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Culture


WIRED FOR JESUS

Isaac Wood

I’m always praying and worshipping under the influence of caffeine. Is that
cause for concern?


Christianity Today January 13, 2025


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Wikimedia Commons / Edits by CT

Most weeks I share a carafe of coffee with all the Sunday schoolers. I approach
the kitchen counter and hope for doughnuts. Selecting a mug—the one that says
“Shalom, y’all” is a hot commodity—I fill it to the brim with splashing
caffeine. Classes meet all over the church building, but everyone makes a
pilgrimage to the coffeepot. Like ants to a picnic.

We stand around talking, weathering awkward silences with sips. Doors swing open
again and again, letting in cold air. Once again, the warm mugs are there for
us. Eventually, we find chairs; we talk about the gospel reading and a couple of
poems. I’m thoroughly caffeinated by the time class ends. I lap up the last
drops and head upstairs for worship.

Coffee dominates church life. The consumption of caffeine, as one writer
quipped, is “Christians’ acceptable vice,” seeing us “through a Reformation,
modernity and postmodernity, through boring Sunday sermons and lively evening
rituals. Now it takes its place on the kitchen table, next to the Bible—close
enough to be in the same frame.” We get out of bed and begin our days with, as
John Mark Comer puts it, “the ancient Christian spiritual discipline of really
good coffee.” Only after arming ourselves against drowsiness do we set about
praying.


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Last year, my body couldn’t take it anymore. I started experiencing chest pain,
and coffee sharpened it. Eventually, I visited a doctor, who told me to cut
back.

It’s forced me to wonder, Can I live a happy life without coffee? Sounds
extreme. But it’s tough to go without. Coffee transforms boring work into
creative contribution and absorbs my attention with friends’ voices. Vocation,
friendship, worship—all crucial to flourishing, all reliant on caffeine. I find
myself craving its effects. If I had this sort of relationship with something
else, say alcohol or social media, my pastor would certainly have concerns.

Maybe happiness isn’t the goal here. But can I live a Christian life without
coffee? It’s as intertwined with the practice of my faith as hymns and potluck
chili. When I struggle to engage with practices of faith, coffee keeps me alert
to the work of God.

I imagine if I were in Gethsemane waiting for Jesus to finish praying, I’d try a
few things to keep me awake—some conversation, food, maybe singing. But when all
those failed, there’s one thing that would undoubtedly do the job.



I really do wonder whether coffee is my “acceptable vice.” Can I keep watch
without it?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

According to legend, coffee originated in a religious context. The story goes
that a goat herder named Kaldi noticed his sheep were acting differently after
eating berries from a particular plant. They weren’t falling asleep at night.
Kaldi, I imagine, thought to himself, I wonder if I could get in on that. He
shared his observation with the abbot of the local monastery, who made a drink
from the berries. Soon the abbot was able to stay “alert through the long hours
of evening prayer.” Centuries later, here we are.

Caffeine isn’t the only intervention that has kept Christians awake while
praying. In the 12th and 13th centuries, Saint Francis and his followers used
rigging. A biographer at the time, Thomas of Celano, explains that the
contemplatives believed they should always be praying and praising God: “They
thought themselves abandoned by God if in their worship they did not find
themselves constantly visited by their accustomed fervor.”

But sometimes they got tired.

> When they wanted to throw themselves into prayer, they developed certain
> techniques to keep from being snatched off by sleep. Some held themselves up
> by suspended ropes in order to make sure their worship would not be disturbed
> by sleep creeping up on them. Others encased their bodies in iron instruments.
> Still others encased themselves in wooden girdles.

To them, metal and wood were the antidotes to drooping eyelids and nodding
heads. The body’s needs were considered obstacles to prayer that needed to be
overcome. Fatigue was a problem to solve rather than a sign to sleep.

recommended


LIVING LIKE A MONK IN THE AGE OF FAST LIVING

Evan B. Howard

The Franciscans not only ignored their bodies’ needs; they actively subverted
them. They stripped naked in the cold and pierced themselves with thorns. These
expressions of faith may be foreign to us. But consider the reasons we deny
ourselves sleep—the prospect of gain and notoriety, for instance—that cause some
of us to overwork.

Saint Francis and his followers harmed their bodies because they believed it
would bring them closer to the crucified Christ. Many of us, on the other hand,
harm our bodies because we think it will bring us closer to worldly success.

Of course, lacking sleep is not the same as stripping in the cold or piercing
one’s own skin. But it does denigrate the body. This modern denigration creates
the caffeine craving, and rampant addiction arises from this refusal to rest.



I go to church with a biology professor who has the spiritual gift of explaining
science in a way that I understand. He taught me that the plants that produce
caffeine use it as a natural pesticide. Caffeine kills hungry bugs. It’s also a
psychoactive substance, like marijuana and cocaine, meaning that it affects
humans’ mental processes.

Caffeine interferes with adenosine, the chemical that tells our brains when
we’re tired. That means caffeine’s main job is to lie to us. Adenosine, any time
we are tired, tries to stage an intervention. But caffeine steps in front and
tells adenosine that there’s no problem, it’s making a big deal out of nothing,
and we’re doing just fine. It slams the door on adenosine’s intervention.
Caffeine doesn’t give us energy. It enables us to pretend we have it.

Whether using caffeine or wooden rigging, some treat their bodies as
inconvenient at best and an obstruction to devotion at worst. If communion with
God happens in spite of physical bodies, then they keep the coffee coming. If
prayer is meant to transcend the physical, then rigging can only help.

In this view, flesh and blood are hurdles between us and God’s vision for
salvific reconciliation. We don’t need to take heed of our bodies’ needs. We
need to get past them.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But bodies don’t have to obstruct communion with God. In fact, it is through
bodies that communion with God is made possible. Consider the Eucharist.

