An Unholy Eating Experience

A big blow to the Christian population, the author Thomas Foster, explains how the word communion has more than just it's holy meaning found in the Bible. Communion’s true basic definition means sharing a meal with a set of people whether it be two or a hundred people as a form of meaningful bounding. He goes on to mention one incident to support his theory from the novel, Tom Jones where a couple shares a meal that I would definitely categorize as far from holy.

Myself raised as a methodist Christian found this non-religious definition quite shocking. I always pictured communion as a cup of grape juice and a bite of bread given to you by an old man in a robe while you kneel at the front pew. The thought never crossed my mind that I take part in communion three times a day almost everyday, (breakfast/lunch/dinner) so when Foster said that a meal was more than just a meal I was skeptical. How could a simple silent dinner of grilled cheese and tomato soup at home on my couch with my mom really mean anything, much less be considered a communion?

After a reread or two, the theory started to make sense. The simplest gestures or lack there of at a meal could give any outside person, in literature’s case being the reader, a huge insight to the relationships between those sharing the communion meal. This leads me to believe that Foster’s point for sharing the importance of communion in literature was to prove how mundane activities in literature can provide massive character development to it's selected characters.

This shed some light on the subject of teen or young adult novels for me especially. I frequently questioned society on how books like Twilight by Stephanie Meyer, contained such common main characters, yet still built up their supposedly normal characters to create an interesting enough plot for people to want to read. With such mundane seeming lives, how did readers really get to know the characters? According to this author’s theory about communion, reading about a character sharing a meal can give the readers a look into the character’s personality and the feelings towards others.

Our job as the reader is to infer about the events, people, places, and things in a story, thats what makes reading such an engaging activity. We then form our own opinions about these things from what we've learned throughout the book as well as from what we've experienced in our own lives. Tying this back into eating a meal is the always present need to feel connected to what we read and thus why authors place events like communion in their stories. Mundane things like sharing a meal allow us to say, “Hey I do that too!” Because lets face it, every human wants to feel a connection…Its in our nature.