August 7 2000

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Phyllis Tickle, a contributing editor at Publishers Weekly, has been a busy woman lately. She is publishing a three-volume breviary, called The Divine Hours, with Doubleday, and is writing a memoir called Prayer Is a Place. Morehouse is releasing The Bread of Life: A Cookbook for Body and Soul, to which Tickle contributed. CT's Lauren F. Winner wanted to know what food and prayer have to do with each other, and caught up with Tickle to ask.

There has been a spate of Zen cookbooks—even Wiccan cookbooks—in recent years, but few Christian ones. How did The Bread of Life come about?

In the late 1980s, I was working for the Wimmer Companies, one of the country's larger cookbook publishers. At this company, there was an overt statement of spiritual intent, a recognition that at the table, body and soul come close to each other. The second-in-command at Wimmer was a woman named Ellen Ross, an Anglican, who never for a minute lost that connection. When I left Wimmer in 1990, Ellen said, "I want to do one book that puts body and soul together in secular space, or in space that is made holy by the union of body and soul." She wanted to do a cookbook, and asked me to write the introduction.

Christians have been writing a lot of books lately about imbuing ordinary, daily acts with spiritual meaning.

That trend bothers me and reassures me. I have an ambivalent relationship with it—as do, I think, many Christians. We are still an Enlightenment people. We have an emphasis on the mind; we live in our heads. Well, the problem with that is it keeps us from saying that we live as well in the spirit and the body. The whole notion of spiritual geography that's like physical geography got lost in the shuffle.

In the last 30 years, we have learned a ...