The Digital Cathedral by Keith Anderson

Author:Keith Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780819229960
Publisher: Church Publishing Inc.
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

SPIRITUAL FOODIES

St. Lydia’s Dinner Church in Brooklyn is connecting worship and liturgy with the practice of preparing and sharing food in remarkable ways. St. Lydia’s worship is inspired by the early church agape meal (see 1 Corinthians 11:17–34), in which a community meal and Eucharistic worship were blended together. When people arrive at Lydia’s, they put on an apron and help prepare dinner, which is then served family style at several tables. Worship takes place over dinner. The bread of the Eucharist is broken at the beginning of meal. The wine is blessed at the end. And so, the entire meal is the Eucharist. Over the course of dinner Scripture is read, a sermon is given, songs are sung, and prayers are lifted. St. Lydia’s pastor, Emily Scott, says, “The fact that we’re getting together and eating sets an understanding that we’re first and foremost a community. . . . It takes the emphasis off the dogma and rules of religion, and it starts with something basic, which is what Jesus did, which was share meals with people.”10

Like St. Mark’s Cathedral, St. Lydia’s has reached deep into the ancient Christian tradition and found something that is deeply resonant for both Nones and the affiliated alike. They name this meaningful practice of preparing and enjoying food as holy by incorporating it into the central act of the faith community, worship itself. The effect is reminiscent of Michael Pollan’s reflection on his own experience of sitting at a meal with a group of friends who had helped gather the ingredients and prepare the food. As dinner begins, he looks around the table at his friends and the food, and recognizes it is a holy moment. He writes,

[T]here’s a sense in which the meal had become . . . a thanksgiving or a secular seder, for every item on our plates pointed somewhere else, almost sacramentally, telling a little story about nature or community or even the sacred, for mystery was very often the theme. Such storied food can feed us both body and soul, the threads of narrative knitting us together as a group, and knitting the group into the larger fabric of the given world. I don’t want to make too much of it; it was just a meal after all.11

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