Long Blog #1: Spiritual Food

I've never really had a spiritual experience solely because of food. What I have had are experiences involving food, family and friends. One instance was when I was on a mission trip. It was our last Sabbath in Ecuador and we had gotten together for communion and an Agape Feast in the church we had built over the past week. We gathered around tables shaped into a big cross and ate dinner by the candle light. As we shared testimonies about how we've seen God working in our lives, we drew closer to each other as a group. It was a great night! It was amazing to see how much of their personal lives people were willing to share with people who, up until a couple weeks prior had been perfect strangers. As we were caught up in the moment, the food became an after thought. Yea, we were eating the usual Agape feast--bread, fruit and soup--but the event, as a whole, was so much bigger than the food.

In our culture, a lot of events are centered around food. You're birthday's coming up, let's go out for dinner! Have no special plans for your anniversary that's coming up in a few days? Take your significant other out to eat. Better yet, cook a romantic meal for him or her! I don't know if it's just an American thing--associating special or monumental events with food (it would explain why America has the highest obesity rate, with 30% of us being obese)--but I really can't imagine a celebration not involving food. It just seems wrong to me. Where else, other than a table, can you gather around with friends and family and talk and laugh about everything for hours? It's a comfort thing.

Because we associate food with special events, once we eat those special foods on their own, without the occasion, they seem to be elevated over other foods. They suddenly make us nostalgic, becoming a way that we can subconsciously live out a meaningful time in our lives. This could be a problem. Because when we start elevating foods to places they don't belong, we start to shift our focus off the special moment, or people, and onto the food itself. This, in the long run, could turn into gluttony. And because food is a basic necessity of life, it's very easy to become gluttonous. As long as we make the distinction of the event being what's special, not particularly the food, we won't have a problem. I'm not saying food can't be special. I'm just making the point that we've got to remember what makes it special.

Meals have become social events, something I've just come to realize since arriving at college. I mat tell myself that I'll only drop by the caf for a quick meal, but a couple hours later, I'll find myself just hanging out with friends, chatting over our empty plates. After returning to my dorm and seeing the loads of homework I have yet to accomplish, I may feel a twinge of guilt, vowing to really make it a quick meal the next time. But I probably won't. I enjoy taking the time out of a busy schedule to sit down with a friend and just laugh and talk about everything and nothing at the same time. It's very refreshing.

So, for me spiritual experiences with food can't be all about the food. It has to be about the environment, the people involved and the purpose for getting together. And of course, we all have those really long days. Days in which you can't wait to get home, curl up on your couch, and eat that bowl of ice cream. As you eat it, the ice cream melts in your mouth and your stress begins to fade away. I guess I understand how that could be an almost spiritual experience. From time to time, it's really good to have some alone time to really savor what you're eating. The caution we have to take in this is that we don't put too much emphasis on the food. That could cause us to become greedy gluttons. Instead, we need to take food for what it is: a basic necessity of life. We need food in order to survive, and there's nothing wrong with enjoying what we eat, but we need to refrain from elevating food to a place where it doesn't deserve to be--a substitute for our hunger for more satisfaction in our lives. Because when this happens, we begin to eat not only to sustain ourselves, but to fill a place in ourselves that is unable to be filled by material things. This is when we begin to waste.