Awaken Your Senses E-Book

J. Brent Bill

• Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 279

Beschreibung

Perhaps you've been missing out. God has given us five senses and a brain with two sides. Yet we often approach God in one way only: through words that are analyzed and processed logically in our left brain. The right brain, however, is the creative, intuitive center--the place that connects most to our seeing, smelling, touching, tasting and hearing, and that roots experiences in our hearts in transforming ways.In Awaken Your Senses, longtime ministers Beth Booram and Brent Bill invite you to engage your right brain in your faith through sensory spiritual practices that position your heart for divine encounter. Readings and a variety of exercises that utilize your whole body lead you to experience God in new ways by - tasting chocolate, words, matzoh, Scripture, forgiveness - seeing the moon, wisdom, art, glory, your best self - touching others, stones, prayers, rubble, Jesus - hearing silence, music, pain, footsteps, the Spirit, the news - smelling gardenias, life, salty air, home, healing oil, coffeeTeaching you to pay attention in love to your surroundings, Booram and Bill will help you open your eyes and ears and nose to a sensuous faith--one in which God can be experienced each day as we live and move and have our being.So whether you're weary, stuck, struggling, growing or on information-overload, the exercises and reflections offered here can bring refreshment--a cold drink of water, a gentle breeze--to your soul. Come experience God with all of who you are, and discover more of who he is.

Leseprobe

Awaken Your Senses

Exercises for Exploring the Wonder of God

J. Brent Bill & Beth A. Booram

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 World Wide Web: www.ivpress.com E-mail: [email protected]

© 2011 by Beth A. Booram

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at www.intervarsity.org.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright ©1996, 2004. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

While all stories in this book are true, some names and identifying information in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

See additional permissions.

Cover design: Cindy Kiple

Images: music notes: © dra_schwartz/iStockphoto

thorny stem: © Jivko Kazakov/iStockphoto bitten pear: © John Clines/iStockphoto old card: © Mike Bentley/iStockphoto old paper with burnt edges: © Neil Sullivan/iStockphoto rose on paper: © Roxana Gonzalez/iStockphoto parrot on perch: Purestock/Getty Images

ISBN 978-0-8308-6960-2 (digital) ISBN 978-0-8308-3560-7 (print)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prayer for Awakening the Senses

Introduction

Part One: Taste

Art Reflection on Tasting

1: Introduction

2: Tasting Forgiveness

3: Keeping Kosher

4: Cravings

5: Spiritual Smorgasbord

6: Tasting Words

Part Two: See

Art Reflection on Seeing

1: Introduction

2: Creaturely Insight

3: Reframe and Refocus

4: Reflecting Glory

5: Going Off Grid

6: I See the Moon

Part Three: Touch

Art Reflection on Touching

1: Introduction

2: The Hopeful Community

3: A Pile of Stones

4: Touching Absence

5: Feeling Your Prayers

6: Touching Jesus

Part Four: Hear

Art Reflection on Hearing

1: Introduction

2: Soundtrack

3: Footsteps

4: All the News

5: Recurring Themes

6: Dinner Conversation

Part Five: Smell

Art Reflection on Smelling

1: Introduction

2: Smells Like . . . Worship

3: Hospitals

4: Sea Salt and Midwest Mulberries

5: Organic Sweat

6: Wake Up and Smell the Communion

Conclusion

Sensory Exercises

Resources for Awakening Your Senses

Permissions

Connecting with the Authors

Formatio

Endorsements

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Brent’s Dedication:

In memory and honor of Alan K. Garinger—writer, mentor, inventor, 

educator, conservationist, rascal and my friend 

Beth’s Dedication:

In memory and honor of Margaret Mary Theising,

October 27, 1916–December 4, 2010: a woman who lived her loves;

the salt of the earth; a simple and true one; grandmother

Acknowledgments

It is not an overstatement (or a bad pun) to say that we sensed the assistance and support of many people as we embarked on this project. From folks who attended our first workshops on this subject to others who contributed in unique ways, it is a joy to acknowledge them here.

We are grateful to InterVarsity Press for believing in this project and patiently nurturing its life. Cindy Bunch, our editor, honored our individual voices while pushing us, in her generous way, toward excellence. We wish to thank Jeff Crosby, associate publisher for sales and marketing, for his friendship and enthusiasm for this project.

Marcy Jean Stacey supplied the pencil drawings for the art meditations. Marcy is a Quaker artist who lives and makes art in southeastern Pennsylvania ([email protected]). Her finely detailed work and support of this project are deeply appreciated.

