THE SHARED TABLE is celebrating the New Year with a GIVEAWAY – the first ever! And yes, of course it’s a book – but it’s not a cookbook; I’m pretty sure you already have plenty of those. Read on to see what it is and how it can be yours!
We’re already one week into the year 2011; that’s plenty of time to have broken some or all of your New Year’s resolutions…so, how are you doing with that?
The etymology of the word “resolution” comes from a word that means to “to loosen, dissolve, untie,” which makes sense if you consider that before you initiate new habits, you have to “loosen” the bad ones that have kept you in bondage. What things keep you in bondage? For many people, it’s food.
The significance of food in our lives is pretty obvious when you consider New Year’s Resolutions; food and our relationship with it generally ranks pretty high on the Top Ten list. What if we decided to think about food in a different way? What might happen if rather than studying every morsel of food we put in our mouths we studied food itself? Specifically, the spiritual significance of food?
Author Sara Covin Juengst took on that project back in 1992 when she wrote “Breaking Bread, the Spiritual Significance of Food.” In the foreward of the book, author Parker J. Palmer notes that the author shows “how food is woven as intricately as faith into the entire fabric of our lives.” Of Juengst’s work, Walter Brueggemann says, “The book lets us retaste and renotice and reswallow our life from God.”
Among others, the author covers topics such as:
- Stewardship: Food as God’s Good Gift
- Hospitality: Expression of Grace
- Bonding: Strangers No Longer
In the chapter titled Compassion: The Great Inasmuch, Juengst includes a poem she wrote after coming home from hunger-stricken Africa to affluent America:
I hear these words about “the poor”
and brush them into the corners of my mind.
I cannot think about them now
I am too preoccupied
with the choice of hors d’oeuvres for my party
and the color of my new shoes.
I am too anxious
about the impression I make
to decide for diminishing
or to question the givens.
I am too cautious
to risk the highway
that leads away from safe places.
Convenience blankets me,
stifles the clamor of a hungry world.
The fact that I own a copy of this book is pretty amazing; prior to launching THE SHARED TABLE, I read everything I could get my hands on about the connection between food and hospitality – there’s not much out there, by the way.
One day after futilely combing through the more than 500,000 used books at Steven’s Book Store, I literally stumbled over a pile of books blocking an aisle, glanced down and there on top was the out of print “Breaking Bread.” At $1.95, it was a steal, being that I’d searched for months without finding a copy for less than $100.
Here’s my well-loved copy:
This book has become one of my most prized possessions and now I’ve come up with a way for you to have one of your own. Recently I came across another copy, only this one is just like new, so I’ve decided to give it away to one of my subscribers as part of The Shared Table’s First Giveaway. To enter for a chance to win:
STEP 1: Enter your email in the RSVP box in the upper right hand corner & click submit. (If you’ve already subscribed to “The Shared Table”, skip this step)
STEP 2: In the comment section, let me know how you plan to share YOUR table in 2011.
One lucky winner will be chosen Monday night!
THE LAST BITE:
A little Google Search Trivia on the above subjects:
“FOOD” …762,000,000 results. Apparently people are interested in the subject.
“SPIRITUALITY” …40,800,000 results. Hmmm….
“NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS” …43,500,000
Maybe we could start a “RESOLUTION REVOLUTION” by changing the way we think about food. Who’s in?
