Excerpts from Bread & Wine by Shauna Niequist

I don't write book reviews. This is because it seems to me that the purpose of a review is to encourage someone to want to read the book. And since I am never a better writer than the writer of the book I'm recommending, I figure it is more compelling simply to share some of their better writing with you. :-) I don't know if that makes sense to anyone else, but it's how my weird little mind works. So...

Please enjoy these delicious little morsels from Shauna Niequist in Bread & Wine. And then pick up a copy of the book for yourself. It is entirely delightful in every way.

  • Bread is bread, and wine is wine, but bread-and-wine is another thing entirely. The two together are the sacred and the material at once, the heaven and earth, the divine and the daily.
  • The particular alchemy of celebration and food, of connecting people and serving what I've made with my own hands, comes together as more than the sum of their parts.
  • It happens when we enter the joy and the sorrow of the people we love, and we join together at the table to feed one another and be fed, and while it's not strictly about food, it doesn't happen without it. Food is the starting point, the common ground, the thing to hold and handle, the currency we offer to one another.
  • Food is a language of care, the thing we do when traditional language fails us, when we don't know what to say, when there are no words to say....It's the thing that connects us, that bears our traditions, our sense of home and family, our deepest memories, and, on a practical level, our ability to live and breathe each day. Food matters.
  • When you eat, I want you to think of God, of the holiness of hands that feed us, of the provision we are given every time we eat. When you eat bread and you drink wine, I want you to think about the body and the blood every time, not just when the bread and wine show up in church, but when they show up anywhere--on a picnic table or a hardwood floor or a beach.
  • This isn't about recipes. This is about a family, a tribe, a little band of people who walk through it all together, up close and in the mess, real time and unvarnished.
  • I'm not talking about cooking as performance, or entertaining as a complicated choreography of competition and showing off. I'm talking about feeding someone with honesty and intimacy and love, about making your home a place where people are fiercely protected, even if just for a few hours, from the crush and cruelty of the day.
  • ...our goal, remember, is to feed around our table the people we love. We're not chefs or restaurateurs or culinary school graduates, and we shouldn't try to be. Make it the way the people you love want to eat it. Make it the way you love it. Try it a million ways and cross a few off the list because they were terrible, but celebrate the fact that you found a few new ways too--ways that are fresh and possibly unconventional but perfect for your family. That's the goal.
  • I want to cultivate a deep sense of gratitude, of groundedness, of enough, even while I'm longing for something more. The longing and the gratitude, both. I'm practicing believing that God knows more than I know, that he sees what I can't, that he's weaving a future I can't even imagine from where I sit this morning.
  • I want so badly to release my stranglehold on my plan, my way, my calendar. I want to be the kind of Christian who really does believe God holds the future and that even my best guesses are just that. I want to live without anxiety, fear, and deadlines. But it seems that every chance I get, I grab back those pretend reins and allow myself to believe the myth that I'm in control.
  • Recipes are how we learn all the rules, and cooking is knowing how to break them to suit our tastes or preferences. Following a recipe is like playing scales, and cooking is jazz.
  • Recipes are the scales, the training wheels, the paint-by-numbers that lead us to jazz, two-wheel riding, and our very own blank canvas.
  • ...there's no replacement for what happens when we make something with our own hands, directed by our own senses, motivated by our own love for the people we're serving.
  • 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.
  • The heart of hospitality is about creating spaces for someone to feel seen and heard and loved. It's about declaring your table a safe zone, a place of warmth and nourishment. Part of that, then, is honoring the way God made our bodies, and feeding them in the ways they need to be fed.
  • I'm learning that feasting can only exist healthfully--physically, spiritually, and emotionally--in a life that also includes fasting.
  • There has to be a way to live with health and maturity and intention while still honoring the part of me that loves to eat, that sees food as a way to nurture and nourish both my body and my spirit.
  • I want people to sit down and feel at home, not like there's a scientist in the kitchen but like there's a sister there, someone who loves them, who understands their history and wants to remind them of something lovely, who wants to recall together a sweet time.
  • ...that night wasn't about the food. 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.
  • I choose discipline, not because I'm out of control, not as a punishment, but because it heals me, helps me, and builds and resets something good inside me.
  • ...entertaining isn't a sport or a competition. It's an act of love, if you let it be. You can twist it and turn it into anything you want--a way to show off your house, a way to compete with your friends, a way to earn love and approval. Or you can decide that every time you open your door, it's an act of love, not performance or competition or striving. You can decide that every time people gather around your table, your goal is nourishment, not neurotic proving. You can decide.
  • I think about how valuable it is to live the life in front of you, regardless of how tempting it is to press your face to the glass of other people's lives online, even though doing that is so much safer and so entirely addictive.
  • I practice.....being entirely where I am, glamorous or not, and what I find is that it's better to be in one place, wholly and full-heartedly, than a thousand splintery half-places, glamorous as they may be.
  • I'm going to live in the body God made me, not because it's perfect but because it's mine. And I'm going to be thankful for health and for the ability to run and move and dance and swim. And this is what I'm not going to do: I'm not going to hide.
  • 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 awhile, 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.
  • Body of Christ, broken for you. Blood of Christ, shed for you. "Every time you eat the bread and drink the wine," Jesus says, "remember me." Communion is connection, remembrance.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The table is where we store up for those days [when it all falls apart], where we log minutes and hours building something durable and strong that gets tested in those terrible split seconds. And the table is where we return to stitch our hearts back together after the breaking.
  • The table is where time stops. It's where we look people in the eye, where we tell the truth about how hard it is, where we make space to listen to the whole story, not the textable sound bite.
  • We don't come to the table to fight or to defend. We don't come to prove or to conquer, to draw lines in the sand or to stir up trouble. We come to the table because our hunger brings us there. We come with a need, with fragility, with an admission of our humanity. The table is the great equalizer, the level playing field many of us have been looking everywhere for. The table is the place where the doing stops, the trying stops, the masks are removed, and we allow ourselves to be nourished, like children.....If the home is a body, the table is the heart, the beating center, the sustainer of life and health.