Close your eyes and imagine you're soaring high above the landscapes of story, drifting like a dream between the worlds that have captured our hearts. First, you descend through the enchanted ceiling of Hogwarts Great Hall, where hundreds of floating candles illuminate tables groaning under the weight of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, treacle tart and
pumpkin pasties. The very air shimmers with warmth as first year students discover Butterbeer for the first time, their faces glowing not just from the magical flames but from the simple joy of belonging, of finding at last a table where they are wanted. Your journey carries you next to the rolling green hills of the Shire, where you slip through the round door of Bag End. Here, Bilbo's pantry overflows with seed cakes and scones, wheels of cheese and crusty
bread. At the kitchen table, meals aren't hurried affairs but celebrations. Second breakfast flowing into 11 ZS, each bite shared with the unhurried contentment of a people who understand that good food, like good fellowship, cannot be rushed. Westward you drift until the bells of Redwall Abbey call you down to witness a harvest feast of legendary proportions. The tables stretch across the Abbey grounds, laden with deeper ever turnip and cater and beetroot pie, strawberry cordial
and honeyed nut bread. Young otters and mice work alongside ancient Badgers, their paws sticky with preserves, their bellies full. Not just a food, but of the deep satisfaction that comes from a community that knows how to celebrate together. Finally, you find yourself in the Great Hall of Care, Paravel, where the kings and Queens of Narnia gather around a table that radiates both majesty and
joy. Here, the wine flows like liquid gold, the roasted meats are carved with ceremony, and talking animals partake in a feast that somehow manages to be both regal and wonderfully, utterly welcoming. Why do food and feasting feature so prominently in our favorite fantasy worlds? What is it about these visceral images that so easily moves us to nostalgia and longing for places we've never physically visited?
The answer has less to do with the magic of those worlds, although it is significant, and more to do with a magic we've forgotten exists in our own. That magic has fragmented in the face of sin and its effects, broken families, eating disorders, obesity, alcoholism, industrial food, and so much more. But what if I told you that every meal, every actual meal you'll eat today is meant to be a small echo of those great feasts?
What if the reason our hearts leap at these literary banquets is because they're showing us something true about reality itself? And what if just maybe there is a way for God to heal not only our relationship with food, but through it the world. Welcome to the imagination Redeemed podcast special House moot edition. I am Brian Brown with Sarah Howell and Christina Brown and today we are asking a question that might just transform your kitchen table. Why do we feast?
Sarah and Christina, thank you for joining me today. Need to. Be here. Thanks for having us. Let's cause some trouble. Having flown over all of these fantasy worlds, let's just take a moment and contrast them with our world. We've got all these different ways that our relationship with food can be soured. Tell me a bit about what that's looked like for you or for the world that you see around you. My world, I don't know how much of it is nature or nurture.
I can definitely tell you that a lot of it is nature. For me, my personality is food is fuel. I'm the kind of person who forgets to eat throughout the day because I'm so hyper focused into what I'm doing. Food is so much of an afterthought that I can't even fathom those people who eat breakfast and say what's for
lunch. My mind goes straight to the the dieting world and and how it's been so Oh my goodness, it's changed a lot throughout the decades, but there's always a focus on calories, caloric intake, there's a focus on carbs and it's just gone through food is basically gone through like broken down into its like elements. And then of course, you have like evaluating food for its nutrient patterns. And so honestly, I have grown to see, to see food more in that light.
And it's been really damaging to the way I've come to any piece of food, let alone a, a table laden with it, you know, but it's, it's become so disassociated with pleasure or it has been like thrown the other way. That's been like in the dieting world, right? It's been like, thrown into like guilt, right. So I just feel like we've lost the essence of the joy of eating. I think we've lost so much, Christina, because we've fundamentally lost what it means
to be human in so many ways. And food is such a visceral flesh. You know, human need. Such a visceral, as you put it earlier, Brian, such a visceral need. There is a wonderful documentary called In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, and one of the key things he wants to know is something that you touched on, Christina, which is we've demonized certain kinds of foods, certain kinds of nutrients, certain kinds of chemical makeups that you find in food.
Carbs are bad or no, it's fats now or what have you. But when it comes down to it, from my perspective as someone who sees food as fuel, so often that comes from an understanding of what my purpose is. If I'm a mechanism that's a machine that needs some input so I can have output, then the food itself becomes mechanistic as well. Whatever synthetic thing I can pull together to give me an outcome, the ends truly justify all the means.
