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“Food keeps us alive, but that is only its smallest and most temporary work,” the late Episcopal priest and cook Robert Farrar Capon wrote in The Supper of the Lamb. “Its eternal purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall sit down at the heavenly banquet and see how gracious the Lord is. Nourishment is necessary only for a while; what we shall need forever is taste.”

How does our human experience of growing, cooking, sharing and eating food relate to our spiritual lives? Whether feasting or fasting, we can ask: Do our ways of growing, cooking and eating food bring us closer to God and the earth? Or does our way with food get in the way of the fullness of life to which God calls us. When our ways with food get in the way of fullness of life, what can we do to embrace a new, healthier practice? Could we eat more vegetables, invite others to sit around our kitchen table or honor our connection to the natural world by tending a garden?

This message is excerpted from “Feasting and fasting” by Anne Basye in the July/August 2019 Gather magazine.