Transcript

Hi.

I'm Emily Stimpson Chapman, the author of The Catholic Table, and welcome to my home.

I am so excited that you're gonna be joining me over the next six weeks to talk about all of the topics I cover in my book, from food and the Eucharist to feasting and fasting and hospitality.

There's lots of grands and glorious topics we're gonna cover.

But today, we're not gonna get into anything too grand or glorious.

Instead, we are going to talk about me.

I know.

How narcissistic can she get, right?

But I promise you, the last thing I really wanna talk about is me.

When I sat down to write The Catholic Table, the last thing I wanted to do was write about me.

In the beginning, I wanted to just write a straightforward book about the theology of food, but as I got into the writing process, I realized that I couldn't tell the story I wanted to tell about God and food without first telling the story of God and food and me, which makes sense when you stop and think about it.

You know, food is such an intimate part of our lives.

It is there from the moment we're born and the first thing we do is drink from our mother's breast to the moment we die and everyone who shows up at our funeral, goes to the mass, and then heads down to the church basement to eat whatever pizza or chicken the church ladies are cooking up.

Food is there in the morning when the first thing we wanna do, or at least the first thing I wanna do, is get a cup of coffee, to nighttime when the last temptation we have to fight off is the temptation to have an extra bowl of ice cream.

Food is everywhere.

It is always part of our story, and so it does make sense that it's gonna be part of the story of God and food.

So, what is my story with food?

Well, if you ask people who know me today, they would tell you that Emily loves food.

And it's true.

I do love food.

I love to eat food.

I love to write about food, I love to talk about food, but most of all, I love to cook food.

Don't let the red hair and the fair skin fool you.

I have the soul of an Italian grandmother.

If I love you, I wanna feed you.

If I'm worried about you, I wanna feed you.

If I am happy for you or sad for you, or really feeling any emotion at all for you, I want to feed you.

Food is my love language.

But if you had told me 20 years ago that I would be looking into a camera telling people that food was my love language, I would've thought you were crazy.

I would've thought you were even crazier if you had told me I would be saying food is one of God's love languages.

Back then, as far as I was concerned, food was in one box and God was in another.

They were entirely separate things, until one day, I realized they weren't that separate at all, and that discovery saved my life.

So that is what we're gonna talk about today and really throughout the rest of the study, not just how God saved my life with food, but how God saves the world with food, and how the more we partake of that food, the more joy and the more life and the more peace, and not unimportantly, the more cheesecake we get to enjoy.

Before we get to the cheesecake part though, I'm gonna back it up a bit.

Uh, more specifically, I'm going to back it up 24 years to when I was a 19-year-old college freshman.

For those of you doing the math in your head at home, that's 43.

Uh, as a freshman in college, I did what most freshmen do.

I ate a lot of pizza.

I also drank a lot of beer.

I drank a lot of bad beer and to this day, I can't enjoy the taste of beer.

Uh, and by the end of my freshman year, it was showing.

I had gained the infamous freshman 15.

It bothered me.

I wasn't crazy about the fact that none of my clothes fit, but I wasn't gonna do anything crazy about it, until one night, I went to a party with some of my roommates and the guy that I had a crush on for months made a remark about my weight.

The very next day, I started dieting.

Immediately, I gave up chocolate and cheese and cheeseburgers and pizza and pretty much everything else good in life, and I started subsisting on nothing other than iceberg lettuce, tuna, and Mrs. Dash.

It's not the tastiest combination .

It's nothing I would serve you if you came to my house for lunch tomorrow, but as far as diets go, it worked.

I lost the 15 pounds.

But when that was gone, I decided it wasn't enough, so I lost another 10 pounds, and then I lost another 10 pounds, and then I lost another 10 pounds, and by the time I was a senior in college, I weighed 50 pounds less than I did on the night when that guy made the remark.By that point, my collarbone was jutting out in a not so attractive way.

Uh, I used to have really thick, wavy red hair and that fell out and it never grew back.

