Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

by Shauna Niequist

What’s becoming clearer and clearer to me is that the most sacred moments, the ones in which I feel God’s presence most profoundly, when I feel the goodness of the world most arrestingly, take place at the table.

The particular alchemy of celebration and food, of connecting people and serving what I’ve made with my own hands, comes together as more than the sum of their parts. I love the sounds and smells and textures of life at the table, hands passing bowls and forks clinking against plates and bread being torn and the rhythm and energy of feeding and being fed.

It’s about what happens when we come together, slow down, open our homes, look into one another’s faces, listen to one another’s stories.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper, the host of The Splendid Table, says there are two kinds of people in the world: people who wake up thinking about what to have for supper and people who don’t. I am in the first camp, certainly. But it took me about twenty years to say that out loud.

Several years later, I’m learning to practice gratitude for a healthy body, even if it’s rounder than I’d like it to be. I’m learning to take up all the space I need, literally and figuratively, even though we live in a world that wants women to be tiny and quiet. To feed one’s body, to admit one’s hunger, to look one’s appetite straight in the eye without fear or shame—this is controversial work in our culture.

What I know now after all these years is that there are some things you don’t get over, some things you just make friends with at a certain point, because they’ve been following you around like a stray dog for years.

I love the table. I love food and what it means and what it does and how it feels in my hands. And that might be healthy, and it might be a reaction to a world that would love me more if I starved myself, and it’s probably always going to be a mix of the two. In any case, it’s morning and I’m hungry. Which is not the same as weak or addicted or shameful. I’m hungry. And I’m thinking about dinner, not just tonight, but the next night and the next. There are two kinds of people, and I’m tired of pretending I’m the other.

I’m talking about feeding someone with honesty and intimacy and love, about making your home a place where people are fiercely protected, even if just for a few hours, from the crush and cruelty of the day.

Learn, little by little, meal by meal, to feed yourself and the people you love, because food is one of the ways we love each other, and the table is one of the most sacred places we gather.

And then she handed me two pairs of safety goggles. She said, “When you feel like shattering something, I’ll be right there with you. We’ll put on our safety goggles. I’ll help you break something, and then I’ll help you clean it up.” She said, “You’ve been celebrating with me, and I’ll be here to grieve with you. We can do this together.”

I want to cultivate a deep sense of gratitude, of groundedness, of enough, even while I’m longing for something more. The longing and the gratitude, both. I’m practicing believing that God knows more than I know, that he sees what I can’t, that he’s weaving a future I can’t even imagine from where I sit this morning. Extraordinary, indeed. More than enough.

I was all feasting and no fasting—all noise, connection, go; without rest, space, silence. I was all flash and text and motion, but inside I was so tired. I was so tired I could only hear really loud music and taste really strong flavors—more, more, more. Intensity, intensity, intensity. At one event, I licked the icing off a cupcake right as I walked onstage to speak, mouth full of sugar and butter as I walked up the steps to the podium. I lost my manners and lost my ability to slow down.

What I’m finding is that when I’m hungry, lots of times what I really want more than food is an external voice to say, “You’ve done enough. It’s OK to be tired. You can take a break. I’ll take care of you. I see how hard you’re trying.” There is, though, no voice that can say that except the voice of God. The work I’m doing now is to let those words fall deeply on me, to give myself permission to be tired, to be weak, to need.

But I have also long held the belief that one’s tears are a guide, that when something makes you cry, it means something. If we pay attention to our tears, they’ll show us something about ourselves. Against my preferences, watching people cross marathon finish lines makes me cry. Crazy deep ugly cry. Specifically, watching average-looking people cross marathon finish lines makes me cry.

And I began to understand what drove the acronyms and slogans and the almost violent positivity: you need it, that kind of enthusiasm, to get you up that early, to prod you along those miles. My life began to take on a new shape and rhythm.

We travel because I want my kids to learn, as I learned, that there are a million ways to live, a million ways to eat, a million ways to dress and speak and view the world. I want them to know that “our way” isn’t the right way, but just one way, that children all over the world, no matter how different they seem, are just like the children in our neighborhood—they love to play, to discover, to learn.

I want my kids to learn firsthand and up close that different isn’t bad, but instead that different is exciting and wonderful and worth taking the time to understand. I want them to see themselves as bit players in a huge, sweeping, beautiful play, not as the main characters in the drama of our living room. I want my kids to taste and smell and experience the biggest possible world, because every bite of it, every taste and texture and flavor, is delicious.

Recipes are how we learn all the rules, and cooking is knowing how to break them to suit our tastes or preferences. Following a recipe is like playing scales, and cooking is jazz.

What people are craving isn’t perfection. People aren’t longing to be impressed; they’re longing to feel like they’re home. If you create a space full of love and character and creativity and soul, they’ll take off their shoes and curl up with gratitude and rest, no matter how small, no matter how undone, no matter how odd.

The heart of hospitality is about creating space for someone to feel seen and heard and loved. It’s about declaring your table a safe zone, a place of warmth and nourishment. Part of that, then, is honoring the way God made our bodies, and feeding them in the ways they need to be fed.

That’s my thing. I’m a get-stuff-done person. I’m a utility player, a workhorse. And all of a sudden, I couldn’t play. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t earn my keep, on practical and metaphysical levels. What would happen to me if I could no longer get things done?

I’ve long wanted to be better at accepting help, better at admitting weakness, better at trusting that people love me not for what I can do but just because they do. It would have been lovely to learn those things on my own terms, when I wanted to, the way I wanted to. But we never grow until the pain level gets high enough. Being so sick for so long was a crash course, not one I would have chosen, not one I handled well, certainly. It was a painful education, but one I needed, one that forced me to embrace the risky but deeply beautiful belief that love isn’t something you prove or earn, but something you receive or allow, like a balm, like a benediction, even when you’re at your very worst.

