November Prayers | Feasting
DEAR FRIENDS,
This is the month of feasting. Our year has been long, our year has been tense. And yet… God calls us to practice the supper of the lamb each week in the Eucharist and each time we break bread with our families, our friends and most especially the stranger. The good folks at the Edible Theology Project “believe the rest and connection you are looking for will take place at the table.” They “create resources for churches, families, and individuals that help you and yours connect the meal shared at the Communion table to Tuesday night’s leftovers. “ Whether we eat a quiet lunch alone or when we gather around tables this holiday season, let us remember the sacredness of this holy activity.
-Christy Yates, Associate Director
“Then he said to them, “Go, eat of the fat, drink of the sweet, and send portions to him who has nothing prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord. Do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.””
O Lord, refresh our sensibilities.
Give us this day our daily taste.
Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in, and sauces which are never the same twice.
Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with, and casseroles that put starch and substance in our limp modernity. Take away our fear of fat and make us glad of the oil which ran upon Aaron's beard.
Give us pasta with a hundred fillings, and rice in a thousand variations. Above all, give us grace to live as true men - to fast till we come to a refreshed sense of what we have and then to dine gratefully on all that comes to hand.
Drive far from us, O Most Bountiful, all creatures of air and darkness; cast out the demons that possess us; deliver us from the fear of calories and the bondage of nutrition; and set us free once more in our own land, where we shall serve Thee as Thou hast blessed us - with the dew of heaven, the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine.
Amen.
― Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection
“[The] dinner party is a true proclamation of the abundance of being -- a rebuke to the thrifty little idolatries by which we lose sight of the lavish hand that made us. It is precisely because no one needs soup fish, meat, salad, cheese, and dessert at one meal that we so badly need to sit down to them from time to time. It was largesse that made us all; we were not created to fast forever. The unnecessary is the taproot of our being and the last key to the door of delight. Enter here, therefore, as a sovereign remedy for the narrowness of our minds and the stinginess of our souls, the formal dinner...the true convivium -- the long Session that brings us nearly home.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection