By Angelo Scola

Cooking is specific to the human family and eating food together is one of the high moments of shared living. Every tradition and every culture receives a value and a taste from it that ‘nourishes’ the person in a real way. Being together is indispensable to life as much as proteins and calories which nourish the body. In addition, eating, in being human beings, is connected with conviviality and hospitality which are constituent elements of the human community and, even before this, of the solidity and equilibrium of primary relationships.

One thus well understand that a ‘shared meal’ – like for that matter ‘fasting’ – are things that are valuable and specific to all religious experiences. They express, on the one hand, conviviality and hospitality so to speak in a horizontal way and become an effective symbol of sharing with the divine. On the other hand, they mark the ascetic journey of man towards God, his wish to abandon all disordered affections. Man becomes in this way more supportive and caring in relation to his neighbour. These fundamental meanings are found, evidently according to their specific modalities, in the Jewish Passover as a gesture of remembering the mirabilia Dei with His people, and in the practice of fasting of Ramadam, and in the Christian Eucharist.

As regards shared meals as a banquet, we can say that in them man experiences in a paradigmatic way the experience of need, which is opened to his wishes and to the sharing of frailty and hospitality. A concrete symbol of good sociability, in banquets we find a synthesis of the experience shared by every man which reflects the breadth and meaning of existence in its rich cultural and religious expressions.

Conviviality is, in fact, one of the essential features of people’s lifestyles which find their foundation specifically in the dynamic of recognition and mutual narration.

  The Homeric figure of the Cyclops Polyphemus, who does not recognise the law of hospitality and thus lives in a feral way outside the human consortium, becomes a paradigm of the barbaric absolution of human coexistence. This last, in contrary fashion, has at its roots relationships as a constituent and religious (religio, re-ligatio) bond, and has trust as a fundamental aptitude. Our Lombard tradition has understood this tradition well: it has in the pages of the masterpiece of Manzoni a special emblematic expression: ‘The gentleman drew near to our Cristoforo, who made a sign that he wanted to leave, and said to him: “Father, would you like something; give me this sign of friendship”. And he began to serve him before all the others; but he, withdrawing, with a certain cordial resistance, said “these things are no longer for me; but it will not be for me to refuse your gifts. I am about to start a journey: deign to allow me to take some bread so that I can say that I have enjoyed your charity, eaten your bread, and have a sign of your forgiveness”’ (The Betrothed, IV).

   It is at the school of the Gospel that we learnt the link between food, our brethren and God Himself. It was Jesus himself, indeed, who educated his disciples in the perception of the complete measurement of their need for food: ‘Do not work for food that goes bad; instead work for the food that lasts for eternal life. This is the food that the son of man will give you…the bread that God gives is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world’. Then he said to them: ‘Lord, always give us this bread…Your ancestors ate manna in the desert but they died. But the bread that comes down from heaven is of such a kind that whoever eats it will not die. If anyone eats this bread, he will live for ever. The bread that I will give him is my flesh, which I give so that the world may live’ (Jn 6:27; 33-34; 49-51). The dialogue between the Lord and his disciples can only refer back to the answer that Jesus gave to the tempter: ‘Man does not live by bread alone’ (Lk 4:4). So what does man live by? The answer of Jesus is his Eucharist, the total giving of himself: ‘Take and eat it, this is my body’ (Mt 26:26). The bread that man desires is God Himself who offers it to man as gift. Only in this way can he be definitively sated. Christians, in taking part every Sunday in the Eucharist, are introduced into the logic of gift as a law of life. Human existence then acquires a Eucharistic form – true human worship (Rom 12:1).