Attending to Goodness: Wine, Hospitality, and an Invitation to Delight

Wine can teach us how to savor, how to notice what we enjoy, and how to find delight in the small gifts of this life.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

This past Sunday we hosted a handful of new friends from our church in New York City, who made the trek across the bridge and through the wilds of New Jersey to get to our house for a Sunday afternoon walk, porch sit, dinner, and some group lectio divina. It’s been two years since we moved into our house, and though we’ve done our best to start connections and new relationships, this was the first time we’ve had a full table of people, some who knew each other well, some who were just introducing themselves to one another on our porch. It felt like Chris and I were home. 

There’s a little dance my husband and I do when people come over, something that happened often at our house in San Francisco. Chris at the stove, clanging pans or chopping, creating something generally delicious. Me opening doors and chatting and putting together snacks. And then there’s the drinks. Chris is grabbing the bottles of wine he planned for this moment. The lighter wine to pour in glasses for sipping or appetizers. The heavier wine for the main course. I pull the wine glasses out. He fills them. The wine moves into hands and around the room. There’s nothing more beautiful than the way wine, both red and white shines in a glass. And the sound of people talking while the light shimmers in their hands.

When I met Chris as a 23 year old, he came from a different world of faith than my own. We had vibrant and interesting conversations about Jesus, I admired his thoughtful way of living his faith in the world. But I was flabbergasted over his comfort with alcohol. For his 21st birthday, his dad had popped open a bottle of port he’d saved since Chris’s birth year. They drank it together. Chris had started a wine club in college where they sipped and ate cheese! (Yes, in college, you guys. If you know Chris you’re saying, of course he did.) So the way Chris talked about wine was especially different than I’d ever heard anyone talk. He was deliberate, and curious. He loved the history and the story of wine. And he came to wine and other drink in a way that felt genuinely joyful. I had grown up terrified of the dangers of alcohol, and rightfully so. There are many reasons to approach it with caution. And as people who follow Jesus, our faith needs to come into play when we consider why and how to pick up a glass. But I didn’t see Chris abusing alcohol or drinking to escape. He loved the complexity and story of it. And I was a girl who loved complexity and story. In some ways his approach to alcohol felt more Christian than my fear and avoidance ever did. 

It’s so easy to get caught up in the pain of this world, and it’s not healthy to avoid those things. But Jesus lived in a world that was just as chaotic, just as broken as our own. And somehow he practiced a balance: holding the pain in one hand and experiencing delight in the other. I believe his life and teaching invites us to celebration, simply because Jesus showed us how to do it. Wine around a table with others can be one form of human response to the goodness of God. 

In Blood From a Stone, his new memoir about leaving ministry and rediscovering his faith in the vineyards of the Santa Ynez Valley of California, Adam McHugh describes his experience as an end-of-life chaplain, and how the more he sat among the suffering the more he lost his ability to delight in the world. “There was something in my belief system that was convinced that if I wasn’t suffering, I wasn’t doing something meaningful. . . Now that I had opened enough to let in the pain of others, I felt I had lost the right to celebrate.” 

Often as we grow into adulthood we learn to shut down our desire for real celebration. We replace it with our long daily lists of tasks we have to accomplish, and maybe even some self-righteous pride in our busyness. No wonder alcohol is misused. We’ve forgotten how to celebrate, how to be together. We’ve replaced celebration with escape. And those are two very different things. The world is filled with grief and monotony. But that same monotony allows the sun to rise each morning, and the full moon to shine in the inky sky every month. Every hard thing has an equally beautiful gift attached to it. One of the joys of learning to be human, is learning to delight in the gift of creation, this magical world that the Divine has set before us. Dangerous? Yes. But beautiful? Always. 

Adam, in his process of healing from the relentless suffering around him, found a way through wine to rediscover the practice of gratitude. “What I was coming around to is that to celebrate life’s pleasures and occasions has always been not only an act of gratitude but of defiance . . . Future loss and uncertainty makes today’s dishes that much richer, tonight’s wine all the more decadent. We can get as cerebral and sophisticated about wine as we choose, but on some level wine will always be an antidote to grief and a defense against worry.”

I love this idea. That at its best, when we value the story of the drink in our cup, the grapes that grew on the rocky hillside in France, the deliberate care taken to harvest those grapes, the creative miracle of fermentation that no human hands can accomplish on their own, the years the drink sat resting in the dark. All of those things are part of a story. There is no way to compare the human-controlled making of a soda in a laboratory with the years and care and climate and generations-old vines that formed your glass of wine. And when we drink it with care and awareness, and even joy, we are in the present moment, we are learning to be grateful and honor one another and this earth we are allowed to live inside. 

“I have always appreciated that Jesus not only restocked the bar, but he brought the best wine to the party, just like I do when invited to a party,” Adam writes. “I think of how the elements of the Eucharist invite human artistry and labor. We don’t offer flour and grapes at the altar. We offer bread and wine. Wine is a gift of God but requires human participation and creativity, a most delightful collaboration between heaven and earth.”