So whether that's guilt for binging or yeah, whether it's over fascination or under fascination with food, we've we've itemized it rather than seeing it as something that is a part of our world as we are a part of the world. Yeah, well said. I mean, between the two of you, you kind of just covered the what, what, what the world around us views as an unhealthy relationship with food or a disordered or damaged relationship with food and then
a supposedly healthy one, right. You've got on the one hand, looking at food with a sense of fear, looking either because of eating disorders, body image issues, food allergies, these kinds of things, or with a sense of guilt. But then on, on the, at the other end of that spectrum, you've got the, the quote UN quote healthy version. And that's reducing food down to its component parts, which is kind of how the mechanistic scientistic world does
everything. We learned the truth of something by breaking it down into little, little pieces. And so I'm not eating beef or tofu, I'm eating protein, which which sort of accentuates that that disconnection between US and the world. It's easy to get caught up in the current problems of our current society and how the industrial food complex looks right now.
And if you you look at even a small amount of what's happened to our food, our systems, the way in which we create and Co create with creation, how damaging it is to ourselves and to the world. But history reminds us that there's never it's hard. You're hard pressed to find times where that something like that isn't going on. I was just reminded the other day that during the French Revolution, most of the peasants in France ate solely their diet was bread, about two to £3 a day.
And I was talking to someone who loves that time of history and they were recounting to me that the majority of that bread wasn't flour, but filler. Filler full of things like grain husks and sawdust. And so the majority of the food that's even on our plates, whether it's during the 1700s or today, we're dealing with something that isn't quite right. So that's on the individual level. When you bring it up a level to the group level, the communal level, you see the same, the
same challenges. Just as you, Sarah said, don't even want to think about the food. Don't even have time for food. I'm busy doing stuff. It's a truism at this point that almost nobody has family dinners anymore, right? And an actual meal where everyone, everyone in your household sits down and looks each other in the eye. And all of this mirrors other brokenness in the world, doesn't it? Like the relationship with food that is kind of guilt driven.
Well, we also do life that way. You approach life in ways that are guilt driven and performance focus and guilt and shame. And we approach life with fear and we approach life with a constant sense of hurry. And you can you can kind of go down the list name almost any aspect of our dislocation from food. We're also doing it in other areas of life. We've talked before about how we don't really know how to relate to the created world anymore.
And that's a gift. That's, that's an art we need to relearn. We have alienation from each other right at the the number of people, especially men, who have even one or two close friends keeps going down and down and down. We have so much tribalism without actually a true tribe. And meanwhile we're all still asking in the middle of all of it, just as the human race always has. God, where are you? It's the alienation from God. Peace.
And just to throw one more little piece of wood on the fire, if you are a Protestant in the United States, there may also be a theological dimension for you that we don't know how to reconcile ourselves. Too much of anything in the created order. We really struggle to have a category between indifference and idolatry. We're so afraid of turning something into an idol, especially something that can be seen, that we tend to write all of it off as bad, distracting, meaningless, irrelevant.
So here we are. We are going about life in bodies that require food, increasingly alienated from that food, and here we are to talk about why we feast. Feasting feels like a strange place to start. If I can't even figure out how to put some food on the table, I don't know how to get to a feast. If I can't walk, how am I supposed to run? So I am curious like why would we move to a feast when there's so much brokenness? How would we ever even get there
at? The root of what you just said, Sarah, is, is essentially this question of yeah, I don't, I don't even know how to eat. Why are we talking about feasting? And, and that's an incredibly important leading question, I think for us. And I'm not going to answer it right away, and I'm not going to ask you to either, but I want to raise it as kind of the fundamental question behind the question for today. What is the difference between eating and feasting?
Yeah, Brian, there's a quote by Alexander Schmeman that we've talked about before, and I know he's one of your favorite authors, but we have the quote here because we like it so much. And so I'll read it. It's it's this the natural dependence of man upon the world was intended to be transformed constantly into communion with God, in whom is all life In our sinfully alienated world. Man still loves, he is still hungry. He knows he is dependent on that
which is beyond him. But his love and his dependence refer only to the world in itself. He does not know that breathing can be communion with God. He does not realize that to eat can be to receive life from God, and more than its physical sense, he forgets that the world, its air, or its food cannot by themselves bring life, but only as they are received and accepted for God's sake and in God as bearers of the divine gift of life.
By themselves they can produce only the appearance of life. Things treated merely as things in themselves destroy themselves, because only in God have they any life. The world of nature cut off from the source of life, is a dying world. For one who thinks food in itself is the source of life. Eating is communion with the dying world. It is communion with death. Food itself is dead. It is a life that has died and it must be kept in refrigerators like a corpse.
