Taste

If you know me, then you know I find little pleasure in reading for pleasure. It’s not that I don’t like books or think reading is a waste of time. I think the reality of being in graduate school from 2011-2019, where reading is not necessarily done for pleasure, ruined me (OK, that sounds a bit dramatic, but you get the point).

As a pastor, one of my favorite parts of the gig is hearing the stories, people tell me in the church, at coffee shops, or in line at the grocery store. More often than not, these conversations are unsolicited, but they are always grace-filled and transformational.

This is why when a friend recommended that I try reading memoirs this year, I was hopeful I would find a book genre that I could enjoy.

Cue, Stanley Tucci, and Taste: My Life through Food.

“I am hardly saying anything new by stating that our links to what we eat have practically disappeared beneath sheets of plastic wrap. But what are also disappearing are the wonderful, vital human connections we’re able to make when we buy something we love to eat from someone who loves to sell it, who bought it from someone who loves to grow, catch, or raise it. Whether we know it or not, great comfort is found in these relationships, and they are very much a part of what solidifies a community.”

Tucci’s ability to connect the story of his family, career, and life to food hit the notes this pastor and theologian needed. Tucci unintentionally lays out the sacramental nature of life around a common table - a life that is sustained not by the actions of an individual, but rather a life that is sustained by the commonality of the meal. Tucci better understands what happens at Christ’s table than many pastors.

As he shares about his battle with cancer, Tucci writes, “I have chosen to write about this painfully iron experience because my illness and the brutal side effects of the treatment caused me to realize that food was not just a huge part of my life; it basically was my life… Watching my guests enjoy the meal I’d made filled me with great familiar pride. In those moments it was clear to mean that someday, when my parents are no longer alive, I will always be able to put their teachings and all the love they gave me into a bowl and present it to someone who sadly will never have had the good fortune of knowing them. But by eating that food, they will come to know them, if even just a little.”

Tucci lays out the why, and then jumps to the theology, which I have to admit I was not expecting in the last pages of this book.

“Until I began to fathom my deep emotional connections with food, I had always thought that the ceremonial eating of the communion wafer, a symbol for the body of Christ, was a strange, almost barbaric, pagan ritual. However, now it may well be the only aspect of Catholicism that makes any sense to me at all. If you love someone, you just want them inside you. (I know what you’re thinking, but let it go.) How many parents hug and kiss their kids and say, ‘I love you so much I just want to eat you up!’ Love can and does enter through the mouth.”

Tucci is explaining what we in the Wesleyan world call a “means of grace.” The Eucharist, Communion, or the Lord’s Supper, is a means by which we experience the amazing grace of God. We approach the Table the same way we may show up at a friend’s table or the dinner party of an acquaintance of an acquaintance - hungry, in need of nourishment, and while we could have chosen to be 1000 other places, here we are in a church fellowship hall or grand sanctuary with our arms extended to receive bread and wine.

In Taste: My Life Through Food, Tucci turned a memoir about food into an invitation to taste and see what the Lord has to offer.

That is the same invitation that is extended to all of us. The Lord invites all of us, those who love him, those who are frustrated or angry, and those who have not yet heard of his amazing grace, to come to the table, to taste and see.

To see what can happen with bread and wine.

To see what happens when Jesus is the host, and we are not.

To see how food, even the simplest foods, can change us from the inside out.