“One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.” — Luciano Pavarotti

One day in one of those great life inventory games that have become so popular in an age of humanistic psychology and personal development exercises, I was part of a seminar that asked us to list ten of your warmest memories. It was easy. I wrote them all down quickly:
1. Family birthday parties
2. My mother’s Irish potato candy at Christmastime
3. Summer picnics on the peninsula
4. Thanksgiving Dinner
5. Dad’s cinnamon toast
6. Packing sandwiches for our fishing trips together
7. Watermelon on the Fourth of July
8. Our family’s Irish wakes and the storytelling times we had there
9. Eating out on the weekends
10. Smelling my mother’s oyster stew

It didn’t take long before I realized that it wasn’t the food that I remembered. It was the occasion and all it meant, year after year after year. All those things had marked my way through life. They were the things I waited for. They were the moments that made life special and family real and life fun. The food was simply the sign that all those things were still safe, still functioning, still the stuff of life.

Then, years later, I began to understand that even the liturgical calendar was a virtual excursion into the way to live life. We learned early in the novitiate the distinction between first- and second-class feasts and feria days. In the early Middle Ages, in a period where
there were no such things as public holidays, no way to relieve the burden of the poor, the Church had begun to insert moments in life that required people to live differently than the social burdens of the time demanded. The Church made life fun and feasting a holy act.

First-class feasts—the great feast days of the church: Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, the Assumption, the Ascension—were times when work stopped for everyone—for the peasants and the poor, as well as the rich.

In the community, we called them “speaking days.” They were weekdays with the character of Sundays. Everything in life relaxed a bit. Liturgy was more beautiful, more ornate, more artistic, more joyful. The community spoke both during the day and at meals. There was always something special on the table: pie, homemade cinnamon rolls, raisins in the morning oatmeal.

Second-class feasts were the feasts of the great saints. On these days there were special feast day parties or pilgrimages or blessings or gatherings. Local patron saints—St. Walburga and St. Paul, St. Joseph and St. Cecilia, St. Michael and St. Christopher—were honored in a special way in the liturgy and people celebrated their lives with great festivals and public events. Vestiges of those feasts still exist in cultures around the world.

The rest of the liturgical calendar, feria days, were life as usual. Food was simple, work was steady and, for the most part, physical. The liturgical feast days provided the only rest most people ever got. And the Western world lived from feast to feast because of them.

We learned that feasting, as well as fasting, is a necessary dimension of life. The oyster stew and the watermelon, the fresh bread for sandwiches, and the bottle of wine to go with them, the smell of a Christmas ham and a turkey on Thanksgiving, the weekly meal with the crowd, the holidays and birthdays and picnics and family specialties all serve to remind us still of the glory of God, the bounty of God, the blessedness of life, the proof that life, in the end, is always good.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1: There are times when it seems that life will never be good again, that this pain will never go away. That is exactly the moment when we most need to remember the good moments, the great laughter, the sweet tastes of yesterday that always, always come again.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 2: Learning to celebrate life is one of the best lessons a person can learn.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3: We need to teach children to celebrate the great moments of life so that they see their responsibility to maintain them.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 4: We are not spoiling children by giving them treats. We are simply immersing them in the joy of life so that they are never tempted to despair of it.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5: Workaholics stand perched on the edge of forgetting that most of the good things of life come to those others who are willing to sit and watch the grass grow while they enjoy what grew without their effort.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 6: It’s important to dot our lives with unscheduled as well as scheduled feast days.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7: We must learn to be able to make joy as well as to expect it. Or as Lin Yutang, the Chinese philosopher put it: “Our lives are not in the lap of the gods, but in the lap of our cooks.”

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 8: Celebrations are an excuse to enjoy the world and to enable others to enjoy it, too.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 9: If you want to know whether or not you’re living a balanced life, ask yourself whether your feasting and your fasting—your sense of praise and trust—come in common measure.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10: Food and feasting are the things that remind us of the unending glory, the limitless love, of God. Voltaire said of it: “Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.”

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 11: A Jewish proverb teaches us that “Worries go down better with soup.” Treating food as a sacrament rather than a necessity reminds us that, in the end, there is always more good in life than bad. The trick is to notice it.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 12: Whether and how much we love good food—preparing, serving, tasting, and sharing it—is a measure of our love of life.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 13: Food preparation teaches us to do everything we can to make life palatable, spicy, comforting, full of love.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14: Cooking for other people is the way we wish them well for tomorrow and enable them to attain it.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15: Sitting down to a meal with the family—table set, food hot, salad fresh, water cold, dishes matched and food served rather than speared—may be the very foundation of family life in which we celebrate our need for one another.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16: The loss of the family feast may do more to loosen the family bonds than any other single dimension of family life.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17: What cupboard doesn’t have a collection of recipes carefully gathered down through the ages, adjusted over the years, scavenged from the underside of every conversation? Such are the things that bind us to one another. “I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly,” Barbara Grizzutie Harrison says. “Tuna fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.”

