Quotes from Norman Wirzba

Food is a gift of God given to all creatures for the purposes of life's nurture, sharing, and celebration. When it is done in the name of God, eating is the earthly realization of God's eternal communion-building love.

We don't know if soil is an organism or a matrix or what-the-heck-is-this-thing, and yet when we put seed into it, it can support life.

Thanksgiving is the power that transforms desire and satisfaction, love and possession, into life, that fulfills everything in the world, given to us by God, into knowledge of God and communion with him.2

According to Scripture, the world we live in is God's creation. It is the visual, fragrant, audible, touchable, and tastable manifestation of God's love, the place where God's desire that others be and be well finds earthly expression.

Whenever we make an idol of anything, we presuppose that it has the power to give life. We confuse something given by God as a means of life with its being the source and fulfillment of life. False worship is so dangerous because it witnesses to human attention and energy being directed in ways that are bound to lead to mutual harm.

Idols evoke worship in us because we think they can save us from life's contingencies, mysteries, and finitude. Put another way, we make idols of all sorts of things—the stock market, a job, superstar athletes and performers, our families—because we think that by giving our allegiance to them we will make our lives secure and complete.

Fasting, in its most fundamental aspiration, is about developing a sacrificial, self-offering life that addresses and nurtures the needs of others.

When we become a Sabbath people, we give one of the most compelling witnesses to the world that we worship a God who desires our collective joy and good. We give concrete expression to an authentic faith that is working to deflate the anxious and destructive pride that supposes we have to 'do it all' by ourselves and through our own effort.

The inability to understand the spiritual roots of gluttony (as the inability to sacrifice) or to appreciate a culture's role in fostering this anxious condition, makes it all the more difficult for individuals to find the help and direction they need.

The fundamental task of Christians is to align their living with the divine love that is always already operative in the world.

We were created as celebrants of the sacrament of life, of its transformation into life in God, communion with God … [R]eal life is "eucharist," a movement of love and adoration toward God, the movement in which alone the meaning and value of all that exists can be revealed and fulfilled … [I]n Christ, the new Adam, the perfect man, this eucharistic life was restored to man. For He Himself was the perfect Eucharist.

The evidence of the early church suggests that the community of followers ate together regularly and often, and that in their eating they tried to bear witness to Christ's way of dwelling on earth.

To "remember Jesus" in their eating was not simply to recall a past event. It was to call on Jesus and invite him to transform what they were doing together.18 Jesus' presence at the meal could thus be an "effective" presence that challenged and corrected their eating practices.

The logic of idolatry is ultimately self-and world-defeating, because the idolatrous impulse is born out of a deep distrust in God's love and care and a denial of the sacred character of the world. People embark on an idolatrous path when they believe that God's gifts are not sufficient or God's care is misdirected.

The world does not exist for our exclusive satisfaction. It consists of billions of creatures all trying to make their way through life, and God loves them all, even the creatures that can harm us (for more on this point, see Job 38–41).

To be sick is to be diseased, ill at ease, unable to be with others in a harmonious way. It is, eventually, to find oneself fragmented and alone. To be healthy, on the other hand, is to be able to move freely, sympathetically, and shamelessly among others.

Sabbath rest is not about stopping, but about exchanging our restlessness for delight.

Scripture does not end with disembodied souls escaping creation and ascending to some faraway place. It ends with God descending to creation to take up residence with mortals.

The meaning of life is found in the receiving, nurturing, and sharing of God's gift of love. Why? Because life is God's love made visible, fragrant, audible, touchable, and nutritious. Life is not a pointless struggle or a random accident. It is God's creation. As such, it is the material manifestation of the divine love that delights in the flourishing of others.

If the experience of delight presupposes a sustained, patient, sympathetic, and affectionate embrace of the world, then the decline of delight will be preceded by the erosion of the practical conditions that make such an embrace possible. What trends and practices in culture work to undermine a loving regard for creatures and things, and how have these trends and practices contributed to a situation in which relatively few people bow their heads before raising their forks?

To meet and know God people must therefore begin with a deep commitment to serve life as they meet it because this is where God is, at the heart of all life's intersections.

work is ultimately to be about a finer attunement to the world as the place of God's sustaining presence. With an awareness of God and with an appreciation for God's intention that creatures be whole and at peace, people's use of the world can be transformed so that the gifts of life are better cherished, nurtured, and shared.

Miracles are God making right something within the world that has gone wrong. That means miracles are not an interruption in the life of creatures, but rather those creatures' liberation to move into the life that God desires for them.