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

by Shauna Niequist

I learned the deeper practices of hospitality—not just parties and planned gatherings, but a way of living with an open door and an open heart, a way of using food and time and attentiveness as a way of loving people.

I believe all of life is shot through with God’s presence, and that part of the gift of walking with him is seeing his fingerprints in all sorts of unexpected ways.

Especially for those of us who make our livings largely in front of computer screens, there’s something extraordinary about getting up from the keyboard and using our hands for something besides typing—for chopping and dicing and coaxing scents and flavors from the raw materials in front of us. There’s something entirely satisfying in a modern, increasingly virtual world about something so elemental—heat, knife, sizzle.

When you eat, I want you to think of God, of the holiness of hands that feed us, of the provision we are given every time we eat. When you eat bread and you drink wine, I want you to think about the body and the blood every time, not just when the bread and wine show up in church, but when they show up anywhere—on a picnic table or a hardwood floor or a beach.

What matters is that one of the ways we grow up is by declaring what we love.

I started cooking the way I start everything: by reading.

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.

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.

You’ll miss the richest moments in life—the sacred moments when we feel God’s grace and presence through the actual faces and hands of the people we love—if you’re too scared or too ashamed to open the door.

We don’t learn to love each other well in the easy moments. Anyone is good company at a cocktail party. 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.

We knew that the Grand Rapids season was singular, never to be repeated. But I don’t think we knew the life and force and influence these friendships would have beyond that season. I don’t think we knew that when we see each other a few times a year, there would still be that trust and honesty and love, that we would still care about each other in so many ways and understand each other so well, even across the distance and the time zones and the life changes.

It was just as it should have been, and nothing close to what I could have planned. And that’s what makes a good party—when the evening and the people and the conversation and the feeling in the room are allowed to be whatever they need to be for that night.

When we want something to be momentous, it rarely is. Life is disobedient in that way, insisting on surprising us with its magic, stubbornly unwilling to be glittery on command.

Food matters because it’s one of the things that forces us to live in this world—this tactile, physical, messy, and beautiful world—no matter how hard we try to escape into our minds and our ideals. Food is a reminder of our humanity, our fragility, our createdness.

I want all of the holiness of the Eucharist to spill out beyond the church walls, out of the hands of priests and into the regular streets and sidewalks, into the hands of regular, grubby people like you and me, onto our tables, in our kitchens and dining rooms and backyards.

We live in a world that values us for how fast we go, for how much we accomplish, for how much life we can pack into one day. But I’m coming to believe it’s in the in-between spaces that our lives change, and that the real beauty lies there.