Our families have been a formative influence in teaching us how to live as sensory beings at home with them in this world.

Brent is grateful to Nancy for her support of his writing and for giving him the space and time to be creative, especially when he knows she’d rather be working in the garden or prairie than reading the same pieces over and over again. She’s also a good proofreader and wise critic.

Beth is grateful for David—an artist, poet and beautiful soulmate—who is patient and supportive as she writes away. She is thankful, as well, for her adult kids—Britt, Brandt and Laura (and grandson Eli!), Bri and Brooke—for their genuine interest and constant encouragement.

For friends who grace our lives and help us taste the richness of relationship, we are indebted. Brent wishes to thank Marcy Jean Stacey, Aaron Spiegel, Nancy Armstrong and Tim Shapiro for their friendship and support of his writing and photography. Brent is also grateful to the good people at Pendle Hill, a Quaker conference center in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, for providing him a place to write a substantial portion of this book.

Beth is grateful for Tim and Mary, Nate and Megan, Steve and Samantha—her true church and dearest companions. For a host of others who bless her life with the gift of presence and influence: Ann, Jan, Sandee, Pam, Phil and Jim. Beth also wishes to thank Dave and Jody Nixon for their hospitality during her writing retreats at the convent of Sustainable Faith.

Prayer for Awakening the Senses

That in the elements of earth, sea, and sky

I may see your beauty,

That in wild winds, birdsong and silence

I may hear your beauty,

That in the body of another and the intermingling of relationship

I may touch your beauty,

That in the moisture of the earth and its flowering and fruiting

I may smell your beauty,

That in the flowing waters of springs and streams

I may taste your beauty.

These things I look for this day, O God,

These things I look for.

—J. Phillip Newell

Introduction

Imagine awakening to the sound of the coffeemaker as it strains its final percolations and you smell the earthy aroma of its brew. You see dim light peeking from the edges of the shades at your bedroom windows. The feel of warm, soft blankets makes it hard to get out of bed. Once up, you look out the kitchen window, focusing your eyes on the early morning light, and feel greeted with hope, reminded that God is in new beginnings.

As you drive into work, you hear a siren behind you. The sound causes you to search in your rearview mirror for the lights. The alarm prompts you to pray—to pray for whoever might be hurt and for the safety of those you love. You feel your tightened grip on the steering wheel and think to relax, to concentrate on simply being and on trusting God with your life and your day.

During work, you notice things: the tone of stress in your boss’s response to a question, the sparkle in your coworker’s eyes as she describes her new romance, the firm handshake of a customer, the cool taste of water from a drinking fountain and the scent of a woman’s perfume in the elevator. Life has so much depth and texture. You are alive to yourself and the world—curious and open to God’s subtle invitations to pray, to love, to be. With each sensory prompt, you are learning to respond the way Jesus leads you.

Dinnertime and evening hours brim with sensual greetings. You prepare a meal with your family. The sounds of chopping vegetables and sizzling meat remind you that food is a gift. Everything you see, hear, touch, smell and taste turns your meal into an occasion—not only for your stomach but also for your heart. Scrubbing greasy pots, rinsing soapy dishes and feeling the scald of hot water awaken you to the unending life cycle of soiling and cleansing, mess and order. Your thoughts turn to your own jumbled soul, to Christ, to his restoring work.

As you lie down to sleep, you notice your cold feet under the blankets, the taste of toothpaste in your mouth, the smell of dinner lingering in the air, the quiet of the house and the streak of moonlight beaming through the window. You feel thoughtful, grateful and pensive. Your heart turns to God, and you express your feelings of smallness and inadequacy. “What are mere mortals that you should think about them, human beings that you should care for them?” You entrust yourself to sleep and to God who does not slumber or sleep. Another day lived, hopefully more fully alive to God and yourself, alive to the beauty and suffering in life, to all its possibilities and cries for healing.

Have you ever longed to live this way—present to life, to God, throughout an entire day? It is possible. We each desire authentic spiritual experiences with God: real, moving, transforming engagements. The trouble is that’s not how we have been taught to live our faith. Most of our teaching comes by way of sermons, books, Bible studies and other spiritual resources that instruct our thinking. Often, though, these resources miss our souls, the prime place of divine encounter. The book you are holding takes a different tack. Its purpose, simply put, is tohelp more of you experience more of God. How will we accomplish that? We’re going to introduce you to spiritual practices that engage your whole person: both sides of your brain, all five senses and your body. In this way, you’ll learn how to cultivate an experiential faith—one that trains you to be attentive to a self-disclosing God who reveals himself in each daily round of beauty.

