It is Sunday morning in the suburbs of Nisshin, a sprawling suburban area east of Nagoya, Japan. Looking down the road from the udon restaurant, you can see a couple bakeries receiving their morning regulars, dwarfed by the enormous pachinko parlor just behind with the pink and blue lights humming faintly in its windows. Across the road, to the right, lies a little white church. A bold blue sky sweeps overhead and all the sidewalks tremble with sunlight. The streets are quiet, but inside the church, everyone has just burst into swift, neat action: it’s time for church potluck.
Church potluck takes place right in the sanctuary. Busy conversations streak around the room. With loud squeaks and scrapes we break apart the rows of chairs, regrouping them around plastic folding tables. Then people begin heading to the kitchen in the next room, where the potluck is served buffet-style. Turns out there’s been little communication about what everyone planned on bringing, and so we mainly have rice.
But rice comes in different forms. The most popular form on the table is onigiri: the rice molded around a filling so that it forms a soft, rounded triangle shape, with a little dried seaweed for a shirt. Plain rice, purple rice, fillings of fish and meats, rice browned with shoyu. Besides this we have the occasional gaijin (foreigner) offering: a Caesar salad with cherry tomatoes, a Mexican-style casserole, and a sheet cake.
Just as the skill of loving music and art can be developed, so too can we learn to love food together. Probably the most important way a Christian engages with food is at Communion. When we take the Lord’s Supper, Christ makes Himself present with us, immanent in the ritual He gave us. Since He deemed wine and bread suitable mediums for this ritual, surely Christians ought to appreciate food more deeply and in more ways than anyone else. In light of this meal, what do we do with the other twenty-one meals of the week?
The space of this article allows us to briefly touch on three dimensions of food appreciation. First, food often holds an associative, or poetic, significance, particularly in its presentation or design. If you look up the etymology for “ruminations,” you’ll find that the one word holds both the connotations of deep thought and that of a cow chewing her cud. When we think about something over and over again, we’re performing a similar digestive action in our minds to the action that takes place when we eat. Food and thought, linked together. Whether our thoughts mimic the food we eat or food mimics thought, it’s difficult to say. Interestingly, however, the origin of the onigiri’s triangle shape lies with the mystical significance of mountains in the minds of ancient Japanese. (Mountains, after all, are triangles.) This pagan connotation found some material expression in rice, and was thus extended into the food we were consuming at church potluck. Did this stain our thoughts? Probably not, but how can a Christian think about food in a markedly Christian way?
Second, the consumption of food—even the daily meals outside of communion—often begins with rites or preparation or a word of blessing. In both the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer includes a deep appreciation of meat. The moment any foreign guest arrives at the courts of a king, messengers and delivery boys run out to fetch the feast: goats, cattle, sheep, pigs. Over and over again we hear of the rites of hospitality, performed by the best of Homer’s heroes. Usually, too, the gods get their share: a libation is poured, the best cuts of the meat are sacrificed. These rites mark the civilized pagan in Homer, but they of course cannot be meaningful for a Christian. What is our response? Do we have our own rites for any given dinner?
Third, we can obviously enjoy the flavor and textures of food. Not long ago, I attended a luncheon at my church local to Grove City College. Unlike the potluck at Nisshin, people had communicated about what everyone was to bring, and so we enjoyed a coordinated chili contest. I remember, for lack of more than one free hand, scooping about four different varieties of chili into a single disposable bowl and watching them slowly, reluctantly, meld together across the glittering white styrofoam. By the time I sat down to eat, small fragments of chili seemed to have retained their integrity, but another glance and I was no longer certain I still had four distinct chilis in my bowl. Should I have kept them apart so that I could judge them better? Was it good that they were mixed, a picture of ecclesiastical unity? How does one eat chili like a Christian?
The answer is, I think, with joy. A Christian eats with joy, thanksgiving, and attention to detail. For example, regardless of the mixing of chilis, I could still take pleasure in the combined result: the warm, rich heat of the stew, the bright peppery spice in the sausage, the alternation between smooth beans and soft crumbly meat. Furthermore, most professing Christians, rather than sacrificing the best cut of chicken or dripping a little libation of chili into the nearest fireplace, practice blessing the food, or “saying grace” over a meal. This is a good practice. In contrast to Achilles and company, we believe that the best possible sacrifice has already been given. We live lives of grace.
Finally, the onigiri has poetic meaning that a Christian can still appreciate, rejecting the bad and taking the good as we should do with all dishes. Note how the rice ball itself suggests a kind of completeness, compact, packaged in its little seaweed shirt, sprinkled over with furikake (dried seasoning). There’s a Japanese nursery song about making breakfast, and the hand-motions which accompany it include the shaping of onigiri: making your hands like shovels with a slight fold in them, and then putting your hands together, cupping them around a triangular piece of air. Hear the soft thud of your hands as you cup the air—twice, and then switch your hands, so that the movement is twofold. Onigiri, onigiri, goes the song. Eat a dozen onigiri and you can feel the completeness echoed in your own stomach, rounded out and compact.
Before concluding, I’d like to briefly point out the worth of a good church potluck. While communion is the most significant meal for a congregation to partake in together, I think the bonding that church potluck offers is also special. A quick glance around the sanctuary of Nisshin Christ Church reveals Japanese men and women in their forties and fifties, a handful of younger families, one or two students from the local university, American gaijin, English teachers, missionaries and their bilingual children, a Chinese-American science teacher and his daughter. A small party of kids skims over the wooden floor: little blonde and dark-haired heads running in a knot underfoot. Everyone is serving food, receiving it, and talking together. In a sense, we have nothing in common but Christ. Church potluck is a niche phenomenon, but it is a great phenomenon.
As you go home over fall break and over Thanksgiving break, ruminate, if you will, on the foods you eat and how you eat them. We are called to be salt, as well as light.
