Letter from Clare

One of the things I enjoy most about the summer months is the opportunity to eat outside. Last summer on a number of occasions around teatime, we packed our things up and headed for Aldeburgh. Just as everybody else seemed to be heading back inland for their tea or supper, we enjoyed ours on the beach. Sometimes, on our more organised days, we met up with friends, and had a shared meal, other people’s sandwiches, always seem to taste much nicer than your own!

Shared meals can be very simple affairs, like our picnic or they can be much more sophisticated, and comprise of several courses, wine and perhaps even candlelight.

The important thing is the coming together, the sharing not just of food, but of company and friendship, of laughter and concerns. The opposite of a shared meal, is one eaten on ones own, and that can be a hard and very lonely experience. Often when talking with bereaved people, they will say, the hardest thing is cooking just for one, and not feeling like eating at all. Memories of shared meals are some of the most precious; no doubt you have some of your own. 

If, in every culture and every country, the sharing of food is one of the fundamental experiences, of what it means to be human, it is perhaps no surprise that a shared meal, is at the centre of Christian worship. It is a meal which evokes many memories, most essentially that meal which Christ shared with his disciples on the night before he died, but not only that meal, the picnic he shared on a beach, after his resurrection, an al fresco meal on a hillside, when a young boy shared his packed lunch; a meal with a tax collector, whom Jesus befriended, when everybody else shunned him. This shared meal, known variously by a number of names Holy Communion, the Eucharist, the Last Supper, Mass, is at one level a meal like any other meal, an opportunity to be nourished, to share in fellowship, to be in the company of friends, but it is at another level, like no other meal an opportunity for encounter and meeting with God. It is a meal that has been shared on the beach, and in the trenches of war; at a wedding ceremony and at a deathbed: at a coronation and in a prison cell; it’s a meal that is shared in every part of the world openly and at times in secret. It’s a meal once shared in that you never quite forget and which often leaves you hungry for more. 

In this holiday season, perhaps the opportunity may come to you, to enjoy a shared meal in the company of others and indeed to share in the meal that Christ invites us to share one with another, wherever in the world, we find ourselves

Clare Sanders