And I couldn't even sleep on my side anymore because my pelvic bone stuck out so much that it hurt to lay that way.

Occasionally, I would cheat.

Okay, so it wasn't all iceberg lettuce all the time.

Uh, I would go to a restaurant and order a salad and with the salad they would serve a breadstick and I would eat the breadstick.

I know, wild times, right?

Uh, or I would go to a birthday party and I couldn't get out of eating a piece of cake so I would eat the tiniest little sliver, but I didn't cheat very often because cheating meant going home and beating myself up for being weak and crying for hours about how fat I was gonna get and feeling like I had to spend extra time at the gym the next day, and it just wasn't worth it.

Now, I know some of you know how this feels because you have been there, or maybe you are there now.

I also know some of you are sitting there wondering what on earth would possess any sane person to give up cheesecake.

I am with you, okay?

Cheesecake is one of God's greatest and most glorious gifts and it should not be given up under anything but the strictest of doctor's orders.

But I didn't see things that way back then.

So what did I see?

At the time, if you had asked me, I would've said I needed to lose weight.

And if you didn't agree with me on that, then you obviously were not living in reality.

But as time went on, I started to see that there were actually three things driving the eating disorder.

First, thanks to the culture we live in, I had some very confused notions about what it meant to be a woman.

Uh, with the exception of the whole self-starvation thing, I was a pretty sharp cookie with a lot of strong opinions, and I thought those opinions and that intelligence made me less of a woman.

I thought they made me less feminine.

Now, I was smart enough to know I couldn't make the intelligence go away or the opinions go away, although I did try one Lent to give up expressing my opinions for 40 days.

Yeah, that lasted like four minutes.

Uh, but since I couldn't make the intelligence go away and I couldn't make the opinions go away, I decided I would make some of me go away.

I thought that if I were small enough, if I were delicate enough and fragile enough that nobody would notice the opinions, you know?

They would just disappear behind my size two body.

So that was the first thing driving the eating disorder.

The second thing was that as the anorexia went on, it became a kind of control mechanism for me.

So you know how some people control the world by cleaning or by running?

If there's something bad happens, they're like grabbing the bleach or hitting the trails.

For me, I controlled my world by not eating.

When I was anxious, when I was scared, when I didn't understand or couldn't make sense of the world, I sort of ordered all of those feelings by not eating.

I could say no to food and feel strong and in control and powerful.

That was the second thing driving the eating disorder.

But third and really most fundamentally, not eating for me was nothing less than a slow form of suicide.

I came to that realization when I was a senior in college and one morning I stood on the scale and it read the lowest number I had ever seen.

For just a second, I was so happy.

I was doing a little happy dance in my head, but the very next second I thought, It's not low enough.

So I paused and I asked myself, Well, what is low enough?

Like what's the new goal?

And the first number that popped into my head was zero.

That was the new goal.

And in that moment, I realized what I was trying to do was erase myself out of existence.

I thought I took up too much space.

I thought I took up space, period.

You know, it didn't matter how many friends I had or how often my parents told me how proud they were of me or how many academic accomplishments I racked up.

I didn't think I was good enough.

I didn't think I could ever be good enough.

I didn't think anyone could ever love me.

And so my solution to all of that was to just make myself go away.

Here it's important to kind of pause the narrative and point out that anorexics aren't the only people who feel that way, and not eating is not the only way to deal with those feelings.

It's not even the most common way to deal with those feelings.

You know, some people try to numb the self-loathing with drugs and alcohol and sex and pornography.

Some people go from one bad relationship to another because they don't think they deserve anything better.

Other people practically work themselves to death because they think if they have enough power or enough money or enough Instagram followers, that that will somehow drown out all the voices saying that they're not good enough.

Me?

I just didn't eat.

Again, I didn't see all this from the start, but the day I stood on that scale and found myself wanting it to read zero is the day I started understanding what was really going on with me.

It's also the day I started understanding that what I was doing was wrong.

