Band Aids or Surgery?

Keeping people from being hungry was a part of my job for fourteen years. At Society of St. Andrew, I was a broker of sorts as I found food that would otherwise go to waste and connected it to people who would otherwise go hungry. Sweet potatoes, green beans, blueberries and peaches gleaned from fields and orchards were put on the plates of people who might not have known from where their next meal would come.  However, the more I did the work of feeding the hungry, the less satisfied I was with the fact that people were hungry at all!  I began to wonder if what I was doing was making a difference for the long term. I provided food, but that didn’t change the situation.  I wasn’t addressing a “root cause” of hunger.

          Visiting Rev. Curry at the Pennsylvania Ave. Baptist Church was inspiring as I realized that he was looking for the root causes of poverty and other issues within his community. One of the areas of concern which he described was the high number of people who were receiving dialysis within the community. Rather than stopping with that issue and looking for ways to support people while they receive dialysis, Rev. Curry went behind this issue to see why so many folks needed dialysis.  As he worked his way back from dialysis to kidney disease to diabetes to poor diets, he recognized the root causes. Chief among these was diet.

          Poor diet is a many faceted issue that includes such things as the abundance of fast food and the lack of fresh vegetables at affordable grocery stores. I was encouraged by the Rev. Curry’s vision of what the community could become through the ministries of the church.  Rev. Curry recognizes the need to feed bodies as well as souls with healthy food and sees that addressing a health issue such as the large number of people on dialysis involves looking at the entire life of the community.

          Giving people fresh fruits and vegetables gleaned from farms is important because it keeps people from going hungry but it is also only applying a band-aid to a gaping wound whose causes are far beyond just having enough food. Community redevelopment with the whole person in mind is more like surgery, it takes time and money and energy, but in the end, the wound might actually heal.

Taking the Time to Go Deeper

"God is in the depth, and we lose touch with God when we focus only on surface things. God is in the silence which we neglect and fear, and we close ourselves to the whisperings of the Spirit when we constantly surround ourselves with artificial sounds.  God is in the questions that arise when we break free of the distractions and we cut God off when we avoid contemplations of purpose, value, and priority. God is in the mystery, and we turn God away when we live as if the only things that matter are those we can see, touch, explain, or possess.  God is in the love of others, and we drive God out when we neglect the deepening of relationships.  God is in the feeling of being still, and we overlook attempts by God to reach us when we run constantly from one activity another.  God is in the discovery and exploration of the interior life, and we say NO to God when we deny there is a spiritual side to our own lives.  There are elements to existence that we only discover when we open ourselves to God."   Bishop Robert Schnase, Five Practices of Fruitful Living, p. 28

    Following this paragraph, Bishop Schnase goes on to write about the way in which our "work" has changed in the last hundred or so years.  The fact that our grandparents and great grandparents often performed repetitive tasks in the course of their days.  These took little conscious thought, and therefore, "most had hours to think, remember, mull over, rehearse, and reflect on the happenings of their lives."

    These words came to me as I participated in a discussion of Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating, Norman Wirzba's book about how our faith intersects the world of our eating. We were discussing the fact that it takes so much time to really prepare a healthy meal. Cooking food which has been responsibly grown either by ourselves or other local growers in a manner that preserves the health benefits of the food can be a time-consuming task.

  I thought of myself in the kitchen-often with either the TV or radio on-- or even sometimes with the laptop open to Facebook while I cook....
  How different would my experience be if I treated cooking as a Spiritual Exercise.
       What if I begin to invite God's Spirit into my cooking?
       How might that begin to change how I look on this chore?
      What if I begin to pray for all the hands that touched the food before it reached my pan?
      what if I were more consciously grateful for all the sacrifices that were made by others so that I could enjoy this meal?

Maybe the practice that I need as much as mindful eating is mindful cooking.... 

Food and Church

A few months ago, curious to see what would land in my inbox, I set up google alert for the words "church" and "food." Hoping to find churches that were doing innovative programming around food and faith, cull through the links that come in the daily email.



Each day, there are anywhere from 15-30 links to news articles, websites and even blog entries. The one thing that all the links have is that they lead to postings that have both the word church and food in them.



Rarely have I received a link to anything that mentions a church educating members about food policy and/or sustainability! Instead, in my very unscientific analysis, the vast majority of articles are about the what churches are doing to meet the food needs of their communities-- usually in the forms of food pantries, soup kitchens, or food give aways. And then, of course, there are the numerous links that merely are mentioning church events in which food will be served!



Some points to ponder....

1. Are churches doing programming related to food "issues"? but just not publicizing it-- so it doesn't make it into the web postings?


2. Are the needs so great in so many of our communities that more and more churches are reaching out with aid in the form of food?


3. Is it just that this community outreach/charity work is much more "reportable"? Articles about churches offering food aid are more interesting to the general public?

So these are just my beginning questions...

Saying Grace: a beginning point

In our family, every meal begins in the same manner. As we gather at the table, hands are joined and grace is said. The words are always the same-- a prayer that was taught to my mother when she was a child and that she taught her children.

“For food, for health, for loving care,
For friends and blessings everywhere,
Dear [God]*, we thank you. Amen.”

Saying Grace is a beginning point for inviting God’s presence in our eating. We say “thank you” for the food which we are about to consume. For many of us, saying a prayer at the beginning of a meal may be the only time that our faith “mindfully” intersects with our eating. Beyond those grace-saying moments, do we think about how our faith connects to the actual food that we put in our mouths?

The answers are as individual and multi-layered as each person who wrestles with questions of faith. How do our religious beliefs influence how that food comes to be on our plates? The answers involve issues of how we eat, what we eat, and with whom we eat.

More and more I am convinced that there are fundamental issues of faith involved in how food comes to our table, but for many us, convenience and price trump values. For example, it is cheap and easy to run through the drive-thru and pick up a burger. Yet, how many of us have thought about what that choice might mean for our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world. I heard someone suggest recently that the meat in such a burger might have come from animals raised in a foreign country where persons are dying from hunger-related causes because all the prime farmland is used for meat which is then exported. I haven‘t verified whether this is a “real“ problem or not, but the issue for me is that I don’t whether or not this is a true story.

And so, as one of my New Year‘s Resolutions I plan to spend more time exploring the layers of this question in my own life: How does my faith intersect with my eating? I welcome your thoughts and comments.


**My mother taught us to say “Father,” but in the interest of non-sexist language, I have taught my own daughter to use the word “God.”