Broken Bread and Poured Out Wine

With apologies to Abraham Maslow, I suggest our primary needs as 21^st century human beings living in developed countries center around food and water, rest, shelter, and physical connection with others. Each of these needs can be fulfilled in basic, transactional ways, but can also be achieved in transcendent moments, allowing the bottom level of Maslow’s pyramid to leap upwards…self-actualization attained through the fulfillment of basic needs.

Sleep can be a taken for granted, put off or avoided in favor of something believed to be more important. Sleep can be fitful, interrupted by incomprehensible nightmares. It can be achieved through chemical assistance, at times producing not so much sleep as an erasure of the night. Sleep can occur in a middle seat of a trans-Atlantic flight, arms folded so as not to touch our seatmates, knees buried into the hard plastic ahead. Sleep can be achieved while waiting for a phone call confirming a loved one has passed, while waiting for an overdue child or spouse to return home. Rest can even be avoided for days if necessary, due to work, physical threat, or mental darkness. But under proper conditions…a cool, dark room…a warm, soft bed and pillow in a place where we feel secure…sleep becomes physically and emotionally restorative. The heat of our mind cools and the cache is cleared. We awake feeling reborn, stiff in the muscles and joints, but supple in spirit.

Shelter too, at its most basic level, can take almost any form. A Cape Cod, a mobile home, a tent, Buckingham Palace, or a cardboard box. All can keep rain off our heads reasonably well, protect us from cold winds, and aid in the incessant human pursuit of warmth. Shelter can keep the marauders of body, mind, and soul at bay for a time, allowing us to rest ever so briefly. But again, under the right conditions that shelter becomes more. It becomes home. It becomes a refuge from the existential threats of the world. It becomes a place of belonging. It becomes a place to which we can return when all else in the world seems to be failing us. Although my grandparents have been gone almost 15 years now, I can still feel the memory of crossing the threshold of their home. I can hear the slight echo of sound off the cold terrazzo floor. I can taste the smell of stove gas on my tongue, Pine-Sol if it was a Monday. I know that that home has long since ceased to be but that somehow, I am still welcome there. That home, always so dark during a summer day, is part of who I am. I hope my eldest child, just returned from her first term at university, longed for our home in that way over these last few months. I hoped she ached within for this place, in all its glorious imperfection, this place to which she will always belong, and is always wanted.

And as humans we need physical touch. Without it, babies don’t develop properly. Without it we do not feel connected to another. But this too has its risks; it’s pitfalls. We can so crave the touch of another we become willing to disrespect ourselves and to disrespect the other. Base instinct overtakes our cognition and we consent to devalue their, and our, humanity. Sex, after all, to take human touch to its extreme, can be purchased under the right circumstances. It can be reduced to a biological process without regard for emotion, connection, or consequence. We need physical touch for reassurance, for comfort, for connection. We thirst for the embrace of a friend long missed, for a father’s reassuring squeeze of a shoulder, for the brush of a hand against our cheek, like electricity through our guts.

The common thread among all these needs is their necessity for human survival…indeed they are also necessary, on some level, for the survival of all mammals. But more than that, they are the things necessary for us to thrive as human beings. Within each of these things we reveal our human vulnerabilities, our wants and needs.

And so, we turn to the importance of food, or better, of meals. Here I am referring to an act so personal and so important as to subsume all the others. Like rest, shelter, and physical touch, our needs for food can be fulfilled in the coarsest ways. Caloric needs can be satisfied by factory produced, highly processed products that bear no resemblance to the bounty of the land. Indeed, food can be the source of death and not life if not approached carefully.

And yet, the act of sharing a meal with another soul may be the most important, the most intimate act in which we can engage. To break bread and pour out wine with another is an act of hospitality in which we see that person as an equal. We allow ourselves to be seen in a vulnerable way and they allow the same. To lavish attention on another through the preparation of a meal says to them, though I may not yet know you fully, I wish to do so.

Jesus, in His final message to the disciples during the Last Supper tells them, “whenever you do this, do so in My name.” The Church has ritualized this meal into the sacrament of the Eucharist, one which I cherish and which feeds my soul. And yet, as important as I believe that sacrament to be, I think it is an incomplete understanding of Christ’s message to us in that moment. I think Jesus is actually saying, whenever you gather as friends…as brothers and sisters…as sinners searching for salvation…as countrymen…whenever you break bread and pour out wine with and for another, do it in My name. Do this as an act of love. Do this sacrificially. Do this as an act of humility. Do this as an act of humanity. Do this as an act of fellowship, as openness, and invitation, as belonging.

It is common in Middle Eastern cultures, in Native American cultures, in Central and South American ones too, for a visitor to be offered a cup of tea, a small meal, a tomato. Even in the Deep South you will invariably asked whether or not you’ve eaten. These ritual courtesies are the model to which these meals should aspire. Inviting someone into your home to cook for them out of the latest Thomas Keller cookbook isn’t what I mean here, unless you are in fact Thomas Keller. A meal like that says to your guest, “look at me, look at what I can do, look at what I can afford,” and though I am certainly up for meals like that at times, the meal…the Meal…I write about is simple and honest. There is no pretense within it. It is not a meal intended to impress another person. It is never food that would make another feel less about themselves. Instead, it bread, pasta, rice and beans. Simple vegetables and simple sauces. I’m talking of the food we would feed our families on a Tuesday night. The food that says to your guest, “this is me as I truly am. You are welcome here.”

Sharing a meal with another may be the greatest gift we can offer another and, in these challenging times of social distancing and political and civil distress, may be even more critical to us all. Meals such as these nourish the soul as well as the body. They build community and strengthen relationships.

Broken bread and poured out wine. I truly believe this to be the salvation of us all.