Further Thoughts On Food And Spirituality

“Hebrew & Christian Scriptures are stuffed (sorry) with food imagery – stories of eating, rule about eating, recipes, metaphor upon metaphor that draws on foodstuff. I think my eating is often screwed up, but my spiritual diet is often even more screwed up. Far too much of the spirit and mystery in my life is snuffed out, is processed, packaged and relegated to the cheap bin near the express check-out.”
The Corner – A Plate Of Foodstuff Musings

I’ve had that quote kicking around my desk since Bob posted it back in January. Over this year I’ve been spending a lot of time pondering the connections between spirituality and ordinary everyday activities like cooking and eating (as well as shopping, organising, tidying and disposing of junk). The interest in quotidian spirituality is not a new thing, but it has a acquired a greater sense of urgency in recent years.

Despite all our public affection for healthy and organic food, if you are actually committed to cooking and eating whole food it sometimes feels like you’ve placed yourself in a small and surprisingly unpopular minority. It’s not unlike what happens if you commit yourself to costly and self-examined spirituality. Pretty soon the accusations of “unrealistic expectations,” “moral superiority” and being “old-fashioned, traditional and out of date,” start to surface.

In a sense, there are potential shared weaknesses between a commitment to good food and a commitment to deep spirituality. After all, both paths can make one elitist, judgemental or socially disconnected. But those are faults, exaggerations and errors of judgement. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Food and cooking can be a gateway to a better and deeper connection with our world, with the cycles and rhythms of life, the seasons of growth and decay and of patterns and moods of our own bodies. The problem is that we are so disconnected from our neighbours, from the earth and so conditioned to not listen to our bodies that re-engaging these aspects of our existence in a consistent everyday way seems so hard and so taxing to us. Now, isn’t that, at it’s core, a thoroughly spiritual problem?

[tags] Spirituality, Lifestyle [/tags]