I can never read that part without Oh gosh yes. Yeah, that last line, it really sticks with you. It does. And, and, and we've talked about this in in the context of a harvest feast in particular, because it's when, when you are especially in these these books that we refer to at the beginning, there's often, you know, a Halloween feast or a harvest feast or something, which is the time when all of we think of all the food as being ripe, right. We've spent all year growing it.
It's at its peak. But it is also food that is all about to die. It's it's either if you leave it and unharvested, it will just sit there and rot. And now that it has been harvested, it's on borrowed time. So yeah, it is, it is, it is
death. And what's what's really, really crucial there scripturally in what Schmemmen does, I think is what what you see in that paragraph is an incredibly important insight into what Saint Paul talks about when he is talking about the relationship between something being of the world and something being of the spirit.
There's this simplistic reading of the New Testament that is constantly wanting to push the heavenly realm in the earthly realm apart from each other and wanting to be more heavenly by being as cut off as possible from all things that are of this world, but just to say all the things that God has made. But that's not what Paul means when he says something is of the spirit or of the world. He means it in much the same sense that Augustine means when he's talking about the city of
God versus the city of man. It's not a question of interaction with one or the other. You are an embodied soul. You have no choice about interaction and you also have no choice from an obedient standpoint when it comes to gratitude to God for the good things that he has given you. But what you what what Paul means is what Schmeman is describing there.
If you are taking the good things that God has given and you are sort of worshipping, worshipping them for themselves, yeah, that is communion with death, both in an ultimate sense and in that kind of immediate sense. But when they are linked together in your mind, when the taking the breath in is also this opportunity to remember that you are literally receiving life from God, not just oxygen and from the air. It's those two things together.
For my Protestant brain, that's a little bit of a stretch to wrap my head around, to love the material thing and the spiritual thing all wrapped up in each other. It, it is such a beautiful motif of, you know, played over and over and over again with every single interaction we have in this physical world of the upside down Kingdom. You know what is last? It's, it's the menial stuff.
How do we enter into abundance? It's through the faithfulness and gratitude of what God has placed in front of us, which with the eyes of the natural person, the natural man, by definition looks like scarcity. By definition, it is dying, it's dead, it's a corpse in a fridge. And yet he asks us to take those things and use them for his glory, for eternity, for through his abundance. And that doesn't make sense
either, right? But but again, that's that's upside down, which which should ring true to all that we know about Christ. Yeah, yeah. So let's dig there because I think if, if we are to boil all of this down to to one thing, it's that the entire dynamic, the negative dynamic we've been describing of the way we are alienated from food, the creation, each other, God, It's it's the effects of the fall. It's not what we were made for. We were made for life together, right?
The imago day with the rest of creation, shepherding the rest of creation, humans with each other, man with woman, parents with children, separating into competing tribes and things is a post Tower of Babel thing. We were meant for life together. And I love that phrase from from Dietrich Bonhoeffer and feasting. This is why it's so important to talk about feasting rather than just eating. Feasting is an act of faithfulness that symbolizes our participation in Christ, healing that breach.
Seeing more on that, Brian, I don't particularly understand how. So let's let's get real controversial right away. Always a good plan.
Love it. Well, I think to do to do anything right in the world, it helps to go back to the source of what is it that what's sort of the higher thing that we're trying to to participate in and our little feasts, whether it's, you know, you and your significant other on a date or the Thanksgiving huge Thanksgiving feast or anything in between are echoes of a big feast and it's.
The future feast that we're looking forward to, but it's also something that we do, many of us, every week, and that is Holy Communion. This is not something that I grew up with my my church did communion once a month. So I would have looked funny at myself now saying what I'm about to say, but. You would have looked funny at your now wife who did grow up that way. That's right, although if I saw how cute she was, I would have would have started rethinking my theology.
But but what I was about to say was the the Christian worship service is built around a feast. The the center point of the Christian worship service is feasting on the word of God in two senses. And a lot of American Protestants have picked up this mythology that it is in fact a Protestant thing to insist that the bread and the wine are just stuff that the whole thing is just a symbol.
And we when we say symbol, we have a much lower understanding of the word symbol then our ancestors would have. When we say symbol we just mean it's meaningless. Fundamentally it's just a thing, it doesn't really matter. But even the Protestant Reformers, up until a couple generations of spin offs after, we're actually quite adamant that Christ literally met and infused his people with his
presence through communion. Their disagreements both with Roman Catholics and with each other were not about whether Christ was present in the sacrament. It was they were, they were about a whole bunch of other things. And in communion, we don't just look back at the Last Supper. We also look forward to the day when God's presence will fill the whole earth.
