Fall Hunter Moon
We had two ribeye steaks last night. After Kate and Ruth lit the shabbos candles, I said my piece about the cattle we knew from the meadow. The primary point was to say thank you to the animal who gave his or her life. The words felt clumsy and anachronistic in my mouth, but right. It was a simple moment, not long, but placing us, as brother Mark pointed out, among others from Jain to Native Americans who stop to honor their food.
It particularly felt right juxtaposed against the familiar Midwestern grace, Bless this food to the use of our bodies. The food is all about us. We can safely ignore the real animals, the real vegetables because God made them for us to eat. This is another way in which traditional Christian values deflect believers from the world around them to the world beyond or at least to a source beyond.
This was a pagan ceremony, one that directs us toward the vital and necessary web of interdependence that sustains us all. This particular cow was not a sacrifice to an abstract principle. In fact there was nothing abstract about it at all. This meat came from an animal that lived this year, ate grass that grew this year, nourished by rain that fell this year, breathed oxygen this year. And her essence did not reach the gods through an altar fire, rather it entered into the truest and most significant transubstantiation, the same transubstantiation that occurred when the grass entered her four stomachs, a transubstantiation facilitated by water falling from the mountain skies of Colorado and the true and astounding miracle of photosynthesis. 
Ultimately our meal, not only the beef, but the green beans, the baked potatoes, the pasta and pineapple, the bacon bits and sour cream, was on the table, hecatombs for humans, by the power of nuclear fusion. The sun projects light and warmth into the solar system it holds in its gravitational thrall. On this earth the also miracle of evolution, began among the deep sea vents billowing out sulfur and heat from earth’s own interior, has found a way to embrace Sol, our sacred source of life and light.
(eatsunshine) We eat sunshine. Reimagining faith then must embrace astronomy, evolution, plant biology, animal science, human culture. This embrace occurs most intimately each time we sit down to eat, no matter the culture or religious beliefs represented. We live and move and have our being thanks to the elemental forces driving our local star and the astonishing fact that our planet has shaped its own elements into hands and leaves and hearts and minds able to receive those forces into our own bodies. Quite amazing.
