Food for Life
Food and Faith/Spirituality
Being a Christian is a whole of life thing. It's not something you do on Sundays at worship and then only when you go to Bible study. And being a Christian affects not just your spiritual life, but also your physical life. 1 Corinthians 6: 19 tells us that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. We therefore have as much responsibility to look after our bodies as we do to look after our Spirits. Most of us don't do either of these things as well as we might like.
This part of the chaplaincy website is devoted to things that might help to improve our physical and spiritual nurture. It grows as I have time to put more material on it.
Physical Food
This bit is first because it's a subject that really interests me. As you will see if you visit my personal home page, I have training and experience in human nutrition and dietetics, which I've tried to carry over into my ministry in various ways.
One of the most challenging things for many students who have moved out of home for the first time is working out what to eat and how to cook it. If you're living in one of the colleges, food is provided for you, but working out what to choose might still be difficult. If you're living in one of the Wright Flats or a house in town, you might have suddenly discovered that you took a lot of things that other people in your household did in the food provision line too much for granted. If you follow the links below, you might find some useful information and recipes.
- Nutrition Australia provides a huge amount of information about what food you should eat and how much. This site gives links to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on a whole range of foods, plus fact sheets including tips for budget buying and shopping for good health
- Stocking your kitchen cupboard is often challenging when you have to start from scratch. This page contains some tips that I've developed over quite a number of years, plus a list of useful kitchen equipment.
- Very easy recipes - recipes written with beginning cooks in mind. Most of these recipes were originally published in the residences newsletter when I was chaplain to the Gippsland campus of Monash University.
- ASCM Vegetarian Recipe Book - recipes and thoughts contributed by members of the Australian Student Christian Movement. Be warned, though, some of these recipes require a significant amount of cooking expertise.
Spiritual and Emotional Food
One of the things I find most difficult about my spiritual life is finding the time to pray and reflect and another is finding things to reflect on that speak to me. This section is aimed at sharing what I've found that works, at least at this stage, but I'm very happy to receive suggestions from others, too.
In the past I've used both an on-line tool for prayer and reflection - on a website run by the Irish Jesuits which allows you to do a guided meditation on a Bible reading at the computer and a similar one from Church Resources, an Australian Jesuit group. They both offer a new reading each day. At the moment, I'm using the rejesus daily prayer page, which offers three different resources each day - morning, day and evening. If you're looking for something more intellectually stimulating, the Link of the Week at The Text This Week usually provides something worthwhile, as do the sermons written by Grant Mauricio Gallup at Homily Grits. Grant is a retired Episcopalian priest living in Nicaragua who provides a reflection on the Lectionary Readings each week. The Text This Week is also a lectionary-based set of resources for preaching and the Link of the Week is also a reflection on the following Sunday's readings. It also contains a movie concordance, which might give you some ideas about films you could watch to stimulate thought about particular aspects of spirituality.
A good site for information about a range of issues that affect the emotions is Reach Out!, a site that helps young people to help themselves through tough times. It includes information depression and other mental health issues; drugs and alcohol; eating disorders and feeling good; family issues; friends and relationships; illness and staying healthy; loss and grief; safe sex and pregnancy; safety and violence; school and uni; sexuality and coming out; work and leaving home. Another useful site is Beyond Blue, the website of Australia's National Depression Initiative.