Essay

Creed

Eating

8 September 2023

7 min read

The meaning of meals

Food is the nexus of relationships. Matthew Croasmun notes that food, and all created things, are most themselves when they are more than merely themselves.

Matthew Croasmun

Matthew is the author of five books including the New York Times bestseller Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most (with Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz). He is an Associate Research Scholar and the Director of the Life Worth Living program at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture.

Around a table, against a backdrop of fret-cut wood, three people talk and listen to each other with great interest.

Inside Lina Ghotmeh's À table pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery.

Serpentine Gallery.

This summer’s Serpentine Pavilion in Hyde Park, À table, designed by Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh, invites us “to the table.” The extraordinary, long tables ringing the pavilion invite us to a meal and to conversation. To connect with one another and with the Earth that sustains our lives.

Ghotmeh’s invitation is an important one, if we have ears to hear. Through seeing what meals are, what they ought to be, and what they invite us to imagine, we discover what we are and what we ought to hope for.

Meals help us understand what we are. We can sometimes rush past questions about our materiality. Attending to meals won’t allow us to do that. Food, after all, is fundamental to life. We are what we eat and drink.

Early in the biblical stories of the life of Jesus, Jesus is confronted with this fact of human life. Hungry after forty days of fasting in the desert, Satan suggests Jesus miraculously produce some food for himself out of the rocks at hand. His response, a quotation from Hebrew scripture, “the human does not live by bread alone,” might at first seem like a hyper-spiritual attempt to deny our bodily dependence on food. But I take it that Jesus isn’t proposing that the human live without bread. He’s asking us to take a closer look at bread to see that it is more than merely bread. What he invites us to see will yet affirm that we are profoundly interdependent within the natural world of which we are a part. Our hunger and the food that satisfies it is one of the most visceral reminders of just this fact.

To desire a good meal is to seek to attend to the many relationships at our tables and to pursue nourishing mutuality.

Food, however, is more than merely food. Food is a nexus of relationship. The rest of the verse Jesus cites goes on to insist that food comes by the “word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” Even as we live by bread, we live by Divine words, because the bread we eat—the bread we are—comes to us as a Divine gift. In the biblical imagination, everything comes from God. In the beginning, God spoke and there was. That’s true of the wheat and rye and barley or whatever else we use to make our bread, and it is true also of the human cultures and traditions through which these natural goods come to be bread.

Bread is more than merely bread; it is a Divine gift. In fact, it turns out, that every good thing is like bread in this way: created things are most themselves when they are more than merely themselves. This is just the sort of thing the creation is. It is an interrelated, connected whole, marked by relationship within and without. Created things are most themselves in right relationship to one another and to the God who created them. As a created good, food is more than just food.

And, of course, meals are more than just food. Meals are sites of relationship. Particularly in our globalized world, our simple tables often conspire to hide fantastically complex networks of relationship implicated upon them. These networks interweave relationships among people and places—seen and unseen.

The people implicated at our table include those around the table; those who foraged for, grew, transported, and prepared the food; those whose cultures for generations cultivated the plants, animals, fungi, dairy products and all the rest that find their places on our table; those whose histories and cultures gave rise—through creativity, necessity, or both—to the cuisines that weave together these natural and cultivated elements; and those absent from our tables who yet hunger for food. The places implicated include the fields and wilds and rivers and seas whence the food itself comes; the lands whence the cuisines and cultures hail; and the places we occupy as we share the table.

So, meals are more than just food. But then, meals most worthy of the name are more than just meals. Meals are not just sites of any old relationship. At their best, they are sites of nourishing mutual encounter between people, places, and the God who created them all. To desire a good meal is to seek to attend to the many relationships at our tables and to pursue nourishing mutuality. To seek the good of the wilds and streams from which our food has come—to seek a way of relating to these places such that those relationships are mutually nourishing. To seek the good of the people seen and unseen but nevertheless “present” inasmuch as they are implicated at our tables.

In days like ours, our tables are sites of mutual encounter, but the encounter is not nourishing to all involved.

At times, a good meal in this broken world will take the form of fasting in solidarity with or materially for the sake of those who hunger for what we so readily waste. In attending to our interrelatedness with the people and the places God has created, we begin to understand what it is also to attend to our relatedness to God at the table. Each of us—human, plant, animal, field, river, sea—we become most what we are when we become more than just ourselves. We become most ourselves when we attend to our relatedness to one another, when we attend to the God who created us for mutual flourishing.