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18: How is it possible to have a feast if we don’t know the difference between the taste of a fresh tomato and a hot-house tomato, a homemade pickle and a factory pickle, fresh bread from pre-packaged bread?

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 19: The farmer’s market is a tribute to life grown here, lived here, to be celebrated here. It links us with ourselves.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 20: One purpose of feasting is to get back in touch with the earth that sustains us, to glorify the God that made it and to pledge ourselves to save the land that grows our food.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21: Feasting is what connects us not only to the people with whom we celebrate this moment but with the rest of the world, as well.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22: Each meal is an act of human community. “Cutting stalks at noontime,” the Chinese poet Chan-Pao writes, “perspiration drips to the earth. Know you that your bowl of rice, each grain from hardship comes?”

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23: Every meal well done, well served, well spiced, well savored, well spent is a feast. There is no need for a great deal of money, just a great deal of care.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24: In this country, we are conditioned to think that taking time to eat together, to make a meal an event rather than an act, takes time from the important things of life. That may be exactly why we are confused now about what the important things of life really are.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 25: A fast-food life is a life that misses life entirely. “Happiness,” Astrid Alauda writes, “is a bowl of cherries and a book of poetry under a shade tree.”

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 26: I have a friend who follows the sun around her back yard in a deck chair with a glass of fresh fruit juice in one hand and a book in the other. Here’s the question: Is she “wasting” time or “celebrating” time? Think carefully before you answer. It can get to be a very important question as life goes by.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 27: Good food is the hallmark of every season: fresh fruit in summer, roasted chestnuts in the fall, warm bread in winter, oyster stew in the spring. Leslie Newman says of it, “As the days grow short, some faces grow long. But not mine. Every autumn, when the wind turns cold and darkness comes early, I am suddenly happy. It’s time to start making soup again.”

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28: Food doesn’t have to be exotic to be wonderful. Peasant societies give us some of the best meals ever made.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29: Good food is always simple, always the same—and yet always different due to the subtle changes of sauce and cooking style that accompany it. As the Polish say: “Fish, to taste right, must swim three times—in water, in butter, and in wine.”

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 30: To be feasted is to be loved outrageously.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 31: Good food is the sacrament of life everlasting. Feasting is a divine imperative. It says, “Thou shalt not ignore the joys of life.”

LET’S SHARE OUR THOUGHTS

The following discussion questions, Scripture echo, journal prompts, and prayer are meant to help you reflect more deeply on The Monastic Way. Choose at least two suggestions and respond to them. You may do it as a personal practice or gather a group interested in sharing the spiritual journey.

1. On October 9, Sister Joan writes, “If you want to know whether or not you’re living a balanced life, ask yourself whether your feasting and your fasting—your sense of praise and trust—come in common measure.” What do you make of this idea? In your opinion, should feasting and fasting be about equally frequent? Do you think of feasting as an expression of praise and fasting as an expression of trust, or have you experienced them differently?

2. Which daily quote in The Monastic Way is most meaningful to you? Why? Do you agree with it? Disagree? Did it inspire you? Challenge you? Raise questions for you?

3. After reading The Monastic Way, write one question that you would like to ask the author about this month’s topic.

4. Joan Chittister uses other literature to reinforce and expand her writing. Find another quote, poem, story, song, art piece, novel that echoes the theme of this month’s Monastic Way.

5. Sister Joan credits Western society’s great feasts to the Church and to Christian tradition, and remembers how her monastery has celebrated the liturgical year with special meals. How do religion and food fit together in your experience and in your beliefs?

JOURNAL PROMPTS

Prompt 1: Here are a few statements from this month’s Monastic Way. Choose one that is most helpful to you and journal with it.

• Feasting is what connects us not only to the people with whom we celebrate this moment but with the rest of the world, as well.

• It’s important to dot our lives with unscheduled as well as scheduled feast days.

• Good food is the sacrament of life everlasting.

Prompt 2: Spend a few minutes with this photograph and journal about its relationship to this month’s Monastic Way. You can do that with prose or a poem or a song or....

SCRIPTURE ECHO
On Mount Zion, God will provide a feast,
a feast of rich foods and choice wines, juicy rich food and pure, choice wines. - Isaiah 25:6

PRAYER
Bless us, O God,
in these, Thy gifts,
which we are about to receive
from thy bounty.
Through Christ, our God.
Amen.
—traditional Catholic Grace before Meals