For All Who Hunger Read online

  Advance praise for

  FOR ALL WHO HUNGER

  “While church leaders were asking ‘How can we get our message out into the world?,’ Emily M. D. Scott went out into the world and asked ‘How can I bring this back into church?’ Her haunting memoir, For All Who Hunger, tells the story of how she created a place for those who never felt at home in church and how her unlikely congregants, in turn, helped her rediscover the heart of her own faith. This powerful and illuminating book is a must-read for those interested in how communities of faith can learn, grow, and reclaim their vital purpose.”

  —Jacob Slichter, author of So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star

  “For All Who Hunger is so full of heart and wisdom, curiosity and kindness, it seems not of this world. Perhaps it isn’t, and that’s a very good thing. Scott envisions a radically welcoming and nurturing space of community that speaks directly to my soul. This book is sharply observed and bursting with generous portraits of real people seeking connection. It is a story and a sermon and a gift; anyone who cares about modern faith, justice, and our relationships to one another will treasure this book.”

  —R. Eric Thomas, author of Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America

  “Conversion––which is to say, the revelation of the whole real world with God in it—is at the heart of this honest, intelligent, and generous book. Scott is called and accompanied by the strangers she meets on so many roads. She stumbles alongside them, carrying her people’s failures and fears. She wants. She burns. She hums a song and tells a story that’s a promise. And as night falls, this awkward, faithful pastor invites us all in, so that one more time our eyes may be opened in the breaking of bread.”

  —Sara Miles, author of Take This Bread

  “What Scott has accomplished in this book is nothing short of astounding. In an era of increasing division and existential loneliness, she manages to do the one thing Christians and seekers have been trying to do for two thousand years: She captures community. For All Who Hunger is raw, authentic, freshly prepared, and ready to be broken into pieces like the communion she so beautifully shares. She doesn’t turn away from her own brokenness, which somehow invites us to look at our own and find the hauntingly beautiful and fearfully made that is already occurring in our midst. In a world that is constantly looking for God and meaning, Scott reminds us that it is in the sharing of that journey with one another where God shows up.”

  —Lenny Duncan, author of Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the U.S.

  “As someone who planted/launched/guided-into-existence a new church when I was twenty-six (it was my second), I read For All Who Hunger with delight. With extraordinary courage and tenderness, Scott speaks truth about the life of a spiritual leader in these strange times, a mixture of loneliness, deep wells, non-perfection, connection, humiliation, exuberance, awkwardness, and healing. You may have no interest in religion or church or the like, but even then, the beauty and humanity of this book will make you want to read, and to read slowly, as if you’re savoring a meal spiced with love.”

  —Brian D. McLaren, author of The Great Spiritual Migration

  “Lutheran pastor Scott asks in her exceptional debut: if you strip from church all ‘the creeds and the chasubles,’ what would be left? The answer, for her, became St. Lydia’s Dinner Church in New York City, which she founded in 2008 as a place for queer, marginalized, artistic, nerdy, and often lonely lovers of God to gather for bread, wine, and the words of Jesus….Scott’s writing is leavened by a healthy dose of self-awareness, and her stories capture the humanity of her mission and community with a light sacramental touch, focusing mostly on the joy and solidarity found in the shared space.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “In this intimate and openly heartfelt debut memoir, Scott explores the power of faith and community as strength-building resources for navigating difficult times….She’s equally relatable and forthright in exposing her own vulnerabilities and loneliness as a single woman living in the city along with her responsibilities and insecurities ministering to the needs of her congregants. Scott delivers a moving personal memoir and an accessibly reverent meditation on finding faith through unconventional acts of worship. Highly inspiring for anyone seeking solace in our modern world.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  Copyright © 2020 by Emily M. D. Scott

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Convergent Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  CONVERGENT BOOKS is a registered trademark and its C colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  “Wild Geese” copyright © 1987 by Wendell Berry, from Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957–1982. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Scott, Emily M. D., author.

  Title: For all who hunger / Emily M. D. Scott.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Convergent, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020003072 (print) | LCCN 2020003073 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593135570 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593135587 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Scott, Emily M. D. | Lutheran Church—New York (State)—New York—Clergy—Biography. | St. Lydia’s (Brooklyn, New York, N.Y.) | Church development, New—New York (State)—New York. | Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Church history. | New York (N.Y.)—Church history. | Food—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Dinners and dining—Religious aspects—Christianity.