It is in these complex webs of interrelationship that what we are begins to suggest to us who we are: we are sharers of God’s home, members of God’s family, citizens, as Jesus put it, of God’s kingdom. The Kingdom of God is just this: all things flourishing in right relationship with one another and with God their creator. One of Jesus’s favorite metaphors for the Kingdom was that of a heavenly banquet. Seated at God’s table, our citizenship, our kinship, our mutual interdependence is plain.

And yet we are not all flourishing. When I visited last year’s Serpentine Pavilion, Hyde Park was bleached from drought and heat. The would-be lawns felt like deserted wastelands; it was disorienting. Such sights testify to our profound interrelatedness, though against our flourishing. On the Black Sea, wheat that may never become bread, because it is trapped by war offers an analogous testimony. Our lives are deeply intertwined; just so, we are not flourishing. In days like ours, our tables are sites of mutual encounter, but the encounter is not nourishing to all involved.

If all Jesus offered were a vision of the table as it could be—as it should be—our reflection would have to end here. “Look at what our meals might be,” we might say. “Let us make them so! Let us build the Kingdom of God.” War and climate catastrophe, beware!

But Jesus never instructed his followers to build the Kingdom. Rather, he invited them to receive it, and in so doing, participate in its coming.

One of Jesus’ most common ways of inviting people to receive the Kingdom was by inviting them to a meal. These were meals in all our ordinary senses. They were sites of relationship. Particularly as Luke, one of the four gospel writers, tells it, Jesus was constantly offering advice about who to invite to the table. He warned about which absences revealed life-denying alienation. He convened and commended gatherings of rich and poor, religious and irreligious, nevertheless gathered for nourishing mutual encounter.

These meals are not only revolutionary social projects (though they were and can still be exactly that). In the ministry of Jesus, meals become announcements and enactments of the Kingdom of God. Meals become invitations to and demonstrations of the ultimate Home that God is making for God and God’s creation to flourish together. It is this Home that Jesus invites us to inhabit with him. When we share meals that are more than mere meals, when we allow God to transform our relationships with one another and within the natural world, our meals, too, can become sites of God’s transforming presence—the Home of God coming to be among mortals.

So, when we come to the table—whether Ghotmeh’s table or the table in our homes—let’s be aware of the opportunity presented to us. At the table, we are invited to know bread that is more than mere bread, even as we are more than merely ourselves. At the table, we are invited into mutually nourishing encounter with one another, within the natural world, and with the God who created it all. At the table, we are invited to be at home with one another in the presence of God in whom all things are finding their Home.

Essay

Awe and wonder

Creed

Easter

21 March 2025

7 min read

At the tilting points of the year, we ask what kind of world we want to build

Equinox is still a threshold between darkness and light.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Sun rise casts a shadow over Stonehenge.

Nik, via Unsplash.

At the spring equinox, we appreciate and talk about the arrival of light in the northern hemisphere. For a brief moment, the Earth’s axis is tilted neither away from or toward the sun, and day and night are roughly equal length – ‘equinox’ is Latin for ‘equal night’. From here, we enter astronomical spring.

But it is not entirely accurate to talk about this being the moment when the darkness is finally diminished. That moment is the ‘equilux’ – equal light – and it happens a few days before the equinox, its date varying with latitude. Because the sun appears as a disc in the sky, the top half rises above the horizon before its centre does, which – when coupled with light being refracted by the Earth’s atmosphere – gives extra daylight. By the time of the equinox, and depending on your latitude, we already have 12 hours and 10 minutes of daylight. It is not much, but it is enough perhaps to read a few pages of a book without an artificial light, or to have “just one more” kick of a ball outside, as my daughter has learned to say.

There is beauty in the idea that for a brief moment during the equinox, we are all experiencing the same light and dark. But it is not true. At any particular moment, some of us experience more darkness than others, and some of us receive more light than we think.

Whenever its moment of arrival, though, the light will arrive. It always has, since the world was set spinning and tilting in space. We have always found ourselves poised at the threshold between the long dark of winter and the gathering light of summer. It is a threshold that is embedded in creation itself; all of life must in one way or another face the work, the inevitability, the challenge of transformation. This threshold is echoed through our own lives too – in the in-between spaces where one thing is ending, but the next has not yet fully begun. There are personal thresholds: a change in career, a birth, a loss. And there are collective ones: times in history when the old ways no longer work and we strain toward something new, unsure of how to get there.

