bread & wine.

At camp a few years ago, my friend told me about a book, Cold Tangerines by Shauna Niequist.  As soon as I could, I ordered the book and quickly devoured it.  I think I underlined half the book.  Shauna seemed to be able to articulate exactly what I felt.  When Bittersweet, her second book, came out, I felt like Shauna had seen my soul and written everything I was thinking and feeling; I felt like I was reading my own story.  We have never met, but I feel like I know her so well.  As Anne Shirley would say, we're kindred spirits.

In April, Shauna's new book is coming out.  I was sent an early copy and I just finished reading it.  It's one of the best books I have ever read.  It's real and honest and funny and heart-wrenching.  It's called Bread & Wine: a love letter to life around the table.  It's a collection of stories and recipes.  And it is beautiful.

Growing up, my family almost always ate dinner together at the table.  I knew this was important to my parents and it was fine with me, but I didn't realize the importance.  Last year, Kelly and Nicole and I made sure we had dinner together on Monday nights, and it was usually more often than that.  When I look back on last year, almost all of the best memories--almost all of the memories, in general--were around a table or, when there were more people, in a living room.  Whether it was Monday night dinners at 311 Calkins with just the 3 of us or a picnic at the new table in the backyard or coffee and morning prayer at the Bradford's or  something Kadilyn had cooked up at her place or a meal at the guys' house on Wealthy or sipping tea from the mugs Jack made or Pancakes at Jenny's or breakfast at Wolfgang's or Brandywine or a fancy birthday meal at Mangiamos or coffee at Sparrows or Wealthy St. Bakery..... Everything includes food and/or drinks.    There was Canadian Thanksgiving when we invited our neighbors.  There was dinner with Pastor Mary.  All the trips to Fulton St. Farmers' Market.  The time we tried to make wine.  And helping the Bradfords with the garden out back.  And bringing snacks to our CMS class.  And trying to roast stale marshmallows over the stove at our sleepover.  And all the new recipes we tried on Mondays... Margarita chicken, the stuffed pumpkin, all sorts of soups and stirfries, margarita pizza, apple-stuffed chicken, cilantro-lime rice, pupusas, all the other things I can't remember.  Finding the ingredients and learning to love the farmers' market and trying to figure out how to eat well/responsibly/ethically and making those meals together and eating together and sharing our hearts and sipping the tea or the coffee or the smoothies....  Those are the things I will never forget.  Those are the things that have made us us.  Toward the beginning of the book, Shauna writes about the friends around her table.  "When Josilyn moved to Haiti, she wrote us a letter to say good-bye.  And in that letter she wrote this line: I can't imagine life without a table between us.  Yes. Yes.  Exactly that.  I can't imagine life without a table between us.  The table is the life raft, the center point, the home base of who we are together.  It's those five faces around the table that keep me sane, that keep me safe, that protect me from the pressures and arrows and land mines of daily life...."  Yes.  That's just right.

In the Bread & Wine, Shauna quotes Lynne Rossetto Kasper, who says: "There are two kinds of people in the world: people who wake up thinking about what to have for supper and people who don't."  I don't.  I have never loved to eat.  I like to cook and I like to bake, but I don't really enjoy eating.  Of course I do eat, it's just not what I love.  And that's okay.  I've been learning that Kasper's quote can be applied to the other senses as well.  I'm learning to love to see things, really see them, and I'm learning that through the drawing class I'm taking, through learning to draw what I don't see.  But what I really love is to feel.  I go for a walk and I want to touch the pine bough dripping with dew, I want to take off my coat the feel the humidity of the heavy fog, I want to touch the flowers and feel the weight of an object and feel the warmth of a person's hand.  I love to feel.  But like I'm learning how to love to see, I'm also learning to love to smell and love to hear and love to taste.

I take these Congregational and Ministry Studies classes and I learn about how practices are formative.  One practice of the church is the Eucharist, the bread and the wine.  For most of my time at Calvin, I went to Church of the Servant and we had Communion every Sunday.  I didn't realize it until junior year, but that weekly Communion did something to me, to us as the church.  And I began to see that Communion can be more than the bread and the wine in the church service; it can be Monday night dinner or coffee on the porch or breakfast at Wolfgang's or lunch with a mentor.  Shauna sums this up at the end of the book: "To those of us who believe that all of life is sacred, every crumb of bread and sip of wine is a Eucharist, a remembrance, a call to awareness of holiness right where we are.  I want all of the holiness of the Eucharist to spill out beyond the church walls, out of the hands of priests and into the regular streets and sidewalks, into the hands of regular, grubby people like you and me, onto our tables, in our kitchens and dining rooms and backyards.  Holiness abounds, should we choose to look for it.  The whisper and the drumbeat of God's Spirit are all around us, should we choose to listen for them.  The building blocks of the most common meal--the bread and the wine--are reminders to us: 'He's here!  God is here, and he's good.'  Every time we eat, every time we gather, every time the table is filled: He's here. He's here, and he is good."  Amen.

Once again, it feels like my soul has been put on paper...  And this isn't even close to all of themes running through the book (and my life)...  So, read the book and then join me at the table.

http://www.shaunaniequist.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Bread-Wine-Finding-Community-Around/dp/0310328179/