junkmail for blankets

* they say in older times, sharing a meal with someone was a way of showing commitment. i do like the potluck though - it's sort of like this modern-day bread-and-fish sort of experience. "will we have enough food?" and somehow there always will. i guess sometimes we think we need to provide enough for ourselves and others but perhaps we need to be able to provide enough for ourselves, share that, and wait eagerly for others to experience the joy in providing for us. not sure if that makes sense. it is amazing how so many spoonfuls of various dishes can make an entire meal.

I have weird feelings about potlucks, regardless if its work or church. For some "unbeknown" reason the thought of not seeing who's hands have touched the food in preparation bothers me. Did she pick her nose, did he wash his hands, ickkkkk....

But I love community and the thoughts of how food and the breaking of the bread brings folks together. Simply amazing. There is truly a biblical time/ space connection to the past.

Maybe one day I'll get over my fear but for now I'll just enjoy the fellowship!!!

My church in college had a dessert potluck for the dedication service we had for our new building. I worked the tables and literally, we covered five big tables with cobbler and cookies and cake and pie (and one guy brought cocktail weiners). Really good stuff, too--a lot of it homemade, a lot bought at HEB minutes before, but when you're staring down an M&M cookie, you don't really care where it came from. :)

I remember standing in the back, smelling all this sugar and chocolate, eating a plateful of rhubarb crumble, hearing about the history of the church, and looking out at all these people that I'd come to know and love, and thinking, This is home. I don't know what it is about food that makes a person feel like he or she is settled in a place. That church, for whatever reason, is the first place that felt like home to me in a really long time. I guess any place where little kids can get hopped up on sugar and sing about Jesus is okay.

And Zack, I promise, I washed my hands. :)

they stress me out. i want to be the good guy and let others go first, but i am sure that by the time i get there all that will be left is the kfc chicken crumbs and tuna fish casserole. i hate that. so then i try to use the "i am getting stuff for my kids" line and go to the front... and hopefully sneak a little extra for myself. i think potlucks reveal our depravity.

I remember when Grace would have chili potlucks in February, and the Great College Comeback in September, so I'd always invite friends (or non-Presbyterian boys that I liked) to church that day. And there were always people who still didn't stay and eat, and I never understood it.

I've also discovered that the food in Starkville is generally better than elsewhere, even though I'm not sure why. I can still remember in particular these apricot cookie things that I've never had anywhere else.

Most of my memories are about not having room enough on my plate for all the food I want to eat and worrying about with whom to sit. And the inevitable Sunday afternoon nap.

The best potlucks I've ever been to are ones that were outside. Growing up, all the potlucks I went to were outside of small rural churches, and I would spend hours playing with cousins and other kids in and around the gravestones as they provided the best hiding places while my parents set up lawn chairs and talked away.

Having four small kids now, potlucks are pretty much a hassle, especially when the food part is over and especially if it's indoors. Give me a potluck in/near a cemetery, though, and I'm there, as there's something about humanity, nature, and food that just go together.

My question is, how many times can you/have you gotten away with eating at a church potluck without bringing anything?

two things:

1. Like most, our church back in Billings had printed a cookbook. Rylie showed me the recipes: "Pepsi chicken," many recipes cobbled together from various canned and processed ingredients, and the like. I was grossed out, surprised I didn't see a Chee-tos casserole. The first potluck I attended there was a delight. Echoing Zack, I didn't eat anything because I wondered how many of the seemingly innocuous dishes had grown out of some mad-scientist moment in a kitchen, but I had a wonderful time because of the fellowship.

2. Anytime we go to a potluck, Rylie and I do our best to make a dish together. Often, that's the best part of the party.

I am used to glorious potlucks, where the food is delicious, plentiful, and almost always made by hand. Where the older women crowd around the sink afterwards to wash everyone's dishes before they get sticky, perhaps a showy service, but ever appreciated.

In our urban, young, painfully hip church we had a potluck recently where the spread was woefully inadequate: far too few items, far too little brought. An emergency trip to the grocery during service allowed none to leave hungry, but few were full.