Helping More of You

Your whole brain. Words are the primary form of communication we use to nurture our spiritual lives. They happen to be the language of the left brain. The left brain, which is the logical and concrete center of our thinking, uses words to understand and interpret experiences. However, the left brain cannot experience—God or anything else. The left brain takes meaning from our experiences; the right brain does the experiencing.

The right brain, the creative and intuitive center of our thinking, communicates through images, not words. By image, we mean anything you envision through one or more of your senses. For instance, if you walk into a room and recognize a familiar face (an image), you have just activated the right side of your brain through your sense of sight. When you smell the aroma of an apple pie and think “Grandma,” you have just utilized your right brain through your sense of smell. When you listen to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and it brings to mind the image of melting snow, you have heard the sound and processed it using the right side of your brain. Because the right brain does our experiencing, sensory spiritual practices that involve the right brain open us to a heightened perception and experience of God. Such exercises position our heart for divine encounter.

We need both sides of our brain in order to live and grow as a person of faith. In fact, neither side can do its job well without the other. Words provide content and information that are critical to faith formation, but words alone are not sufficient to create encounters with God that nurture wholeness. As Dr. Terry Wardle of Ashland Theological Seminary says, “We are over informed and under transformed.” Why? Because we rely almost exclusively on word-oriented approaches that provide information about God but rarely facilitate engagement with God. We need to awaken both sides of our brain in order to experience God.

All five senses. Since we live so much out of our thinking, we often become divorced from our souls and bodies. We lose a sense of place, of rootedness in life. Using our senses helps us live in pres­ent time. That’s important because the present is the only place we can experience God. We can’t experience God while thinking of the past or planning the future. Neither exists right now. God can only be experienced in the reality of the present moment. When we attend to life with one or more of our senses, we immediately enter real time and awaken to the possibilities of God in it.

This idea of a sensuous spirituality, of attuning your senses to the sacred, may be new for you. It was for both of us. For Brent, it came into focus when a couple of friends teased him about the books he was writing. One of them said, “Gee, you have written about Quakers and sound [Holy Silence] and Quakers and sight [Mind the Light]—what are you going to do next? Quakers and smell?”

So Brent began to investigate the idea and found this quote by the founder of Quakerism, George Fox: “Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter.”

After discovering that quote, he found he couldn’t let go of the idea of how our senses are involved in faith development. He then began looking through the Bible and found dozens of references to the physical senses in verses such as Psalm 34:8, “O taste and see that the LORD is good” (KJV); Matthew 5:8, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (KJV); and 2 Corinthians 2:15, “For we are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ” (NIV, emphasis added for all).

At the same time Brent compiled this list, he and Beth met and began conversations about linking senses to spirituality. While we recognized the pure God-given sensory experiences of seeing a dramatic waterfall or smelling the delicate scent of a newborn grandchild as the gifts they are, we both discovered that thinking about our sensory experiences as windows into the life of the Spirit led us to opportunities of experiencing God in fresh ways. We acknowledged the senses and the experiences they bring to us as inherent blessings. But we also saw their potential to help us go deeper into our lives with God. With that in mind, we began a series of thirty-day experiments with each of the senses and posted our reflections on our blogs.

The body. One of the reasons for living as sensual beings is that it helps remind us that our bodies are carriers of spiritual truth. “Do you not know that your bodies are temples . . . ?” (1 Corinthians 6:19 NIV). A temple is a good place to go and learn about the Divine. Our body-temples have all sorts of things to teach us if we would just pay attention to the lessons they present. Too often, we live mostly in our thoughts—making lists and checking them twice—and spend too little time listening to what our bodies are saying. Yet Christians throughout history have known that our bodies have much to teach us.

Some faith traditions, more than others, model how to involve the body in worship and prayer as a way to express one’s heart. And undeniably, any time we involve our bodies in kinesthetic response, we reinforce what we are feeling, thinking and doing. The actions involved in baptism, kneeling, anointing, lighting candles or coming to the altar for prayer all strengthen our internal attitudes through outward expression. But many of us have never been taught how to listen and respond spiritually to and with our bodies.

As an example of how our bodies can teach us, we invite you to try the following exercise. First, read the psalm below quietly to yourself.

