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

by Shauna Niequist

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.

That’s what shame does, though. It whispers to us that everyone is as obsessed with our failings as we are. It insists that there is, in fact, a watchdog group devoted completely to my weight or her wrinkles or his shrinking bank account. 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.

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. Try to think yourself through starvation. Try to command yourself not to be hungry, using your own sheer will. It will work for a while, maybe, but at some point you’ll find yourself — no matter how high-minded or iron-willed—face-to-face with your own hunger, and with that hunger, your own humanity.

My friend Shane says the genius of Communion, of bread and wine, is that bread is the food of the poor and wine the drink of the privileged, and that every time we see those two together, we are reminded of what we share instead of what divides us.