It struck me that potlucks are a practicality that need instruction. Both the "whys?" of fellowship and the "whats?" and "hows?" of quantity and quality. I pray that we can do better. That in our youthfulness, we will not neglect the joys of what seems stodgy and old-fashioned. As long as we don't take to calling them "Pot Providence" meals.

Heh, Kristen, we call ours pot providences, because we're cool like that. ;)

I think you're right, Kristen, it's a thing that needs to be taught in order to be done well. Maybe we ought to be catechized in stuff like this...

Q. What is your only hope of sending all these people home full?
A. Get everyone to bring something and bring two things yourself.

Q. Why must we do this?
A. Because the world is fallen and people will be lazy slackers and mooch/not have time because of family or social obligations/forget/think it's next week. Everyone is invited, and everyone must provide.

Q. What else must we not do?
A. Use mayonnaise if the potluck is outside in July, pick our noses, fail to wash our hands, or hope someone else brings the salad.

But that's what our more experienced folks are for.

We have Lenten Soup Suppers to which everyone brings Chicken Noodle, Vegetable Beef or Chilli. Each individual pot is dumped into a big vat of the same-style soup. One one hand, that's disgusting and why did I work so hard on my homemade soup when it got lumped with some slacker's can of Campbells?! On the other hand, I can not gloat to see my soup eaten up first or wait to be told how delicious it was and say "why, I'd give you the recipe if I had one, but I just sort of threw it together!" I have come to love the community vat-o-soup.

I just picked up by have not yet read Robert Farrar Capon's "On Food: The Supper of the Lamb" - the back says "Should a true man want to lose weight, let him fast. Let him sit down to nothing but coffee and conversation, if religion or reason bid him do so; only let him not try to eat his cake without having it. Any cake he could do that with would be a pretty spooky proposition - a little golden calf with dietetic icing, and no taste at all worth having. Let us fast, then -whenever we see fit, and as strenuously as we should. But having gotten that exercise out of the way, let us eat."

My friend RWK at the blog "Today at the Mission" wrote this one day and I have it marked so I can come back to it again and again:

"Every one of us hungers for food, companionship and God. A shared meal is the only place in which those three needs can be met simultaneously."

our church had a quasi-potluck of desserts saturday evening, at which i found myself standing next to a friend. she was picking at fruit that had carefully been speared with toothpicks: one grape and one blueberry on each toothpick. i was eating ginger molasses cookies. we looked at each other and started laughing. she brought the fruit and i brought the cookies. we came to share and still ate our own food....says something, i think.

We have several Episcopalian families in our neighborhood. they sometimes come with us on wednesday nights to the presbyterian church exclusively for the food. we sometimes go to the cookouts at their church on Sunday afternoons for the wine (they have a bottomless bottle).

I've been reading your blog for a while (I've been hooked ever since I read your review of Blankets in Critique) but this is my first comment. I was a part of an international church in Torino, Italy last year; it is a small congregation of about 80, with around 15 countries represented. One of my favorite parts was the potluck dinner. I would line up at the long tables and have no idea what half of the food was! Over dinner we would discuss the various foods on our plates and in doing so, get to learn a little bit of the cultural background of our fellow brothers and sisters. It was such a beautiful picture of the body of Christ, one that I'll savor for a long time.

Hi. I've just posted about your blook at my blog, Blooking Central. As near as I can tell, you left it untitled and I never found the photo that you promised. I'd love to hear more details about the project if you would write me. Thanks.

Jeremy--tried to email you--not sure if your old email address is still current. The anthology is on. My last book took longer than i expected to finish--but it's off to press now. I'm hoping to get the proposal done in a month or so (no other projects going--this is it!) Are you still up for this essay on the church potluck?? If so, could you send me a synopsis, and a 200 word bio to include in the contributor's notes? thanks--anxious to hear from you! Leslie

Leslie,

I'm at junkmailforblankets@gmail.com.

Let's talk!