Ancient people marked the equinox with purpose and care, watching for the moment the sun rose in the east and set in the west. At places like Stonehenge, huge stones were arranged to capture the exact angle of equinoctial light, as if the builders knew this threshold was something worth marking. Recently, archaeologists have suggested that Stonehenge was built not just for religious reasons, but for unification too: its stones come from Cornwall and Wales and Scotland – from all parts of the land. Their slow journey to their resting site on Salisbury plain would have been a chance for celebration and feasting, with thousands of people joining in along the way. It was a journey that would have brought together different people, including groups that had migrated from modern day Europe. Gathering light was a shared effort, and one worth celebrating.

For the early Celtic world, the equinox was a hinge between Imbolc, the season of early stirrings, and Beltane, the riot of summer. It was a time for reckoning and renewal – counting what food remained after winter, deciding what animals to keep or cull, what seeds to plant. To live well meant paying attention to the balance between what had been and what was to come. Lately, I have realised that it is not change itself that feels hard so much as not knowing the nature of the change that I, that we, will be called to. My young daughter has brought this into sharp focus. On the days when the dark feels relentless and the light seems distant, I find myself fearing for her future. I think of those Celtic people; the way they did not know the future but prepared for it anyway, perhaps in their rituals asking, how do the past and the future speak to each other at this moment, who are we, who might we become?

Even if we long to cling to what is familiar, the familiar will eventually change. Easter, and the equinox, are not just about light triumphing over darkness, but about transformation.

In a world where crisis seems to be following crisis, it is easy to feel that everything is tipping off balance. The equinox suggests though that equilibrium has never been static, and balance has only ever been fleeting, a transition between states of being. It is a moment of poised readiness, a preparation for movement. The world will keep tilting and tipping as it always has, and we will keep changing as we always have.

In the Jewish calendar, the equinox often falls near Passover, the great festival of liberation. The story of the Exodus is a story of transition – of leaving behind what enslaves us even when the road ahead is unknown. The Israelites did not step from captivity into freedom overnight. They wandered, and wrestled with doubt, and longed for the certainty of their old lives even as they were being offered something new. Thresholds are rarely comfortable.

I find myself at a threshold now: I am trying to shape a life that has reformed around motherhood, with past roles and jobs behind me, and the new identities yet to fully clarify. I have been feeling the truth of farmer-author Wendell Berry’s idea that "it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work." This real work has been stimulating but also confronting, as thresholds often are.

If we are, as many believe, living through a threshold moment in history – where old systems are failing, where climate and conflict threaten the future – how do we walk forward? How do we resist the temptation to cling to what is familiar, even when it no longer serves us? Easter falls just after the equinox. Shoots push through soil, lambs stumble into life, a chorus of birdsong swells, and we remember that nature is all resurrection. Even if we long to cling to what is familiar, the familiar will eventually change. Easter, and the equinox, are not just about light triumphing over darkness, but about transformation. Jesus did not return from the tomb unchanged; he was made new, unrecognisable at first, even to his closest friends.

The balance of light and dark is fleeting; it does not last; a threshold is not a place to linger. The world is always moving towards light, or toward dark, but always through change, and so are we. Balance is not an end in itself; it is a preparation for change. Perhaps these tilting points of the year are good moments to ask who we are becoming, and what kind of world we want to build, and how we will bear witness to the light, but also to the dark, as we do so.

This equinox, then, we will turn and face the coming light, but perhaps too we might turn and notice the faces that the light shines on – or doesn’t. Virginia Woolf reminds us that "A light here required a shadow there." When the light comes, darkness will too. These turning points of the year are an opportunity to sit in the truth of that, to appreciate the hope and the beauty of this spring threshold, but also to get to work. We can reach out to those who are experiencing more darkness than us, help build the world in such a way that draws attention to the light like the makers of Stonehenge did, take stock of what has been and who we are becoming, step away from what enslaves us even if we are not yet sure of the shape of freedom.

We cannot know what will happen next, but we can choose how to move forward. I wonder about those ancient people who somehow moved huge stones weighing up to 30 tons to Stonehenge; I wonder what they saw as they moved through the land, when they looked to the horizon, when they stood in the tension of their own now. They carried not just the weight of stone, but of their own unknowable future. Those ancient people persisted and celebrated and became us, passing on their burden, passing on their particular stone-bound, collectively built way of focusing the light. This equinox, I am thinking about how I can do the same – despite and because of the darkness, despite and because of the unknown path ahead.

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