It’s in that collaboration — human artistry and labor, plus the miracle of time and natural fermentation — that healthy delight can emerge. Wine is a slow drink. You can’t rush the making of it. And, to enjoy it, you can’t rush its drinking.  “So many ordinary people through the ages have peered through a glass of wine and seen the face of God. Here is a theology you can taste, a grace you can drink, a love that warms you from the inside.” 

My husband Chris eventually became a “certified wine specialist.” This is simply a stop on the certification train for people who work with wine professionally. He did it for fun, which means he’s not really a professional, just a guy who geeks out on learning, and who has hosted various wine clubs over the years. I asked him why he loves wine, and what gift it’s offered to his life in God. He loves thinking about questions like this. 

“Here’s the thing I think about,” he said. “Wine serves no purpose from a nutritional perspective. But when we choose to engage it on the deepest level it’s an act of meaning making. . .  it’s saying that the people who took care to make it, the specific land, and the climate and the weather at that moment — you’re claiming that the thing they did at that moment is special and worthy of attention. And you’re saying that their labor is worth remembering.” 

Adam McHugh says it this way: “...the work of wine is equally the work of God. From age to age, wine has been one of the grandest expressions of God’s love for us.” 

I don’t think Adam is saying someone needs to enjoy wine to experience God’s love. But he is making the case that it’s a way toward experiencing that love. Not because alcohol is something that everyone should partake in. But wine can teach us how to savor, how to notice what we enjoy, and how to find delight in the small gifts of this life. It can help us learn to practice gratitude together. 

I felt that as we sat around the table with our hodgepodge of new friends, our kids, and a feast Chris had worked to create for us. The center of meaningful and loving community is gratitude. Wine is certainly not the only way to find that center. But it is a way. 

It is a way of attending to the goodness of the moment. As my husband said, “If you are willing to look lovingly at anything it elevates the people and communities who made it.” This isn’t really an invitation to wine, in other words. It’s an invitation to gaze lovingly at the world. 

I’ll be thinking about this as we move into the holidays, and I hope you will too. What does it mean to gather with people you love and attend to them? What does it mean to move toward the complicated and sometimes difficult relationships in your life and find gratitude around the table?

What I love about Adam McHugh’s book (which, by the way, there is much to love – his writing sparkles and his humor is a delight), is his invitation to move from the slog of suffering and into the gift of delighting in a beautiful world. “I am both contented and keenly aware that I have lost a lot,” he writes, considering the journey that brought him from ministry into the business of wine. “I don’t stand up in front of others as a Holy Man anymore, but my faith has survived through it all, though it is quieter now and humbled, like pruned winter vines. I am grateful I had so many opportunities to help others grieve because it has helped me grieve too. Wine has also been a comfort, since it makes both laughter and tears flow more freely, and I have needed both.”

What I’m trying to say is this: What if we all began to move to our tables, our families, our communities with a vision for attending to the stories. Not only the stories of our food or drink, but the stories of the people in front of us? What if your Thanksgiving gathering – whether or not Uncle Bill says something hateful, or Aunt Betsy criticizes your attempt at pumpkin pie — what if you gathered at the table with a generosity toward the stories that brought every single soul to that space? The food has a story. The wine has a story. And so does Aunt Betsy. The gift of the slow way is taking time to attend to the delight underneath the hard surface. And maybe, in that process, to savor. 

A Slow Practice

“Good wine,” Adam McHugh writes, “is a reminder that life is full of abundance, not the imagined scarcity that we all try to survive on. It is a way to use our earthiest, most tactile senses to connect with something otherworldly.” 

How do we practice living from a place of abundance, rejecting scarcity and embracing delight? I don’t think you have to pour a drink to practice this idea. Attending to the slow good thing in front of you is a spiritual practice you can always tap into, wineglass in hand or not. 

There’s a practice I’ve mentioned before around here that I want us to consider again today. Several years ago I heard Steve Wiens, on his podcast This Good Word, explain the spiritual practice of using our food or drink to remind us of the nearness of God. He invited his listeners to allow their first sip of coffee (or tea!) in the morning to be an invitation to connect with our Creator, the One who allows good things to grow in the earth, the One who invites us to collaborate with nature in making the world more beautiful. I have loved building and nurturing this small spiritual practice in my life, especially as a girl who loves her coffee. That first sip in the morning is my reminder that God is close and that I can choose who and why I will be today. 

So let’s try. 

For the next week, as you wake in the morning, whatever your first ritual is — whether that’s the first sip of tea or coffee, or the spreading of your yoga mat, or the lacing of your sneakers as you move to take the dog on a walk in the early light of the morning, allow yourself one physically embodied reminder that you are loved, and that God is near. 

As you raise your coffee to your mouth. Or stretch your body in downward dog, or walk the trail outside of your town, you can pray this simple prayer: “Remind me, oh God, that life is full of abundance. Teach me to see you in the goodness around me. Help me reject the lie of scarcity and embrace delight.” 

Take some time to write this prayer down. Put it beside your coffee station, next to the dog’s leash, or on a sticky note beside your wine glasses. Maybe we all discover that, no matter our suffering, abundance is still here, available. And it’s inviting us to attend to the goodness around us.