Eating Heaven Quotes

“Whatever is genuine, whatever is real and true, thrives only if man does justice to both – ready for the appeal of highest heaven and cared for in the protection of the sustaining earth. Martin Heidegger”
― Simon Carey Holt, Eating Heaven: Spirituality at the Table

“M.F.K. Fisher says it well: There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. It’s like religion. If you have a glass of water and a crust of bread with someone and you really share it, it is much more than just bread and water. I really believe that. Breaking bread is a simile for sharing bread ... you cannot swallow if you are angry or hateful. You choke a bit ... it’s all very betraying, how we eat.”
― Simon Carey Holt, Eating Heaven: Spirituality at the Table

“To feast together is to tell a common story and claim our belonging on a canvas much larger than that of an individual or a particular household. It says, ‘We are who we are together.’ Commonly, at the heart of such communal feasting lies an act of sacrifice.”
― Simon Carey Holt, Eating Heaven: Spirituality at the Table

“As humans, we know instinctively that we are more whole when we are together. We are naturally tribal.”
― Simon Carey Holt, Eating Heaven: Spirituality at the Table

“The Canadian-American journalist Jane Jacobs once described this life of the city’s streets and in its neighbourhoods as a ‘dance’ of constant movement and change: not a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time … but an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. It is this dance, this ‘ballet of the good city sidewalk’, that makes the city a place worth being, a human place.”
― Simon Carey Holt, Eating Heaven: Spirituality at the Table

“It was the twentieth-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre who described the café as a ‘fullness of being’. Throughout its history, Sartre and many others like him have found at the café table something life-giving. Most often it has to do with its provision of space that is both personal and public, secluded yet connected. This communion of the café table is not first about intimacy but connection no less. Very often the communal nature of the café is found in its anonymity amidst life.”
― Simon Carey Holt, Eating Heaven: Spirituality at the Table

“To speak of the table’s role in our formation is rather to acknowledge its intimate daily-ness and therefore its power.”
― Simon Carey Holt, Eating Heaven: Spirituality at the Table

“this, I have a growing sense that the tables of everyday life, whether in or out, are potentially holy places, altars at which sacred transactions take place.”
― Simon Carey Holt, Eating Heaven: Spirituality at the Table