You, God, are my God,

earnestly I seek you;

I thirst for you,

my whole being longs for you,

in a dry and parched land

where there is no water.

I have seen you in the sanctuary

and beheld your power and your glory.

Because your love is better than life,

my lips will glorify you.

I will praise you as long as I live,

and in your name I will lift up my hands.

I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods;

with singing lips my mouth will praise you. (Psalm 63:1-5 NIV)

Now, breathe deeply. Relax your body and mind. Let your mind float over these words. Think about them slowly and gently. Savor each thought. As you do, ask yourself, What posture might I adopt if I prayed this prayer aloud? Would I be prostrate? Upright, reaching toward heaven? Sitting in my chair with my palms upturned, ready to receive? What does this prayer call your body to do? Then, if you dare, adopt that posture and say the prayer aloud.

Experience

The point of the exercise above (and the ones that follow) is to help more of you—your whole brain, all five senses and your body—experience more of God. Since the left brain interprets our experience and the right brain does the experiencing through our senses, we have designed sensory exercises throughout this book and in the “Sensory Exercises” section at the back of the book to help position you for a divine encounter. We believe that such experiences are helpful to your spiritual formation, not as an end in themselves, but as a means to know God and live more deeply in him. Therefore, please don’t gloss over these exercises or think of them as superfluous.

The same is true of the art pieces that open each section. Each was created to illustrate one of the senses in daily life, but they are also meant to be used as an art meditation. While we tend to think of art meditations as something we experience with great pieces of fine art hanging in marvelous museums or galleries, the art included here illustrates the holy among the daily—from the pure physical enjoyment of the juice from an orange to the reminder of how anticipation and thirst reflect our desire of a soul-satisfying experience of God.

So please take time to do the exercises and art meditations. They are integral in helping more of you experience more of God.

More of God

Finally, in helping more of you experience more of God, we refer to the “wonder of God.” God is the Life within life. Listen to the sentiments of author and theologian Richard Rohr: “All of life is sacramental; everything is a means of grace.” The wonder of God encompasses the breadth of life, including episodes that surprise us and ones that confound us. Wonder is the awe we feel when we gaze up into the night sky, glimpse a hundred stars and sense the One who created them looking back at us. The wonder of God is also the mysterious ways of God that prompt us to ask, “I wonder where God is?” “I wonder why God didn’t answer me?” “I wonder what God is doing?”

Through awakening your whole self, you will experience more of God as you live closer to reality and the facets of God that are difficult, mysterious and perplexing, as well as amazing, gracious and stunning. Wonder humbles us. Picture a small child, engrossed in the marvel of a ladybug or hushed into silence at the sound of a violin. We become like children when we are roused to the permeating presence of God in the witness of creation and the sacredness of an ordinary day. And it was Jesus who said, “I tell you the truth, unless you turn from your sins and become like little children, you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 18:3).

Awakening your senses to the wonder of God is what poet Caroline C. Graveson called becoming aware of the “daily round for beauty.” She believed that God was in all beauty—natural and human-made. When things are “right”—be they serious or silly, humble or great—there is a fitness or correctness about them. They are pleasing to the eye, ear, nose, tongue, fingers and soul. Thus, a nursery rhyme can move us as deeply as a requiem by Mozart because God is in all beauty, both the simply amazing and the amazingly simple.

A Sensuous Faith

Christianity is a sensuous faith. We often forget that. And some of us even get nervous thinking about it, probably because we confuse sensuous with sexual. While sensuousness is certainly part of God’s gift of sexuality, sensuousness is so much more than sexuality. Especially when it comes to faith.

Our faith lives are filled with sensuous experiences. Some are solitary, as when we’re alone in a devotional time and feel the thin pages of the Bible between our fingers. Others are in community as we gather around the smell of incense, sing hymns and meditate upon the cross—all these experiences and more (or less, depending on our tradition).

We invite you to join us in meeting Christ with all of your being—through the senses of touch, smell, taste, hearing and seeing. We want to help more of you experience more of God so that you come to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength. This meeting will require something of you. It will require risk. You’ll be stepping out of your comfort zone, stretching yourself through new and uncomfortable spiritual exercises. Growth and progress happen no other way. It will also take time. Please don’t just read this book straight through. Practice it. Go as slow as you need, but do take time to participate in the experiences designed to help you encounter the Divine.

