Bread & Wine

I feel like Shauna Niequist is my friend. 

In the last couple of months I've read through two of her (three) books and they've been so easy, enjoyable, so sitting-in-a-friend's-living-room-sharing-a-bottle-of-wine kinds of books. I'm thankful. 

LOTS of good stuff in her most recent book, Bread and Wine and again, its one I should probably just buy. For now though, the library copy is doing me well and typing out her nuggets of goodness helps the thoughts stick in my brain a little bit better. 

So, without further ado, a bunch of quotes (with my own emphasis added) from my good friend Shauna. 

pages 106, 107 & 109: 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... it isn't about perfection and it isn't about performance. 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. I know its scary, but throw open the door anyway...

page 176-177: The heart of hospitality is creating space...protecting the fragile bubble of vulnerability and truth and love. Its 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. We do it best, I think, with our nuclear family - most of us tell our children and spouses how much we love them easily and often. But that night... we risked the awkwardness of saying tender, meaningful things out loud in front of everyone, in front of our friends, trusting that those words would travel down to a very deep part of someone we cared about...
Sometimes food is the end and sometimes its a means to an end, and sometimes you don't know which it is until it happens... The food and the table and the laughter helped to create sacred space, a place to give someone the gift of words. That's what the night was about - sacred space and words of love.

page 181: Kids aren't vanity projects and they're not extensions of our own images... He's a person, not a paper doll. And we're his parents, not his marketing team. 

page 250: The sacraments are tangible ways to represent intangible ideas: new life becomes something we can feel and smell and see when we baptize in water. The idea of a Savior, of a sacrifice, of body and blood so many centuries ago, fills our senses and invades our present when our fingers break bread and our mouths fill with wine. 

We don't experience this connection, this remembering, this intimate memory and celebration of Christ, only at the altar. We experience it, or at least we could, every time we are fed. During that last meal, that last gathering of dear friends and disciples, Jesus was inviting us to gather around a table and remember, in church buildings and outside of them, during the sacrament of Communion and outside of it. 

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. 

page 251: ...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.

page 252: I believe the bread and wine is for all of us, for every person, an invitation to believe, a hand extended from divine to human. I believe its to be torn and handled, gulped. I believe that we can practice the sacrament of Communion anywhere at all, that a forest clearing can become a church and any one of us a priest as we bless the bread and the wine. 

And I believe that Jesus asked for us to remember him during the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the wine every time, every meal, every day - no matter where we are, who we are, what we've done. 

If we only practice remembrance every time we take Communion at church, we miss three opportunities a day to remember. What a travesty! Eugene Peterson says that "to eyes that see, every bush is a burning bush." Yes, that, exactly. To those of us who believe that all of life is sacred, every crumb of bread and sip of wine is a Eucharist, a remembrance, a call to awareness of holiness right where we are. 

I want all 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. 

Holiness abounds, should we choose to look for it. The whisper and drumbeat of God's Spirit are all around us, should we choose to listen for them. The building blocks of the most common meal - the bread and the wine - are reminders to us: He's here! God is here, and he's good. Every time we eat, every time we gather, every time the table is filled: He's here. He's here, and he is good.

page 257: I want you to stop running from thing to thing, and to sit down at the table, to offer the people you love something humble and nourishing, like soup and bread, like a story, like a hand holding another hand while you pray. 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 that its in the in-between spaces that our lives change, and that the real beauty lies there.