And if you want to read a whole book on just that, we quoted it already, Alexander Schmeman's For the Life of the World, which is really short and really ecumenical, but let's just look at the Eucharist for a SEC. There's a three-part, this is my highly UN theological sort of layman's explanation of the the process of the Eucharist that I want to be able to, for us to kind of point back to our own feasting with. It starts with Thanksgiving, step one.
It goes into Step 2, which is offering the gifts we have thanked God for back to him. And then it concludes with a request for him to do the real Sacramento work. This breaks all of the broken rhythms and broken relationships that we've been describing like starting with Thanksgiving. I understand easier said than done, but if someone could wave a wand on our historical relationships with food, the three of us and make us properly thankful for the gifts that God
has given us in that food. There's a reason we always, historically speaking, say grace before a meal that would make you Sarah, perhaps hurry less, pay attention more, get a little bit out of a rhythm of I got to do the next thing. And maybe my value is in the next thing. Maybe, maybe my value is sitting quietly and receiving.
And Christina, the dynamic you described, it's instead of the the posture of guilt or fear or some of these other elements we we've talked about again, it's grateful, trusting, reception. Just that if that's all we did differently and we could magically do it tomorrow, what would that change?
And it's completely fascinating and, and beautiful and, and I think especially as a, as a gardener, like is I think about like our direct relationship to land and the food, like the food we grow and the tilling of it. But I think it's fascinating if you really think about it and how weird it is in some ways. Like you can think about it two ways. You can think, OK, that's kind of weird, but you think, oh,
that's actually really natural. But how Christ actually says about food, bread and wine to his disciples, take, eat, this is my body given for you. And again, like the blood, the wine. And like how odd it seems in some ways that that the God of the universe would be like, Hey, think of me as this food, you know, given for you. And yet, and yet it really does point to like how the sacrifice is of Christ in general. His entire life and death is
more than just symbolic. It's it's complete sustenance. It's life. And in our death, like we're all inexorably tied to Christ's giving of that flesh and blood and the blood, the bread and the wine that he broke for us. It's truly like life for life, all so that we can have life unto life. So it's just really crazy.
But anyway, I was thinking about how nutty it is that, you know, if you think kind of aside from the normal ways we, we as Christians approach communion, how out of sync it sometimes can be that Christ is saying I'm food for you, eat me, come to me, Sup of me, not just Sup with me, but Sup of me. I think that's pretty cool. It's wild. And that death is a part of that right Death, the death of
Christ, the death of the food. Verily I say unto you, unless a wheat, a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies it, it shall not bear life, right. But I think that I have seen in lots of different channels, not necessarily only the, the Judeo-christian channel, this idea that gratitude and Thanksgiving is paramount to shifting our orientation to the world from one of fear to one of trust and love. But Brian, I'm, I'm really interested. What do you mean by the second one?
Offering something back? Because there seems to be an offering. And then you said that there is something like a request and that has a relational dynamic to those two things that I often don't find when when I hear people kind of stop at at the gratitude portion because what now? Yeah, what now? So I love the way that that Christina framed it. It's so rooted in the way that we receive gifts.
That posture of Thanksgiving is so rooted in the way that Christ himself told us to receive the gift and the way that those are symbolic of the way he made for us to relate to everything Good, right? You can't sweep aside this stuff and say I only need Jesus because he's literally handing it to you saying yes. And and so OK, if if that's the reality, if if all good things are from him. And this is another place where Schmeman is so good.
The why? Why is it that the church is referred to as as a Kingdom of priests? Well, it's because that's what we were made for and that's what we were redeemed for. We are literally on the planet to offer the planet back to God in worship. So when you receive a gift, whether it is a skill or a chicken wing, you offer the gift back to him and say this is not
mine, it is yours. I want to use it for your purposes in that action, whether it is at the start of a creative process, I want to write a book or the start of a meal or something else. We are acknowledging that symbolic reality, that the gifts of the world are ultimately for His world. They are not simply the physical objects or the mental acuity or whatever it is, but they are
something more. We are offering our bodies and souls and everything that is going into them as a living sacrifice, because only when we love the things of earth as a part of heaven are we really inviting God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven for earth to follow the pattern of heaven. So you with the, the, you fight the, the, the guilt and shame and all those kinds of things with Thanksgiving. You fight the temptation toward idolatry through sacrifice. This is yours.
This is for you. The the communion service in many churches has some variation of the phrase. All gifts are yours, O God, and of your own have we given thee. My goodness, yes, I I have something I really want to say. So this all is making me think so much of well, you know what? OK, I'm just going to read it because I think it needs to. I need it needs its own little introduction.
