Great Quote on Food and Life

I finally got around to reading Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy. This quote is choice:

"Man must eat in order to live; he must take the world into his body and transform it into himself, into flesh and blood. He is indeed that which he eats, and the whole world is presented as one all-embracing banquet table for man….In the Bible the food that man eats, the world of which he must partake in order to live, is given to him by God, and it is given as communion with God. The world as man’s food is not something ‘material’ and limited to material functions, thus different from, and opposed to, the specifically ‘spiritual’ functions by which man is related to God. All that exists is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God. It is divine love made food, made life for man. God blesses everything He creates, and, in biblical language, this means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation....Man is a hungry being. But he is hungry for God. Behind all the hunger in our life is God" (11, 14).

Tonight my parents are taking the kids and Nancy and I will have the house to ourselves. I'm going to make a few recipes from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and we'll rejoice in God's good gift of food, which points to him.