26 Apr Food For Thought

Dear Westwood Church family,

I was on a call this afternoon with board members of the Foundation that operates my extended family’s organic farm in central Nebraska. I found the conversations — about planting red oak trees, new calves being born, and the need for rain — surprisingly inspiring.

I am hungry to connect more to the people and places involved in growing and raising the food that is my (literal) daily bread. It feels good to know that food comes from actual places. Even the food that comes to me by way of the grocery store was grown somewhere, by someone.

One of my favorite writers, Wendell Berry, holds together the role of farmer and poet; his work sings with practical theological insight that connects food and faith. With the appreciative knowledge that having tended fields gives, he invites us to claim the responsibility that comes with eating. He challenges us to be worthy of the food we eat. That is, to recognize that we depend on things outside ourselves.

No matter how much we believe we stand on our own two feet, we depend also on things outside ourselves. As a Christian, I acknowledge that this is true for both my physical body, and my spiritual life. I depend on food I have not produced, and also on a grace that is beyond me.

So, today I offer this short prayer, written by Wendell Berry. Though written by a meat-eater, I hope this devotional invitation might be relevant for us all:

I have taken in the light
that quickened eye and leaf.
May my brain be bright with praise
of what I eat, in the brief blaze
of motion and of thought.
May I be worthy of my meat.

(“Prayer After Eating”, by Wendell Berry)

grace and peace,
Pastor Molly