So in case you're wondering, this was written a couple years ago at Cultivating Oaks Press. So it's called take and eat. And I just, I need to say it. Here we go. OK, He's sitting still on the hillside. A light breeze scented thickly with blooming cowslips and wild hawthorn tossles his hair. Closing his eyes, he tips his face to the sky, inhaling deeply. The sun, that wondrous orb of fire, warms his bones.
He wiggles his toes deep into the cool mud that proudly boasts Tufts of fresh green and opens his eyes as he surveys the vast expanse of the valley below him. Tears of joy begin to form in his eyes. This, this is beauty. A wild red poppy catches his eye. Her petals form a perfect cup turned up to the heavens like a chalice, offering glory back to the one who gave it to her. He sifts through his satchel beside him and pulls out his pen
and notebook. He leans over the sun washed page and scrawls for the beauty of the earth. Folliot Sanford Pierre .29 year old Queen's College graduate, penned these words in 1864 on a hilltop in Bath, England and his poem became one of the most well known hymns sung around the world. Today his words describe our ecstatic encounters with creation and the love of God who
placed us within. He writes for the love which from our birth, over and around us lies hill and veil, and tree, and flower, sun and moon, and stars of light. Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of praise, or this our joyful hymn of praise. But what many people don't know about Pierre points Hymn for the beauty of the Earth is it was actually written as a communion hymn. And this is my favorite part. It's actually one of many eucharistic poems that he compiled along others.
My favorite is called the Chalice of Nature that were eventually collected into published volumes. But for pure point beholding the beauty of the earth inspired him to offer that praise back to God on the altar. And we were just talking about that. So this is what I need to say this. So most of us have never heard these long omitted stanzas in this original hymn for the beauty of the earth. So I wanted to read them here. So he this is of the other
stanzas. It says Yesu victim undefiled, offer we at thine own shrine thyself, sweet sacrament, divine for thyself, best gift, divine to the world, so freely given for that great, great love of thine. So I love that because as we were talking about like offering back to God and the whole concept of Christ saying take, eat, this is my body. The bread and the wine were things that man made. It's not that Christ gave us a grain of wheat and a grape and said this is me.
He gave bread and wine, which is the participation and gratitude. It's a making of bread. It's a pressing of the wine and so we are giving him back to himself in that weird, weird way. And so like when peer point says offer we thine own shrine thyself sweet sacrament divine. He's talking about again the beginning of the poem as he's sitting on that hill, the chalice of nature, that the way you cannot pull God from nature and nature from God.
And anyway, it's just so beautiful and mind blowing if you really stop and think about it. So thank you for allowing me to read that because I just got so excited about that. Yeah.
And I'm glad you did. And because it's again, like we have this instinctive for, for those of us who are have Protestant backgrounds, we often have this very instinctive kind of recoiling from not only this, this Eucharistic theology, but also this sense of just reconciliation with anything in, in, in the world, because we're so afraid of it. And we forget that that's not only is that not a Protestant thing, as I said earlier, it's also, it's, it's pretty recent
thing. There are so many good old hymns like that one that have communion verses. And if you get out your, you know, whatever Methodist timnal or something, they probably don't have those verses. But if you Google them and look at the original ones, they're there. So many of our best hymn writers knew this stuff and wanted us to remember we are living in the world and not of the world. And to live in the world and not of the world is to live in the world like we are participating
in that larger heavenly reality. So we meet it with Thanksgiving, we offer it back to God, and then we invite Him to do the real work, right? That's the third step. We, we don't get to Jesus by looking past the things that he has given us. Just shove it all aside. I only need Jesus. There might be seasons of fasting and things like that for us, but overall we the only way
forward is through. So God goes about transforming the gifts that he gives us. When we offer them back, he sort of completes them, but he also in the process is transforming us. So to bring that full circle, then our little feasts and now we can start talking about what feasting actually is in our context.
Echo that big one. It's an opportunity for us to practice something very radical, very different, very countercultural, whatever one of these buzzwords you want to use and and doing something that's actually pretty easy to do, which is invite others into it, right? Think about all the people in your life, whether they are sort of disaffected Christians going through rough stuff or whether
they are not Christians at all. Who would not accept an invitation to come to church with you on Sunday? Who would accept an invitation to dinner? This is what we do. We re enact in this smaller way, this practice of Thanksgiving and offering an invitation to God. And in that process we kind of live out this little ritual of mankind reconciled to creation, people reconciled to each other, and God reconciled to man. So let's talk details. Yeah, yeah.
