achieve the purpose for which it has been sent. (Isaiah 55:10-11)

Tonight was my turn to make dinner—brinjal bhaji. The mustard seeds were sizzling in a skein of hot oil on the stove. One by one, coriander, onions, crushed tomatoes, spices, and slow-roasted eggplant would follow into our trusty Dutch oven, all simmering together into a velvety South Indian aubergine curry. There was only one problem. How do you slow-roast five pounds of eggplant in twenty-five minutes in an oven that huffs and heaves through three?

If you swing by the Casa kitchen any night between Sunday and Thursday, you’ll be sure to smell something delightful. As Christians, the comparisons to the Eucharist basically write themselves. When I try to explain the idea of intentional community to friends outside of FMS, I always point to our dinners—they are a corporeal sign of our commitment to each other. When we want to welcome a new friend (and as a house of hospitality we have many) you can be sure they’ll be receiving a community dinner invitation. Our Franciscan simplicity—we eat meat once a week and have a shared grocery fund—encourages us to approach every dinner creatively. (One of our more ambitious efforts in this regard turned our well-endowed spice cabinet and an inheritance of rice noodles into a delicate pho dinner celebrating a community member’s concert.) We trust at the end of a long day of service something warm and delicious will be on the table, and that at least twice a month you get to do that good turn for your fellow residents. So far, so Eucharistic. 

As the Programs Associate, I have the distinct privilege of spending my Tuesday mornings volunteering at another site. Most weeks, I am at Food and Friends, which began as a group of church friends delivering meals to homebound patients during the AIDS crisis. It now delivers 7,000 meals a day over 600 square miles. Because I cannot drive, I join a team of volunteers to prep several hundred units of one thing at a time in three-hour sessions: tofu-lemongrass soup, sweet potato pie, three-bean salad. Our camaraderie is quiet, a warm assembly-line of good cheer and good nutrition going out the doors of our Fort Totten facility. In the kitchen I do not meet our clients. How do you make a Eucharist with someone you might never see? Faith, however, is the hope of things unseen (Hebrews 11:1). Every time I ladle a soup or stick on a label, I trust that that meal might be a sacrament for us both.

When it is my turn to say grace, I often find myself turning not to the Last Supper, but to a first supper. As a famine ravages the land, a foreign prophet crosses a brook. He wanders into a small Sidonian town looking for bread. There is a widow in that town, and though she does not know him, she knows his God. “As surely as the LORD your God lives,” she says, emphasis mine, “I am gathering a few sticks together to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it and die.” When Elijah enjoins her, “The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry until the Lord sends rain upon the earth,” the miracle is in simplicity restored. You do not eat to die, but to live. You shall not eat and die, but you shall eat and live. The widow has lived, labored, and loved under a system in which a God might live while she and her child die, far away from the center of power in Samaria. She has good reason to be skeptical, but during this famine, God brings abundance to the simple, filling the hungry with good things.

The solution, it turns out, is to broil the eggplant in two batches for six to seven minutes at a time, watching carefully. Dinner only has to be a few minutes late. We love a God that fortunately feeds us in time—just when we need it, in our fleshy, yearning, living bodies. 

Question for Reflection: When have you shared a meal that reminded you of your commitment to someone or something?