Mealtimes put us at the intersection of heaven and Earth.
When I was growing up, the Christian-home counterpart of the essential Joy of Cooking was a cookbook called Food for the Body—Food for the Soul. In it, pithy Christianity in the form of Bible passages, sermonettes (with a “From My Kitchen Window” view of the world), stories with a definite message, and recipes for Christian character (“7 cups of love, 1 pint of forgiveness, a pinch of honesty”) alternated with an excellent collection of basic food recipes.
Whenever I think of that cookbook I am reminded of my grandmother, who took it so seriously. She used every meal as an opportunity for getting the lessons of life clearly in focus. She rehearsed both international and neighborhood news—from the deceit of the Russians right down to the latest woman who had painted her lips “bloody”; and each evil she then pierced with a straight and sharp (with chapter and verse) biblical sword.
The wisdom of the cookbook, in all its quaintness, was its recognition that just as the body needs biscuits and gravy, so the soul or mind needs to be fed its own nutritious mix of (as we say) food for thought. And the wisdom of my grandmother was that the mealtime is a natural focal point for communication.
The cookbook, my grandmother, and all of us human beings have taken the most animal-like, gut-driven action of each day—eating—and transformed it into the highest celebration of our humanity: our ability to interact with other minds. At this mealtime crux of body and soul we get close to a crux of Earth and heaven, for the deeper implication of both that cookbook and my grandmother’s attitude is that two sorts of nourishment meet when human beings eat together. Just as biscuits and gravy must be taken and digested in order for us to grow strong bodies, so the food for the soul must be eaten and digested in order for us to communicate well with each other.
And so, in an age that has been called the TV generation, that has been criticized for being image oriented and nurtured on the “plug-in drug,” that has been warned it is in danger of losing its own soul to the maw of superficial mass culture, we would do well to analyze carefully the nearly forgotten soul food of literature.
When we eat a meal we are doing something awfully mundane. We eat pretty much the same old foods on the same old dishes, and often enough with the same old people. And so it is with reading. We have the same old letters, the same old words, and all too often the same old plots. Without our minds there to interpret the data of our eyes, the whole mass would be a meaningless jumble. So just the bare reading of those squiggles and lines in good books is a wonderfully imaginative activity.
Our reading—our re-creation of those letters into words and those words into a plot—is, however, only a beginning. Each word we read carries memories and reminders of the history of the human family. Each word we read hangs in a balance between objective dictionary definition and subjective nuance: with our experience, we tip the scales. Phrases like “Once upon a time” and “big bad wolf” touch emotional resonances that go strong and deep.
But the imaginative activity of reading a book goes far beyond the richness of the words. Here a comparison with the visual media (television or movies) is helpful. When we watch a story translated into a movie (like E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India), we see the characters instead of imagining them for ourselves. We see in their faces and gestures and we hear in their tone of voice the actors’ and the director’s and the screenwriter’s interpretations of the story.
In fact, we see the whole story through the grid of other people’s points of view. Not only do they flatten the ambiance in a story to one line of meaning, but they may even be completely wrong. And yet, research has shown that once we see the events of a book through someone else’s eyes we will find great difficulty in finding our own internal vision again.
When we read a story, on the other hand, our minds supply highly personalized imaginative data of sight and sound for our two most vital senses. The fairy godmother in Cinderella that our mind’s eye conjures up is a marvelous combination of homey grandmotherliness and fairy glory. So any picture of her, whether by Walt Disney or Arthur Rackham, is an immense disappointment, both because it is never quite true to our fairy godmother and because we can never go back through that picture on the page or in the movie to what is, for us, the real fairy godmother. Our heavenly vision has been murdered.
Reading is, therefore, far more than just seeing meaning in words. As we turn the pages of print, our minds are busy manufacturing elaborate details for our eyes to see and our ears to hear—and for our noses to smell, our tongues to taste, and our bodies to feel. In reading, the whole imaginative activity of our minds becomes geometrically magnified.
In a way, reading comes close to dreaming. Our subconscious can choose that very configuration of truth—can create that very shape from the world of the words—that matches the fairies and dragons, the green pastures and dark tunnels, of our subliminal world. This match of story world and inner world explains the importance both of fairy tales and of Jesus’ parables. On those spare bones of story we drape the clutter and tatter of our fears and longings—the paucity of detail in fairy tales allows our minds plenty of latitude for shaping the archetypal figures of wolf, grandmother, and woodsman—and of course, we all are Little Red Riding Hood.
And so, in the end, we live happily—or at least happier—ever after. We have carried the burdens of our souls safely through to the good ending of the story. Any story in literature is like a fairy tale in that, with our imagination, we remake (or digest) the story into the image of our own experience and hopes and fears, and we thereby go through a catharsis. This catharsis may lead to healing or it may lead to hurt—but any story in which we imaginatively dwell with all our senses will be a catharsis.