I didn't know a lot of theology back then, okay?

Nobody was gonna pay me to write a book about the Catholic Church, but I knew enough to know that God had made this body of mine and he did not appreciate me starving it to death.The only problem is I didn't know how to stop starving it to death.

I would try.

I would eat a little bit more.

I would exercise a little bit less.

But the longer I did that, the more the world would start to spin out of control, and the only way I knew to stop the spinning was to stop eating.

So I would fall back into my old habits and the cycle would continue.

So what changed?

God.

God changed me.

God saved me, and He saved me with the very thing I was so afraid of.

He saved me with food.

He gave me that food when I was 25 and I came back to the Catholic Church.

Uh, I'd left it about five years earlier, not too long after the eating disorder had started.

Uh, although, I didn't know what I was leaving back then.

Okay?

I was catechized in the 1980s, which means I wasn't catechized, and I met a really cute Protestant boy who put some questions to me about Jesus and the church and I didn't know how to answer those questions.

And if I am being completely honest, I didn't wanna know how to answer those questions.

I was way more interested in pleasing the boy than I was in finding out the truth.

But, thanks be to God, things did not work out with that guy and five years later, I found myself in Washington, DC, where a very smart Catholic coworker put some questions to me about Jesus and the church and authority, and this time I did want to find out the answers.

So over the course of several months, I thought and I prayed and I pretty much read my way back into the Catholic Church.

Uh, I'm a writer , so it should be a surprise to exactly no one that reading is a big deal with me.

It's actually one of the reasons my husband and I bought our current house.

Uh, you know how some people on HGTV buy bigger houses because they have shoe problems or tool problems?

Yeah, we have a book problem.

So, at least in that respect, Emily at 25 and Emily at 43 are not that different.

Uh, I read like a crazy woman my first few months back in the church.

I read Frank Sheed and Peter Kreeft and Carl Adam and so much G.K.

Chesterton.

I read Dietrich von Hildebrand and Tom Howard and Scott Hahn and Saint John Paul II, and you get the idea.

I read a lot.

Well, as I was reading, I was thinking about the big issues, right?

So I'm thinking about the Trinity and papal infallibility and the Immaculate Conception.

I wasn't thinking about food.

I was still struggling with food and my body, but I didn't think the church had anything to say to me about those things other than Jesus loves you and he doesn't want you starving yourself to death.

But I already knew that and it wasn't helping.

So, I went on struggling and I went on reading until one day at daily mass, I was on my way back from holy communion, and a thought flashed through my mind that would change everything.

And that thought was this: The most intimate communion I have with God is that I eat him.

The most intimate communion I have with God is that I eat him.

Like, that was it.

You know?

I eat God.

In the Eucharist, Jesus Christ, the God of the universe, takes on the appearance of bread and wine and feeds me with his very self.

Before I went up to communion that day, if you had asked me what the Eucharist was, I would have said it's the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

I knew what transubstantiation meant.

I believed in the real presence, but I believed it with my head.

You know?

I understood it as a doctrine or as a teaching.

I didn't see the radical love.

I didn't see the radical generosity.

I didn't see the radical intimacy that was the Eucharist until suddenly I did.

In that moment, all of the reading I had been doing, all of the praying, all of the going to mass, all of the sitting in front of the blessed sacrament, it all came together in a single sentence.

The most intimate communion I have with God is that I eat him.

And just like that, I knew I couldn't starve myself anymore.

I knew I couldn't binge or purge or count calories and fat grams.

I knew I couldn't not eat cheesecake.

Like, instead, I realized I needed to treat all food, from first to last, as exactly what God meant it to be.

As a sign of his love and as a foretaste of the Eucharist.

That's really what food is.

Like, broccoli and Brussels sprouts and buttery bread and chocolate chip cookies, ice cold lemonade and red, red wine, all of it is a sign of how very much God loves us, and of all that he wants to do for us in the Eucharist.

How did I get to that conclusion?

That's what we're gonna talk about in the next episode.