What does this look like? Because that sounds really great. Maybe I'll ask it this way. Think about a a favorite feasting memory could be from a book, it could be from your own life, and it could be a one time super memorable thing. Or it could have been this this ritual that you had with family or certain friends or something at some point in in your life. Well, something Brian, that you probably said this and I'm catching up, but it seems like feasting has to involve hospitality.
It has to involve a welcoming and of not only the food on the table, but of others to come around the table as well. So it's a communion in all sorts of ways. And so, yeah, my first thought about feasting and when I've experienced it before primarily is when someone has welcomed me and and shared in their abundance. The thing that I keep thinking of, there are two specific families, one from San Diego and 1:00 here in Boston. And they don't know each other at all.
They're from completely different cultures, but they both in their own ways from their little means, continuously, continuously say when you come over to visit, we have so much, please, please eat more, please take more. We have so much. That phrase, we have so much is something that I, I can't seem to shake when I think about hospitality in in in relation to feasting. It's. Beautiful, I even think of it
too. When you asked that question, Brian, I thought of a lot of, you know, big feasts or whatever. And I was lucky to to grow up with parents who really did believe in in feasting large, you know, holiday feasts and inviting strangers in. But just shaped a lot of, you know, my approach to feasting and hospitality as an adult, as I think we've talked about before and and in turn, you know, the way you and I like to
to to host people and to feast. Brian But it's funny that when you ask that question, the thing that came to my mind was actually way more simple. And it was having a family movie night, but doing it with all kinds of treats and goodies and putting it on like charcuterie board and baking cookies and just sitting there and enjoying this experience of a movie together, maybe one that our kids haven't seen yet and sharing the experience and like eating this food.
And sometimes, you know, Brian and I will have a glass of wine around. You know, the kids will have like this little sparkling like goodiness. And I just thought like that in and of itself is just this beautiful way to invite even small children into like the goodness of celebrating time together and food and story. So anyway that that's something that that came to mind when you said that. Yeah, you can. You can layer all these additional feasts on top of the
literal food one. It can be, you can be feasting on a yeah, a story together or a conversation or any number of different things, but it's above and beyond the food. It starts with the food. Because food, like we said at the beginning, it's transforming death into new life, right? This is this is a hill that I'll die on. Like I, I love, I love cooking and I love cooking for people specifically. I can look down, I'm cooking.
Last night I was just making these stuffed Peppers, just rice and ground beef and fennel and garlic and things and everything on my counter was dead or dying, right? And, and many of them wouldn't be, wouldn't be considered food in and of themselves, right? They all have nutritional value, but none of them are food by themselves. I. Don't know, I love to eat raw onions like apples. Just kidding. Just kidding. Raw garlic, like apples or like oranges anyway. But but yeah, like it's, it's,
it's all dead. And then I put it together into something that it wasn't before and never would have been naturally something that is life. And I'm offering life to my family. In that case, you're transforming death into life. You're you're doing this literal physical embodied thing which builds in you the habit A to do that and B to CI was cooking with our our nine year old. He was helping me and he's seeing, learning to see as normal this transformation of
death into life. Like that is a part of the world that we're offering to him and that is a part of the world that you're offering your guests, right? That's sort of step one. They come in and you have that just sense of eat more, eat more. Like you said, Sarah, if I make a cocktail for somebody and then they want a second cocktail, I always, I absolutely refuse to let them reuse their glass, to take the glass, stick it in the sink, get them a fresh glass because it just those little
tiny things. You don't have to do that literal thing, but those little tiny things give them that sense of abundance, that sense of no, it's not going to be the last cookie, Eat the cookie. This is not inconvenient. Yeah, of course. I will wash this dish later. I want you to have this abundance. Yeah. And practicing that abundance think, like you said, Brian, has to be something you build as a habit because it does not come naturally in a world where we
see scarcity. I think it's interesting. Interesting is not even the right word. It's fantastical that in the Gospel of John, Jesus's first miracle, his first sign is making 750 bottles of wine equivalents halfway through, you know, at the end of the
celebration. And that screams the from Amos and from Joel, this idea that when the Messiah comes, there will be streams of wine flowing from the mountains, like just this overabundance that the, that we're we're moving towards in the ultimate feast, when God's bride, his people come and have true communion with him. But that's that's really, really hard. Yeah, it's really, really hard for me. So I'm curious, how, how do we begin to practice that? What does this actually look
like to begin that habit? Maybe I'll, I'll love this one over to Christina and, and ask to just pile on to Sarah's question a little bit. We, we, we talked about all these different ways in which our relationship with food is broken. So at this point and, and as a species, we're still figuring out why the heck this is. But at this particular moment in time, a lot of people, almost anyone at any given table is bringing some aspect of a broken
relationship with food, right. She can't eat gluten. She doesn't drink. She's is an alcoholic. So and so is watching sugar. So and so can technically eat everything, but is bringing this unspoken guilt or shame thing with them. Almost anyone at your table has something broken in them in your relationship with food. So what does it look like? Christina, you've put a lot of thought into this over over the years.