And in spite of the thoroughly personal nature of reading as a food for the soul, it does not lead to a solipsistic narcissism precisely because, at heart, reading is a profoundly Christian experience. In Philippians, Paul reminds us of the central teaching of Christian life:
“Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.”
In one sense, as we read a book we are all like God looking down from some high, exalted place into the world of the story. Through the eyes of Charles Dickens we see the world of David Copperfield: gentle Dora, sturdy Agnes, ‘umble Uriah, cocky Steerforth, and those whiny Micawber kids. But as the story progresses we take on the nature of David and vicariously go with him through the events of his world. In the end we have immersed ourselves in the likeness of another being to a degree that we rarely could or would in the real world.
What is more, we have vicariously lived through the death of parents, a childhood of torture and insecurity, fickle friends, the death of a wife, and two marriages. We have, in fiction if not in fact, lived quite a hard life in which we have learned many lessons, not the least of which (for our own day) is the goodness that can come from enduring a bad marriage.
In every book we read we are new people going through new experiences. Because these characters of fiction are faceless and factually unreal, that we can in ourselves give flesh and blood to their being. And in so doing we lay aside our “selfish ambition” and “vain conceit,” and we take up the cross of their pain, the burden of their care.
And so as we read books, as we digest this feast for the soul, we realize that we have not made our world in our image; rather, our experience of all these worlds has remade us. Our digestion of literature as food for the soul is profoundly Christian in that, as we eat this food for the soul and digest it to strengthen our hearts and minds, all these books end up somehow eating away at us, biting off our selfishness, our misunderstanding, our prejudice. Eventually (if we allow ourselves to read the greatest story of the world) we may in a great communion of body and soul so eat Christ’s body and drink Christ’s blood that we may be “eaten”—or transformed—into his image.
What results from all this eating and digesting of a good book as food for the soul? Perhaps its richest result is a spiritual energy for deeply relational interaction—and now were back to the dinner table.
Around the table, our communication becomes a workout for the soul. Here it is that we use the sturdy bones and strong muscles of our soul to have communication that becomes in itself food for the soul. Literature helps us work through the weary chatter of our conversation toward meaning and patterns. Not only does literature give content and direction to our interaction, it also helps us understand the others around the table.
Because we have lived others’ lives in books, we can live others’ lives in a mealtime. Around the table we see not only our family and friends, but, having richly eaten and digested the lives of many others, we can see (for example) in this young son of ours a “Toad” of The Wind in the Willows, who may have to go off caravaning before he appreciates the value of a more sturdy stability; in this daughter we see an Anne from Anne of Green Gables who must test the strength of her own wings before she settles down; and in this dear husband we recognize a Sam Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings who gives us a sense of the comforts of home wherever we are.
And so, in ourselves and in each other, we recognize the thousand faces of the other souls of story. When we talk around the table we respond not just to son or daughter or husband, but to the complex and diverse mix of those many-storied selves in these persons who are talking with their mouths full.
At this point in the meal, or the conversation, we come back to words, the basic ingredient of that culinary concoction of the soul that is literature. From our experience in literature, from being in the likeness of another, we can begin to concoct the right recipe of love, forgiveness, honesty, kindness, and even maybe harshness that will make our words fit food for another’s soul.
So in the meal we have both our food for the body and our food for the soul. Here eating and reading come together. Our reading of good books involves us in a wonderfully imaginative activity that stretches our minds by the sheer infinite variety in that smorgasbord of the world’s words. In turn, our reading becomes a profoundly Christian experience as we vicariously digest the joys and sorrows of another’s life and make them our own. This food for the soul that we have digested is then transformed into the muscle strength for deeply relational interaction with others.
Each meal, each conversation, each word we say is (to adopt a metaphor from Fredrick Buechner) a letter in the “alphabet of grace.” The good of Buechner’s metaphor is that—as he reminds us—the alphabet of grace is full of gutturals. Our reading helps us to see that all the gutturals, even the harsh words, the noisy chaotic meals—and the silent, sullen ones—are parts of a greater glory that is the plot of our own story.
The sacrament of Communion helps us accept the imbalance in all our meals and conversations. We do not come perfect to the meal of God. We are never perfect in our communication with God or with our family and friends while we eat this meal. We may, if only figuratively, choke on the bread and cough at the wine, but the Word of our God has come to us in this bread and this wine. The meal reminds us that food for the body and food for the soul come together at the dinner table of our God and at the dinner tables of our homes.
Evening is here,
The Board is spread;
Thanks be to God,
Who gives us Bread.
Mary Ruth Wilkinson is a lecturer at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia. This article originally appeared in Crux, a journal published by the faculty and alumni of Regent College.