  Classification: LCC BX8080.S345 A3 2020 (print) | LCC BX8080.S345 (ebook) | DDC 284.1/74723—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020003072

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020003073

  Ebook ISBN 9780593135587

  Book design by Edwin Vazquez, adapted for ebook

  Cover design and illustration: Sarah Horgan

  Cover background image: Art Furnace/Shutterstock (cosmos)

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: Communion

  Part I: Creation

  Womb

  Quickening

  Fear and Trembling

  Part II: Enough

  Cardboard Wings

  Three Miracles

  Lost Things

  Part III: Justice

  Deep Waters

  Good Fridays

  Empty Tombs

  Part IV: Resurrection

  Broken Bread

  Distant Seas

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  They need not go away; you give them something to eat.

  —MATTHEW 14:16

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is a memoir: a story made of memories. In service of the narrative, I have tinkered with time lines. To protect privacy, some names have been changed. I have endeavored to tell the truth.

  Prologue

  COMMUNION

  Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.

  —FLANNERY O’CONNOR, on the Eucharist

  In my hands I hold a warm loaf of bread. I lift it to
eye level, so it can be seen. I sing words: about how Jesus took bread and blessed it and broke it, and as I sing, I rise up on my toes without realizing and close my eyes. No, keep them open, I remind myself, and look around the room at the twenty-five souls gathered there.

  We stand in a loose circle around three tables set for dinner: mismatched napkins, forks and spoons, bowls filled with a green salad. Behind me, a pot of soup steams on the stove top. The people’s hands are lifted, held open in prayer, like mine. Some have their eyes closed, faces tilted up in expectation. Others look back at me. The pastor has a privileged place in the gathering: we get to see our people at prayer. Their eyes are soft, waiting to receive.

  There is a tenderness to this moment, shot through with quotidian distractions. One congregant might fret about the testy arch of her supervisor’s eyebrow when she asked for tomorrow off. Another prays fervently that his sister will stay clean this time, while another may just be realizing he forgot something at the grocery store. One has dredged himself from the quicksand of yet another depressive spell just to make it to church tonight. They are seeking love or sex, working two jobs to pay the rent, hungry for fulfillment, achievement, attention. I know their stories. Some grew up in poverty and others were raised to go to prep school. They dream of making it as an artist or just making it through the day.

  The song leader chants and we repeat together: “Glory to you forever and ever.”

  It’s dark outside, and in the plate-glass window of our storefront, the reflections of candles flicker as somebody races by on their bike. There’s a fire station down the street; often the room floods with circling red lights and the blare of the siren.

  “Mother, we give you thanks for the life and knowledge you sent us through Jesus your child,” I sing before catching the eye of one of the newcomers in the room, a clean-shaven kid with a mess of curly hair and a flush to his cheeks. He can’t be more than twenty-five. He has the look of a new arrival to the city, his face not yet hardened into the feigned certainty of the urban dweller. He takes in the chanting, eyebrows raised and a surprised smile on his face, like he’s just woken up from a spell.

  Sometimes I wonder what pedestrians think as they pass by on the sidewalk and catch a glimpse of us inside. There we are, standing in a circle, singing to bread.

  I break the loaf. It’s fresh from the oven and hot in my hands. When the crust cracks, steam escapes in curls, and I hear an audible sigh from the congregation. It is so good, this bread. It smells of rosemary and yeast. You feel its breaking in your bones, deep down somewhere. The warmth of it on a cold night.

  “Holy food for holy people,” I say, turning my gaze to the room. My people look at me, and at the bread. The eyes of the people shine. It’s a moment outside of time.

  I turn to Malika, a congregant standing next to me, her dark hair swept off her neck and held up with a beaded hairpiece, and tear off a piece from the loaf.

  “Malika,” I say, pressing the piece into her hands, “this is my body.”

  I meet her eyes and then avert mine quickly. These are not easy words to say. They evoke a letting go of self, the smell of sex, an errant thought of cannibalism in the back of the mind. Malika takes the bread and eats it.

  “Amen,” she says.

  She takes the loaf from me and gives a piece to Will, standing next to her, owlish and academic in his horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Will, this is my body.”

  The bread is passed from hand to hand. I collect the leftovers in a basket, and pop it on the table closest to me, ready to be smeared with butter or dipped in soup. Then, we all sit down to dinner.

  * * *

  Often, I have to explain who I am and what I do to confused men I’ve met online in my attempt to have something resembling a normal social life. One such date was with an avowed agnostic and medical student. We met for drinks at a sidewalk café on the West Side of Manhattan.

  “So, your church, St. Lydia’s…you eat dinner?” he asked me. He was gangly, curious, and good-natured. I already knew that I liked him.