But love is born when we misunderstand one another and make it right, when we cry in the kitchen, when we show up uninvited with magazines and granola bars, in an effort to say, I love you.

The word that helps me these days is fasting, although I’ll plead permission to use it loosely. I have fasted strictly, as a spiritual discipline, consuming only broth and juice for a certain amount of time. But I’m using the word fasting these days as an opposite term to feasting — yin and yang, up and down, permission and discipline, necessary slides back and forth along the continuum of how we feed ourselves.

Fasting gives me a chance to practice the discipline of not having what I want at every moment, of limiting my consumption, making space in my body and in my spirit for a new year, one that’s not driven by my mouth, by wanting, by consuming.

I’m never happier than when I’m planning a menu or passing bowls around my table, fragrant and full.

I’m working to find a middle ground—some fasting, some feasting. At some points, gobbling up life with every bite; in other seasons, mastering the appetites and tempering the desires. My work these days is to find that fine balance—allowing my senses to taste every bite of life without being driven by appetites, indiscriminate and ravenous. Some days I get it right, and some days I don’t, but I do know that along the way, the process is healing me.

The heart of hospitality is creating space for these moments, protecting that fragile bubble of vulnerability and truth and love. It’s all too rare that we tell the people we love exactly why we love them—what they bring to our lives, why our lives are richer because they’re in it.

I resist and kick at discipline every chance I get, and then when I break down and do something hard, I find that it builds something in me, that it makes me stronger, not just in that area but in all sorts of areas.

I’m realizing this after what seems like a lifetime of saying to myself, “Well, you can’t be expected to do something hard on a day like this, can you?” I did expect more from myself, and I did do something hard, and I’m thankful.

It seemed that if things were going well, he listened to classic rock, but if things were getting a little hairy, he switched to worship music. Understandable, I think.

I think it bothered me so much because, like all things that make us crazy, it reminded me way too much of myself. I’ve overthought, overplanned, and manhandled so many parties and meals over the years.

But entertaining isn’t a sport or a competition. It’s an act of love, if you let it be. You can twist it and turn it into anything you want—a way to show off your house, a way to compete with your friends, a way to earn love and approval. Or you can decide that every time you open your door, it’s an act of love, not performance or competition or striving. You can decide that every time people gather around your table, your goal is nourishment, not neurotic proving. You can decide.

Before the trip, I’d spent several weeks in a coffee shop with a laptop, hyperconnected all the time, and the silence of Mexico and my useless phone felt cavernous. I felt a little jumpy, like something really major might be happening and I might miss it. But as time went on, I realized that the really major things were happening all around me, and that more often than not, I had been missing them because my phone had become an extension of my hand, and what it said to people, essentially, is that just being with them isn’t enough. This view of the ocean? Not enough. Your story? Not enough.

The church is at its best, in my view, when it is more than a set of ideas and ideals, when it is a working, living, breathing, on-the-ground, in-the-mess force for good in our cities and towns.

And as we talked about hunger, about privilege and simplicity and waste and wealth, we talked about how easy it is to settle into a lifestyle of accumulation, to get used to buying and buying and buying, and then living in homes that are bursting with stuff we don’t need, can’t find a place for, shouldn’t have bought in the first place. We want to live simpler, more responsible lives, with less waste and clutter. We want to stem the tide of ongoing accumulation, and we want to be thoughtful consumers instead of rabid accumulators.

That’s all we can do: start where we are with what we have. We have so much more than we need, and we spend a lot of our time managing our stuff, picking it up and organizing it and finding places for it. That’s not how I want to live. I don’t want to stand by, choosing to be ignorant. I want to stand with, choosing to be a part of the solution. I want to be a part of making sure the kids in our town, and in every town, have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I want to be clearer about exactly what money can and can’t buy.

Shame tricks us into believing there’s a cable channel that runs video footage of us in our underpants twenty-four hours a day, and that all the people we respect have seen it. Shame tells us that we’re wrong for having the audacity to be happy when we’re so clearly terrible. Shame wants us to be deeply apologetic for just daring to exist.

When you offer peace instead of division, when you offer faith instead of fear, when you offer someone a place at your table instead of keeping them out because they’re different or messy or wrong somehow, you represent the heart of Christ. We tend to believe that what we’ve done is too bad—that our sins and mistakes are beyond repair, and our faults and failures too deep and ugly. That’s what shame tells us. But if we take a chance and come to the table, and if when we are there we are treated with respect and esteem and kindness, then that voice of shame recedes, just for a little while, enough to let the voice of truth, of hope, of Christ himself, get planted a little deeper and a little deeper each time. The table becomes the hospital bed, the place of healing. It becomes the place of relearning and reeducating, the place where value and love are communicated. When the table is full, heavy with platters, wine glasses scattered, napkins twisted and crumpled, forks askew, dessert plates scattered with crumbs and icing, candles burning down low — it’s in those moments that I feel a deep sense of God’s presence and happiness. I feel honored to create a place around my table, a place for laughing and crying, for being seen and heard, for telling stories and creating memories.

These are things I can’t change. Not one of them. Can’t fix, can’t heal, can’t put the broken pieces back together. But what I can do is offer myself, wholehearted and present, to walk with the people I love through the fear and the mess. That’s all any of us can do. That’s what we’re here for. Not the battle lines, keeping people in and out. Not the “pro” and “anti” stances, but the presence, the listening, the praying with and for on the days when it all falls apart, when life shatters in our hands.

I want you to invest yourself wholly and deeply in friendship, God’s greatest evidence of himself here on earth. More than anything, I want you to come to the table. In all sorts of ways, both literally and metaphorically, come to the table.