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DiggPass the Gooey Marshmallows, Please? Amen
Eliza Shallcross remembers a steamy New Jersey summer day, and a parish picnic that taught her how parishes understand the connection between food and community.
This article appears in the Sabbath edition of Trinity News. To receive a free subscription to the print edition of Trinity News, send your mailing address to news@trinitywallstreet.org. (Please note that in doing so, we may use your email and mailing addresses to inform you of special parish events and resources available on this website).
A few years ago, I attended a Fourth of July barbecue on the sprawling back lawn of a Victorian house in New Jersey belonging to a deacon of the Episcopal church. The invitation had been informal, offered during announcements at Sunday service, and the guest list wide open. In the end, some thirty or forty people showed up, most bearing food of one form or another. The attendees ranged in age from infants to senior citizens. The deacon and her husband provided grills and hot dogs and hamburgers, plus drinks in a claw-footed bathtub filled with ice that stood just outside the back door to the house. We sat in the shade of the hundred-year-old trees and ate five or six different salads that all seemed to feature home- or locally grown tomatoes, and several of the guests took turns at the grill.
There was a treasure hunt for the children among the sprawling beds of perennial flowers, already a little wilted in the steamy July heat of a New Jersey summer, and the bravest among us attempted to play croquet with the set provided. I think lawn croquet was meant to be played on velvety greensward rolled perfectly smooth, not on a bumpy, thirsty lawn among the tree roots.
Watching us with faint bewilderment were five or six Filipino merchant sailors, whom Anne, our hostess, had met through her work with The Seamen’s Church Institute. These sailors, most of whom spend up to nine months of the year away from home and family, were perhaps a little shy and uncertain of their English, but they seemed to enjoy the children and the laughter.
After all the hot dogs and hamburgers were grilled, Anne brought out bags of marshmallows for the children to toast over the glowing coals. My son, who was about nine or ten at the time, was enthusiastic about cooking as many as possible. After a while, he came to me and whispered proudly, “The sailors really seem to like marshmallows, so I’ve been doing lots for them.” Was it the treat of overly carbonized gooey sugar that they liked? Or was it the emotional impact for these men, whose own wives and children were so far away in the Philippines, of being offered a quintessentially American food to welcome them to America? I like to believe the gift of food helped ease their loneliness.
Food is basic. We need it to stay alive. If we don’t eat regularly, our health suffers. If we don’t eat for long enough, we die. But food also has an emotional component. The first example of love that a newborn baby is offered is milk for its questing mouth, whether from the warmth of its mother’s breast or the kindly hands of someone holding a baby bottle. Food is an important element of love that holds human communities together.
When Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (NSRV, John 6:35), he was evoking an archetypal image. But Jesus also knew that mankind needs physical as well as spiritual food, that the “bread of heaven” on its own is not enough to sustain us in our daily life. The Gospels are filled with references to eating and drinking with friends and family, from the wedding at Cana to the miracle of the loaves and the fishes to Maundy Thursday. Even that “Last Supper” is not the final reference in the Gospels to Jesus encouraging his friends to eat together. In the ultimate chapter of John, Jesus prefaces his famous command to Simon Peter to tend his sheep with a prosaic invitation to a very real breakfast. “When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread.… Jesus said to them, ‘Come and have breakfast.’” (NSRV, John 21:9, 12)
Understanding the connection between food and community would appear to be something churches are naturally good at. Take my friend and walking partner Charlotte Gudorp, a member of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Metuchen, New Jersey. She believes in the ministry of food. Whenever St. Luke’s offers a communal meal, which is often, you can be sure to find Charlotte bustling around in her red apron with St. Luke’s emblazoned in white across the front, making sure that everybody in the church community has satisfied their appetites. I asked Charlotte what drew her to the kitchen, and she replied simply, “Nobody should leave a church hungry.” The bread and wine of Communion feed our spirits, but the covered dishes of a church supper and the gooey marshmallows of a summer barbecue among family and friends — both old and new — can feed body and soul together.
Yet in the 21st century, America is so often the “fast-food nation.” From drive-thru burger joints where we don’t even have to leave our cars, to frozen entrees eaten in front of the television set, our lifestyle too often rejects that simple invitation to eat with friends that Jesus proffered his disciples.
What can we do in our personal lives to combat the lure of fast food and the frenetic hurry of daily life? At least one day a week we can make an effort to slow down, to appreciate what we eat, to thank God for what we have been given. Here are just a few suggestions of ways to foster a sense of Sabbath simplicity and community in our eating.
• Help organize or even just attend a church lunch or supper. Sit in friendship and community with your own family. Invite friends, acquaintances, or strangers to share in the bounty the Lord has given us.
• Include the community in the kitchen. Even little children can help with simple tasks such as shucking corn, breaking ends off beans, or stringing peas. If the kitchen is small, let the work overflow into other areas.
• Use local, fresh ingredients that are in season in your area. Buying organic and from Greenmarkets helps support the small and family farms, which builds community in yet another way.
• Look for recipes that don’t take a lot of work and can also
be prepared ahead of time, so that community time at the
table also includes the cook.
