Eating, Praying, Loving: A Biblical Spirituality of Food (Part 1)

Last summer I went through a season where I was constantly struggling with this low-grade fatigue that I couldn’t seem to shake. It might have been my ramped-up hours at work, or subtle changes in my bedtime routines; it might have been the fact that I had just celebrated my 46th birthday, or possibly a combination of all three, but after a month or two of seeing me drag myself around, my wife had had enough and sent me off to see her naturopath.

I didn’t know what to expect, but I was willing to try pretty much anything if it would get me back to feeling normal. To my surprise, Dr. Laura spend a great deal of time talking to me simply about my diet. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t an in-depth exploration of what kinds of food I was using to fuel my body. She even asked me to spend the next two weeks tracking it, writing down in a food diary every morsel that entered my mouth.

I have always assumed that I was a relatively healthy eater. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. I do the majority of my shopping on the outside aisles of the grocery store. I eat vegetarian a lot of the time. I mean, I wasn’t no health-food guru or nothing, but I did okay.

And then, two weeks later, I handed in my homework to Dr. Laura and received the painful truth. Turns out I have a tendency to skip meals (mostly breakfast and lunch), power through with coffee, and compensate with all kinds of empty carbs late in the day; then I over do it at dinnertime and go to bed feeling gross.

And I wondered why I was always out of vim and vinegar. You could get away with a diet like that when you were 25 and your metabolism could handle it, but at 46? Man: grow up, right?

But this post is not meant to be the true-confessions of a reformed carb-binger. And it’s not even a promo for the value of naturopathy (although, the modified Keto diet Dr. Laura recommended to me did wonders for my energy levels and general sense of well-being). But this post is not about that.

It’s about the spirituality of food.

Because the three or four months I spent paying close attention to everything I ate opened my eyes in a way they had never been opened before to the fact that our diets actually have a profound impact on our spiritual well-being.

We are, after all, holistic creatures. Our spirits and our bodies are intricately connected and interrelated. This is why Jesus enjoined us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, souls, minds, and strength. Because your physical eating, sleeping, breathing, sweating life is lived before the Lord as much as your praying, thinking, yearning, introspective life is.

To put it very simply: you don’t “have” a body; you “are” a body. And the Scriptures consistently assume this, and affirm this, and appreciate this fact. The same God of peace who will sanctify our “spirits” and our “souls," also intends to sanctify our “bodies”  in 1 Thessalonians 5:23.  These are each part and parcel with the other.

Even on a very concrete level, it should be obvious that what I eat affects me spiritually. If I feel like garbage physically, because I’ve been treating my digestive tract like a garburator for the worst kind of junk food, it’s not that likely that I’ll have much motivation for extended prayer, Bible study, or works of mercy. If I have no physical energy because I’ve been skipping meals and carb-ing up late in the day, it’s not too likely I’ll have much spiritual energy either.

The more I meditated on this, during my weeks of diet-journaling for Dr. Laura, the more I noticed how often and how profoundly the Scriptures actually address food as a significant concern in the spiritual life: from Torah’s dietary laws to Jesus’ teaching about fasting, the Bible makes no bones about it that there is some mysterious connection between our diets and our spirits.

Just exactly what that connection is remains to be seen.  Over the next little while I hope to spend some time exploring this topic here at terra incognita, in a series on the spirituality of food that I’m calling, “Eating, Praying, Loving.” So if this post piqued your appetite for more (pun intended), let me invite you to check back in over the coming days.

If you’re still scratching your head skeptically, wondering if I’m not biting off more than I can chew on this one (pun still intended), let me just suggest this, as a starting place for building a “biblical spirituality of food.”

Simply put: it is no accident that the central act of Christian worship (the most famousest Hillsong ditty not withstanding) is, and has always been a shared meal. The Eucharist, Holy Communion, our glorious supper with Jesus, is not merely a metaphorical act. Even if you’re not sacramental in your theology on this point, all but the most ardent of Zwinglians would agree, I hope, that our symbolic meal with the Lord is no mere symbol. (As if it could just as easily have been a bungee jump for the Lord, or something, and it still would have accomplished the same purpose.)

As the primary sign of his presence among us and our spiritual fellowship with each other, as his way of strengthening us and encouraging us in the spiritual life, as an opportunity to encounter him and the mysterious means of our communion with him, he gave—wonder of wonders—food for us to eat together.

Of course Jesus is not only our host at the table, he is also the feast itself (this bread is his body), but in making that spiritual leap to the sacramental meaning of the meal, the bread and cup do not cease to be—all but  the most ardent of transubstantiationalists would agree, I hope—it does not cease to be food for us. Literal, real, life-sustaining bread and wine.

Because the Word of God knew all along what I am just beginning really to appreciate, that there is in fact something mysteriously spiritual about the act of eating, and so, when it reached for a symbol that could mysteriously express our union with Him, it reached, of all places, into the cupboard, and pulled out a loaf of fresh-baked bread.

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