What does it look like to invite a group of people to your table and have them, you know, 5 or 10 minutes later, sort of all of that has been overcome because of what you've done in terms of
hospitality choices. Well, I mean, of course, practically speaking, because there is so much broken relationships with food or dietary considerations and sickness and autoimmune things, when you do have someone over who you don't know particularly well, you just kind of want to ask, are there food allergies or restrictions you guys are dealing with right now? You know, because you want them to feel comfortable. We as a family have dealt with a
number of those ourselves. And it is uncomfortable when you're invited to someone's house. I'm like, oh, but I'm so sorry we can't have gluten, you know, like, or we can't have cheese right now or whatever it is. And you just, it's, you feel terrible when you're invited to someone's home and you're putting them out in that way.
So when someone says we'd love to cook for you, do you have any food allergies or restrictions that we can accommodate that is already takes a ton of pressure off. So that's just a way to kind of immediately counter sort of some of that, you know, guilt that someone might be coming in with. And then I think honestly, for me, one of the biggest things that I've found is setting a beautiful table.
I think having flowers or drinking from the fancy water glasses, it doesn't have to be that way. And you don't want to over formalize, you know, a casual come over for dinner, but lighting a candle, just making someone feel like you have intentionally prepared a space for them can be really, really welcoming. It really shows them that you're not being put out and that you're excited to have them. You know, I think those things are really, really encouraging and in that way.
And then if you want to go the opposite way, I know, I know people who say like, I don't like my house being perfectly clean when people come over because I don't want them to feel like pressure, like, oh, their life is so put together. And I wish I could cook like this and I wish I could, you know, whatever. And why doesn't my house look this like pristine? And, you know, then they start feeling like this shame and this pressure.
So, you know, you could go the other way and say, no, this is just a casual meal we're having together, you know, like mismatched dishes, plates, but eat what you want, Eat as much as you want. Like there's more on the stove. Oh, do you want this? Do you want this? And but anyway, those are just some of the ways that I've found in some of those more immediate contexts, Brian.
Yeah, well, so so you had the the immediate food sense of your transforming death into new life and offering it to your guests and you're doing it in a way that they that they can all receive, they can all partake in. And then what I heard in what you just described, both in that respect and in the more sort of relational aspect, what I heard was I thought of you before you got here. Yeah, right. It's that echo of of Christ.
I go to prepare a place for you. There was you're you're walking in and you could be AI mean you and I have had literal total strangers plenty of times that just walked in because a friend of a friend invited them and you're making a stranger into a friend, which is almost like making an enemy into a friend. That's actually the the root of the word hospitality means. Well, yeah. Do you know that exact route? I I remember we had talked about that at 1:00.
Point Hospice HOSES. Yeah, it's, I forget the the detail detail of the etymology, but it was like frending an enemy, essentially the something. Like that the. Stranger becoming a friend. So, so in that you're modeling again the reconciliation of the human race with, you know, with each other itself. What about the what about the God component? This is where I think you push furthest into the difference between eating and feasting, right?
Because when you're transforming death into new life, that's not unique to feasting. That's that's an eating thing
across the board. Strangers becoming friends, inviting the man, making those little choices to say, I thought of you before you got here and recognizing that there are times for that to be fancy and formal and how you went to that much effort for me. And there are times for that that will overwhelm someone, and you want them to just feel comfortable, like they could just take a nap on your couch. So there's eating, there's hospitality.
The vert, that vertical dimension of connection with the divine and with past and future, I think is what really elevates eating into feasting. Tell me about that. To me, I, I know that this verse has a lot of different other contexts, but something that keeps coming to mind in this conversation is in Psalm 23 where it says, God, you prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
And while we're talking about all these things that we can do with Thanksgiving, what we can do to offer things back up to God at the end of the day, this world is still so broken. And when we look at the grand narrative of history, it is this Exodus way where we are taken out of slavery through Christ. And in the here and now we are with him. And yet we are still walking in this wilderness before we get to the Promised land, just like the Israelites.
