Today my house is very busy as we are making some sauce, sausage and meatballs. It's a unique smell that fills the air and a unique joy that fills your heart and stomach when a family cooks together. Cooking is a process that is part science, part art, and a large part genealogy.
Recipes are passed down through the generations and only those who are blood relatives or marry into the family get to share in the secrets that make children smile and grown men cry, "Molto bene!".
The uniting factor of food is something God intimately uses in creating His family with His Bride the Church. From the earliest days, Christ shared meals with His disciples. He met some of them for the first time at the seashore where they were fishing. He brought all of them to celebrate at a wedding feast at Cana before He started His ministry. He fed 5000 and more with a few loaves and fishes.
Most important to the unity of the family is a family dinner. We all lead hectic lives, ranging between relationships and states, both mental, spiritual and, in my case, geographical. The family dinner is when everyone sits at one table and shares one meal. And in that sharing of the meal they share everything: their troubles, joys, laughs, griefs. Food is a flash point of our familial existence inside and outside of the frying pan of temperaments family's can be.
Jesus unites us in one universal meal at the mass. He offers Himself up as the meal that satisfies, the true food and true drink of our humanity. We are united in Him not only as our priest, our King, our God, but our very sustenance. He is the very food that gives us life, and life eternal. It is in the Eucharist that the Catholic Church is truly united as a family around one table which also serves as an altar of sacrifice.
God's love within the Blessed Trinity is familial and it's appropriate and beautiful that He chose a family meal as the sacrificial remembrance of Jesus' Passion. As I sit and enjoy this time with my family, I am grateful to God I have them in my life, that we have this time together before I get married, and that I will have the opportunity to someday soon have my own family. Blessed be God forever in His Trinity and may He bless all your families this day!
God love you!
~OneCatholicGuy
PS: The meatballs are really good!
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