Paying Attention in Love: A Spiritual Exercise

We start using our senses to experience the presence of God around us when we learn to pay attention in love to our surroundings, the spots where we live. Though it is in God that “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28 NIV), it is in very specific places like our homes, offices, farms, schools and the like where we actually live and move and are being. Take a few minutes now and look around.

What do you see?

What do you smell?

What do you hear?

What do you taste?

What do you feel?

Grab a piece of paper (or a scrap of napkin, computer keyboard or journal) and write down your answers.

This is a simple step, but it is the first step in learning to pay attention. Seeing God at work and play around us, however, involves more than merely paying attention. Seeing God around us requires coupling our attention with love. When we look with love at something, we regard it. We notice the nature of it; we respect and appreciate it for what it is. We experience its “otherness” and see its intrinsic goodness and worth. For instance, the people we live and work with can become so familiar to us that we quit really seeing them. But when we stop and pay attention to them with love, we awaken to their distinctiveness—to the ways God has uniquely fashioned and formed them. We see the image of God in them. While we wish we could claim this concept as our invention, many people have written wisely and well about it before us. One of our favorites is a fellow named Belden Lane who teaches theology at Saint Louis University and has a deep interest in the sacred. Concerning paying attention in love, Lane writes:

Where can I not encounter the holy, has been the question of spiritual writers in every tradition and every age. “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” asked the psalmist (139:7). Once our attention is brought to focus on the masked extraordinariness of things, we are hard put to discern the allegedly profane.

There are miracles all around us. They seem hidden because we do not see them, cloaked as they are in the ordinary. It takes the combination of attention and love to notice them. Loving attention sees the sadness in a friend’s eyes, the flitting grace of a butter­fly, the craftsmanship of a communion table, the early morning sparkle of dew across the lawn.

When we combine attention and love, we move to a new level of noticing. Love and attention give us a deep, clear look at God every­where around us. So with the thought of paying attention in love, slow your breathing, quiet your mind and calm your heart. Now, take a fresh look around, with attention and love.

What do you see?

What do you smell?

What do you hear?

What do you taste?

What do you feel?

When you’re finished, write down your answers and compare them to what you wrote earlier. How are they similar? How are they different? How did you catch a glimpse or whiff or touch of the Divine?

By engaging your senses in ways like that above, you will awaken to the wonder of God all around you—a joyous, sensuous, spiritual awakening!

PART ONE  

Art Reflection on Tasting

As you look at the illustration, take time to relax your body and mind. Breathe deeply. Think about the following questions slowly and gently as you look at this drawing. Savor each thought and each sensory experience that comes to you.

As you study this image of the woman tasting juice from an orange slice, where are your eyes drawn?

What do you notice about her experience of tasting the orange?

Did you see the drip of juice suspended from the orange slice? What happens when you focus on it?

How do you imagine the juice tasting to her? How would you describe the taste?

What would it feel like if you were holding the orange in your fingers? What would the texture be like?

If you were eating an orange like this, what other senses would be awakened? Describe them.

How does this image inspire you? What do you want to do or taste?

The artist titled this piece Thirsting for God (Psalm 63:1). Have you ever thirsted for God in the way the woman in the drawing is thirsting for the drop from the orange?

In what ways has a taste of God quenched your spiritual thirst?

1 Introduction

by Brent

Taste and see that the LORD is good.

Psalm 34:8

Often we taste the granular body of wheat (Think of the Grain that was buried and died!) and swallow together the grape’s warm burning blood (Remember the First Fruit) knowing ourselves a part of you

From “The Partaking” by Luci Shaw

This is one of my favorite pictures of my son Ben. Here he’s drinking his first bottle of pop. At three years old, he’d had soda before, but always out of a cup. So on this steamy summer day in 1977, his mother and I seated him in a lawn chair and handed him a partially drained bottle of Pepsi. I grabbed my camera and began shooting as he thought about the best way to drink it.

What the photo lacks in composition it makes up in showing how much Ben wanted to get at that sweet nectar in the bottom third of the bottle. It also shows how he couldn’t quite figure out how to do it, having never drunk from a pop bottle before. Finally, he gave up figuring and just shoved the neck of the bottle into his little mouth and tipped the whole thing back. This picture is of him trying to puzzle it out, right before he tipped it back and got doused. His eyes are big, the bottle’s neck is stuck deep in his mouth, and an expression of wonder plays on his little round face. After the tipping, he was a sugary, sweet mess as the contents had spilled all over him. That didn’t make for nearly as fine a photo.