And so in this wilderness, we might be able to do our participation, our part with Thanksgiving and offering back. But at the end of the day, what we have is still broken. At the end of the day, even though he calls us to feast in seven different feasts in in the desert and like the Israelites and feast upon feast and remembrance upon remembrance, we're still we're still in a desert. It's still not totally right. There's still mostly sawdust
bread on the table. And so to remember that it's the Lord who prepares the table, that it's the Lord who creates the space. And like you said, Brian, maybe it is just as simple as asking him to come and to take our small couple loaves of bread and couple of fish and multiply them in a way that is outside of the realm of how we think death to life happens in food. Maybe. Maybe it really is as simple as remembering he's the one who prepares and that we are the ones who ask.
Yeah, you can't take the gratitude piece out. You can't take the serving God, offering things back to God out of this. It just doesn't work. Yeah, sanctify these gifts by the power of your Holy Spirit. And you said Sarah over and over. Remember, remember, remember. That's again a recipe that's in Scripture that Americans are terrible at, maybe just humans are terrible at, but we it's another thing that feasts are great for. It's why the church year is
filled with feasts. It's why things like big things like Christmas and Easter, but also every Sunday is a feast you you have this built in opportunity to remember. And we can echo that in our feasts. The the I remember the first one of the first times we had a bunch of people over for cocktails happened to be on the feast day of Saint Agustin, who's, among other things, the patron sanctif or one of the patron Saints of Brewers.
And so we found in the book of Common Prayer, we found a a collect for Saint Agustin and it just thanked God for the life and witness of Agustin and asked us to follow in a couple specific in his in his example, in a couple specific ways. And boom, a whole bunch of 21st century Americans just remembered this long dead Christian. And similarly, that's the role of the people of God to constantly be telling the stories of his faithfulness.
And it's another way in which you kind of invite God to the table by remembering. And then you don't really have to work too terribly hard to to look forward. You can you can spend time in Revelation and think about the marriage supper of the lamb and how it that might color how you feast. But we've heard over and over, Christina and I, in our hospitality, in our house, we've heard over and over from people some variation on.
I walked away from such and such an occasion feeling like I'd gotten a little glimpse into what heaven is like. And that was just the grace of God at our table. In the. Cases that fairly simple things. Yeah, it wasn't. Yeah, like we don't have to not taking. Credit for that one. No, like we don't hear it because we worked the hardest that time or did the fanciest thing. It's because it's not ourselves that we're offering.
And that's the hardest thing to remember, especially when you just worked really hard for an hour or four hours or four days to to prep for something that you can get that sense of pressure, just like you can get the sense of pressure for any other thing that you're putting sweat into. But it's not us that we're offering. I'm also thinking about that the, the story of, of a siege in the Old Testament where God, God has the whole army that's encamped around the city dispersed.
They freak out, they hear something and they all run away. And these, these there are these three, I think two or three beggars who they're, they, they just say to themselves, well, we're going to die in here. We're going to die out there. So I, we might as well leave. And they leave the city, the the city under siege, and they find just a trillion army's worth of feasts of food just sitting there with no one around.
And after they gorge themselves for as long as they possibly can, they finally get to the point where they're like, well, we can't eat this all. We have so much, we might as well go tell everyone in the city. It's no skin off our teeth, so to speak. We're we've had our full and Brian, I've heard you and Christina say that a lot, that you can't invite someone into something unless you have something to give, something that you're living in. Yeah, you can't invite someone
into a life you're not living. Yes, yes. And I'm just reminded at the grace that God commands every seven days for us to rest, for us to, to drink in, to stop to drink in and to to taste and see that he is good in the literal food that we eat that day in the Eucharist, in the time together in the communion of Saints, but also in just the beauty of the world that we don't often stop and look and see.
When I think back to the people who have offered their feast to me, it does seem like they are always coming from a place where they really, really do believe that they have so much to give. Like the beggars who just they can't see any reason why not.
And, and I think that might be a place where we can begin and ask God for help to begin and to to just ask him to help us have the eyes of abundance and to see his goodness while we are still in the wilderness, not yet at the marriage supper of the Lamb. That's a good note to end on, Sarah. Christina, thank you for joining me and lending your wisdom as
always, listeners. Both are normal Imagination Redeemed podcast listeners and our Rabbit Room friends participating in this conversation as part of House Moot. Thank you for joining us. Feel free to shoot us an e-mail on ansamsociety.org with follow up questions. We'd love to help get you started in your feasting, if it's not a habit you have already. The Imagination Redeemed podcast is the production of the Anselm Society, whose mission is a renaissance of the Christian imagination.
It's easy to see this world as disenchanted and to give up hope that there's more. But you were made to see the world with the eyes of heaven and to live a bountiful life that participates in the life of God. Like in the great stories, the Ansam Society is a place where you can come in and experience that beauty, joyful celebration, and ancient wisdom and go out renewed, bringing that life to
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