The Most Basic Practice

Dr. Lauren F. Winner has a 7-lesson DVD available from Paraclete Press that is described as "Seven Ways of Christian Formation inspired by the Jewishness of Jesus." Being Jewish, and a Christian convert in her young adulthood, Lauren Winner has a uniquely qualified perspective on the more meaningful linkage between Jewish traditions and Christian practices. She addresses topics like hospitality and prayer and fasting among others. One practice in particular makes an interesting highlight for use in previewing the series. That practice is mindful eating.

While she left the Jewish practice of "keeping kosher" behind, she did retain the spirit of the tradition in her Christian practices.  "Scripture is shot through with suggestions that God cares a lot about how we eat and how we interact with our food," she notes. She does not think this that divine interest stopped when the Christian era began.

Consider, she notes, that the first sin involved food. The Passover was a sacred feast to initiate the Exodus, and later Hebrew disobedience was revealed through attitudes toward manna. Jesus offered His "last important communication" with His disciples over a meal; and, of course, the Eucharist, The Lord's Supper is a food-oriented practice that continues to this very day.

How much thought do we give to any of this? Even if we don't have an addictive issue related to our eating habits, how mindful are we when we take a meal?  Does it fill a role in our lives that is too much or too little? Do we even taste the food, or do we rush through the prep and the eating, thoughtlessly feeding ourselves as our hands and minds do "more important" work? Do we eat numbly, mechanically putting food to mouth out of habit?  Now that we think about it, is there something about our way of nourishing ourselves that might need to change, not so much for its physical features as for its spiritual ones?

Dr. Winner notes that as mundane as it is, "...the act of feeding ourselves, something so connected to our creaturely-ness, becomes the place where we meet God." Before considering issues of content or the volume of food we consume, have we simply looked thoughtfully at how we eat? Is the act of eating for us a conscious acknowledgement of our "creaturely-ness" as Dr. Winner puts it?

As the season of Lent approaches, a time when many choose to fast a particular food or all food for one day of each week, take several days here to contemplate your own eating habits and how the act of eating could be more of an act of communing with God.