  “Well…we all cook and set up for dinner together,” I said, abashedly. “We sing and light candles, and I bless the bread, and we share it. We eat, talk about scripture, and share our stories. And then we hold hands and pray, clean up together, get a blessing, and go home.” Like a big nerd, I went on to explain that the worship at St. Lydia’s is patterned after an early Church practice of sharing a common meal: in the first few centuries of Christianity, worship took place not in a sanctuary full of pews, but around a handful of tables in people’s homes.

  He frowned, considering my words.

  “Sorry,” I said, reflexively. “That’s probably more information than you want.”

  “No, no,” he responded, smiling. “That actually sounds…really nice. It sounds like some of the evenings I spend with good friends. When the food is good and the conversation is good. Those nights feel sacred to me.”

  “I agree!” I told him. “I think they’re just as sacred as what I do in church on Sunday night.”

  This particular agnostic later broke up with me on the sidewalk in front of my apartment just after kissing me, which seemed an unusual choice of sequencing. But whenever I explain St. Lydia’s, I think of him, because he saw what we were doing so clearly. Church is not about transcending human things like warm food and chortling laughter. It is—or should be—about pointing to them as sacred. Our most human parts are also the most holy.

  * * *

  —

  I became a Lutheran pastor against my will. I never really meant to.

  “How did you decide to become a minister?” someone asks me. My hairdresser as she captures portions of dampened hair between comb and blade; a friend of a friend at a party as she smiles and smooths her boyfriend’s dress shirt; the young seminarian who looks up at me with wide open eyes, hoping to catch sight of her own illuminated future.

  My heart curls inward, like a crustacean receding into its shell. It’s a simple question, completely innocent, yet it seems impossible to answer.

  “God made me do it” are the words that usually flash through my mind. I don’t say them out loud, though. They taste too bitter in my mouth for casual conversation. Usually I smile, lips pressed together, and say something like “That’s a long story,” and wonder how I might manage to explain.

  At gatherings of Lutheran clergy, I don’t fit in. I am young, I am female, I am not married, I do not have children. There are some younger clergy and women scattered through our assembly, but the majority of Lutheran pastors are men who were ordained decades ago. They all seem larger than I am, delivering strong handshakes to one another, inquiring about wives, and cracking loud jokes. Har har har. They wear their clerical collars with ease, as if born into the uniform. With black suits and white collars, they mingle like a colony of penguins in a huddle.

  I know a lot of these men. Many of them have welcomed and affirmed me, offering words of encouragement and resources to share. They are kind. I like them. But when they’re all assembled together, it’s clear I’m out of place. I’ve wandered into the wrong zoo exhibit, a small bird with unruly plumage. My heart starts racing beneath my garish feathers.

  St. Lydia’s, the church I founded and for the last seven years served as pastor, is a convention of odd birds. Each of us would be wholly out of place wandering through the doors of a clapboard, steepled church. Most of us are younger than the average church-attending Christian by at least twenty years. Many of us are single, many of us are Queer. We are the kids who hung out in the art room long after the bell rang but flunked out of algebra. Or maybe we earned a 4.0 but carried a constant yearning for something different, something far away, which brought us to this city of a million lights and hard realities. Our congregants are quirky and earnest, pouring themselves into graduate school or tugging at the threads of theological questions. They do
n’t believe being gay is a sin anymore, like their pastor told them when they were kids. But what does the Bible say about it? they want to know. Ultimately, the thing that ties us all together, I guess, is that most of us got beat up in middle school, or narrowly avoided it.

  * * *

  At dinner, a congregant passes me a full bowl of soup. I scan the three tables to make sure there’s someone at each with enough social skills to keep the conversation going. We’ve had trouble with this. The most confident Dinner Church participants tend to arrive later and end up seated at the table closest to the door. Soon they’ll be guffawing loudly at a joke somebody’s cracked while at the table where I’m seated, near the kitchen, we sputter and lurch through small talk.

  Somewhere along the line, St. Lydia’s got the reputation for being a hipster church. “Oh, yeah, the cool church,” people would say to my colleague, Julia, or me when they ran into us at church events. Sometimes their words carried a hint of dismissal. Perhaps they imagined that St. Lydia’s was a boutique ministry geared only toward the privileged. Or that we were unwelcoming of anyone who didn’t ride a fixed-gear bike or have a mustache. Julia and I always reported these stories back to one another with incredulous laughter.

  “Let me assure you,” we’d tell them if we got the chance, “there’s nothing about it that’s cool.”

  Sprinkled around these tables are geeks and geniuses, fools and misfits. Some of us have done a better job than others of climbing our way into something that might be identified as “success” in work or life. And now here we are, stumbling our way through dinner conversation that is the opposite of refined or easy.