This picture sums up for me some of the defining aspects of taste, including unbridled thirst, anticipation, savoring and hope. When I look at that picture, Psalm 42:2 comes to mind: “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God” (NIV). Few of us think about seeking God with that kind of thirst or about taste as a way to experience God. Yet Christianity is a faith of tastes. From the informal flavors of coffee and donuts at countless church fellowship hours to the holy taste of the consecrated bread and wine at communion, our faith is formed in no small part by our tongues. “Take, eat: This is my Body, which is given for you,” is fraught with spiritual and physical invitation. Yet we often miss the physical connection in our thinking or talking about God. As Mary Gordon reminds us, “The incarnate God is a potent embodiment of what I think of as the truth about the human lot: that we are mixed, flesh, blood, spirit, mind—and that the holy is inseparable, not only from matter, but from the narrative of our lives.”

And so, even though the bread and wine possess tastes, we often move through the “tasting” (and other sensory experiences) in rote ways and thereby miss God’s teaching us through our bodies.

Tasting the Story

Perhaps we should learn from the Jews, our spiritual ancestors. When they celebrate Passover, they intentionally combine words of faith and tastes of faith. The tastes reinforce the story of faith by specifically recalling (in the same way the bread and wine recall Christ’s sacrifice) important details of faith.

The foods include

matzo, placed within the folds of a napkin to represent the haste with which the Israelites fled Egypt

maror

(bitter herbs), often horseradish, to symbolize the bitterness of slavery

charoset,

a tasty mixture of apples, nuts, wine and cinnamon that recalls the mortar the Jews used as slaves when they were forced to erect Egyptian buildings

roasted egg

(beitzah)

to symbolize life

parsley or celery

(karpas),

representing redemption and hope

the roasted shank bone

(zeroa)

of a lamb that stands for the paschal lamb sacrificed on the first Passover

Additionally, there are four glasses of wine that represent redemption, and a special glass is left for Elijah the prophet, whose presence is anticipated (much in the same way the presence of Christ is anticipated in the consecrated bread and wine).

Even though I am not Jewish, I have had the privilege of participating in Seder meals, thanks to my close friend Aaron and his family. A rabbi, Aaron has often hosted us at Passover. He also invites us to be full participants (at more than one Passover I have read the part of the foolish son—which some thought was typecasting). To this day, when I taste horseradish (which I strangely like) I remember the bitterness of the Jewish enslavement. Tasting the exodus has enhanced my understanding of the exodus.

The Sacrament of Taste

One reason that God gave us the sense of taste, besides the sheer enjoyment it gives us, is to bring us closer to the One who loves us more than we can know. Taste is a tool of faith—a sacrament, if you will. I think taste, as well as the rest of the senses, fits the definition of a sacrament as anything that serves as a visible means of divine grace. My favorite definition comes from Leland Ryken of Wheaton College: “A means of grace, as I use the phrase, is anything in our lives by which God makes his truth and beauty known to us, and correspondingly anything in our lives by which God’s presence becomes a reality to us.”

Taste is a way that God’s presence becomes a reality to us. Not just in bread and wine, but also in the coffee and donuts or meatloaf served at church functions. The divine presence infuses all the tastes around us when God’s people gather. Of course, sacramental tastes vary depending upon the rituals of our faith community. For Quakers, who don’t observe outward sacraments, it’s hard to imagine the taste of bread and wine as a way to experience God’s grace. In the same way, it may be difficult for those from a high-church tradition to consider anything less than the consecrated host as a means of grace. Sadly, no matter what our tradition, we place too many limits on the way God teaches us, including using our taste buds.

Tasting God Daily

Have you ever thought about tasting God in what you put in your mouth? The idea that food can remind us of the different attributes, ways and stories of God is a novel thought for most of us.

If I am open to letting God teach me the ways of faith through my body, though, then I can learn the ways of faith through my taste buds as well as my brain. The sweetness of a freshly baked cinnamon roll can remind me of the sweetness of God’s love in the same way that horseradish reminds me of the bitterness of slavery. Tasting is a yummy way of spiritual learning!

Recognizing that the tastes we experience daily are carriers of God’s wisdom and care for us is possible only if we open ourselves to the possibility that God is truly with us in the everyday. That is how taste teaches us, whether we’re gathered at the altar with the people of faith or sitting around our kitchen table with family or swigging on a bottle of pop.

But beware. Just like young Ben with his bottle of pop, we might find ourselves doused in spiritual sweetness and stickiness!

The Taste of Faith: A Spiritual Exercise