Photo by **Angela Roma** from **Pexels**

We greet one another with a “How are you?” or “How’s it going?” but in China the common expression was “Have you eaten?” (吃饭了吗？)

I initially thought that was a unusual way to say hello to someone. But in the historical context of a country and a people that have experienced hard times and large famines, the greeting and question behind it make a lot of sense. Food seemed to often be at the forefront of people’s minds, and eating was a form of deep expression. Coming from my background, seemingly ordinary days would feel like a culinary celebration. People in China loved to talk about food and cooking, and there is a rich culture built around eating a meal together.

Yet to American ears the question is jarring - “Have you eaten?”

OF COURSE, WE’VE EATEN, we’re quite literally eating ourselves to death! Look at the shelves: the first week of COVID in Michigan nary a bag of Doritos was to be found in stock. Because the world may be imploding, but if we’re going down, we’re going down eating!

One year, during the Lunar New Year festival (the largest holiday in China), my wife and I spent a few days in the home of a local friend. The night of Lunar New Year (除夕) the host family had prepared an immaculate holiday feast. It was a rare dining experience that would have delighted even the most experienced of palates.

Near the end of the meal, when the dishes had been cleared, our friend's father told us a story of how when he was a young child his family had to eat tree bark to survive during a famine. This was in the late 1950s when China experienced one the largest famines in modern times. Listening to our friend's dad tell how he boiled and ate tree bark, after we had just finished such an enormous dinner, put a whole new light on the question "Have you eaten?"

***

We are often out of touch with our stomachs.

Thanks to modern psychology's penetration into popular culture, we are very in tune with emotions and feelings. But in prosperity and material excess, we have lost contact with some deeper part of ourselves - the guts.

This infatuation with feelings comes out at church. Most worship songs either sound like an R&B love song with your girlfriend’s name swapped out for Jesus, or a mad-lib about deadly natural disasters: “fire” “burning” “flood” “falling” “rain down, rain down” “yeah! yeah! yeah!”

These are songs of the heart, but not songs of the stomach. Perhaps the closest we come to stomach music is the line “burn in our hearts Holy Spirit” – those who’ve eaten spicy cheddar kielbasa at the ballpark will be familiar with this sort of burning.

Other than that, mainstream church operates safely at the upper levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (pictured above). We already have all we could ever want: total control and safety, a stocked pantry, alarms on the doors.

Life is predictable, the only unaccounted for factor being death itself. Though we may delay its approach, we cannot totally deny death its prey. Therefore, our religion spends the majority of its time extinguishing that one last fire in the forest. We treat the Christian experience like a spiritual retirement fund: steadily make deposits now, for a heavenly paradise that awaits after retirement from this life.

This religion is something highly cognitive, a set of professed beliefs that supposedly lead to a certain cosmic outcome. We experience faith in our brains but rarely in our stomachs.

***

Jesus’ three-year career as Rabbi was wrapped up in food and drink. His first day on the job he turned water to wine at a wedding, his last day on the job he ate a lengthy holiday meal with his friends. He was always eating and drinking, so much so that the uptight religious types said he was a drunkard and a glutton. Though he preached in the synagogues from time to time, much of his theology did not come from the pulpit, but during intimate conversations with companions over a meal. He came to feed a soul starved people – in their bellies, in their relationships, and in their spirits. Rather that getting into our feelings and emotions, he seems to ask us an even deeper question:

Have you eaten?

The question is an invitation, to sit down, slow down, be present, and partake in a restful, life giving meal. Our interactions with God and each other are often less like a long multi-course meal and more like the Wendy’s drive thru. They are expedient, consumeristic, and time-efficient. Yet we are left feeling empty and hungry, lonely and exhausted.

In the midst of material abundance we are on the brink of spiritual, emotional, and relational starvation. The holidays are a season of famine: increased drug and alcohol abuse, loneliness, suicide and depression. And instead of reaching for something nutritious, we’re often caught up in more consumption – food, alcohol, media, sports, presents.

Does your soul feel dryer than an overcooked turkey? Perhaps in our context it does make a lot of sense to ask ourselves and each other “Have you eaten?”

Have You Eaten?