Historical theologian Gisela Kreglinger writes that “we receive spiritual
sustenance through our physical and communal sharing in the Eucharist, by
walking to the altar to stand or kneel, by opening our hands and our mouths to
receive the physical matter of bread and wine. We chew, we taste, we listen, and
we swallow. We digest.” It makes sense that Jesus taught us to remember his
flesh and blood by eating and drinking. You can’t get much more bodily than
digestion.

In eating the bread, our bodies tangibly interact with the body of Christ. And
we enact our identity as the church, the body of Christ.

Bread is different from caffeine. It gives energy by providing calories that our
bodies need. And while the Lord’s Supper doesn’t typically involve eating enough
bread to sustain the body’s literal needs—just a wafer, just a crumb—bread’s
physical effects reflect a spiritual reality: that prayer might have less to do
with transcending our bodies and more to do with nourishing them.



Wine, on the other hand, is more like caffeine than bread. In larger quantities,
it’s a psychoactive substance that affects mental processes. What, then, should
we make of its place in the Communion ritual?

related


THE LORD’S SUPPER IS A MULTIETHNIC LOVE FEAST

Jamaal E. Williams and Timothy Paul Jones

In her essay “Prayer and Incarnation: A Homiletical Reflection,” the religious
philosopher Lissa McCullough writes that absolute good transcends us, “lying
beyond or outside the limits of our desire.” Humans are limited by our
bodies—tired, hungry, suffering from headaches or sore backs—and that limitation
can keep us from the absolute good of God. I might believe that I need to give
my undivided attention to a hurting friend, but if I am exhausted, my conviction
is limited by my body. I want to pray with loving attention toward God, but my
drooping eyelids limit that desire.

Part of prayer, McCullough argues, is a “sacred petition” that takes us beyond
ourselves and to an absolute good that “can reconcile us to the incarnational
will of God as that will is actually unfurled providentially in events.” Humans
are broken. So communion with God requires a spiritual elevation above human
nature, above the limits of our bodies and minds—above tiredness.

Notice the ultimate purpose that McCullough outlines: Transcendence is intended
to “reconcile us to the incarnational will of God.” Jesus came down to live an
earthly life with a bodily existence. God’s will is incarnational. It doesn’t
ignore our earthly bodies but works through them, even when ultimate goodness
requires transcending our bodies’ limits.

Communion wine acts as an agent of transcendence, at least figuratively. But it
does so not to denigrate the body (as with self-flagellation and overwork) or
ignore it (as with wooden girdles and a double shot of espresso). Instead, both
the bread and wine enter the body for the sake of the body. In McCullough’s
words, prayer should “be directed not toward the transcendent
disincarnationally, but into the world, toward the body and the earth, giving
rise to a fully incarnate saintliness or holiness.”



We’re humans that need sanctification, and this sanctification is accomplished
not in spite of our bodies but through them. Kreglinger draws out how God
sanctifies us through our bodily existence:

As we bring ourselves, including our bodies, and as we bring the fruits of the
earth in bread and wine (which includes our participation in labor and
creativity in its production), God sanctifies them and meets us in bread and
wine. The fact that we bring ourselves together with bread and wine to God in
the Lord’s Supper and that we receive Christ in bread and wine solidifies our
close kinship with creation in the world of salvation.

God meets us during Communion. A couple in my church is beloved by everyone
because they have loved everyone. She led the children’s choir for years and
greets every person with the truest of smiles. He makes a point to greet
newcomers any chance he gets, with a soft handshake and curious questions.
Christ’s love sparkles in their eyes. Recently they’ve had some health problems,
and she uses a walker and oxygen tank.

During an evening Eucharist service, while everyone else walks up the aisle to
receive bread and juice, they remain seated. The servers walk to them. They eat,
drink, and receive God’s grace. Watching them raise their hands as we sing our
final hymn, I become more aware of God’s will for incarnational salvation. The
limits of their bodies do not keep God from communing with them. If anything,
the beauty of the Eucharist is made more beautiful by the limits they face.

To enact incarnate holiness, prayer does not avoid the world but goes into it.
The Eucharistic prayer gives us the food and drink of this reality, building a
closer kinship to creation with each swallow.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Saint Francis didn’t think bodies were all bad. One day, he came across some
birds and began to preach to them: “My brothers the birds, you should love your
creator deeply and praise him always. He has given you feathers to wear, wings
to fly with, and whatever else you need.”



Being thankful for our own feathers and wings means taking good care of them.
This requires eating good food that gives good energy. It means getting rest and
not using caffeine as a crutch. If we are exhausted, glorifying God might mean
taking a nap or going to bed early.

It could also mean making a cup of coffee to comfort a friend. It might mean
going through a drive-through for that hot, bitter drink that will get you
through the third stretch of a long day. Sometimes, tiredness is worth the
tradeoff. Sometimes, we need coffee.

But just because something is good doesn’t mean it’s always good. Gisela
Kreglinger was raised in a family that has been making wine for generations, but
she recognizes the substance’s potential for abuse. In The Spirituality of Wine,
she writes,

> When we use wine or food or any other substance as an anesthetic to cope with
> the stress, suffering, pain, and perhaps boredom of our lives, we not only
> abuse God’s gifts but also close ourselves off from the possibility of
> receiving comfort and healing that comes from being in a relationship with God
> and one another.

Kreglinger calls for us to enjoy the gifts of God’s creation yet to be wary of
using them in a way that keeps us from loving relationships with God and each
other.

I’ve started drinking coffee again. (Not every day, and I sometimes have to
adjust my diet to accommodate.) I have reasons that might hold water, but at the
end of the day, it’s mostly because I enjoy it. I’ll leave it to someone with
more fortitude or hypocrisy to call Christians to stop. But I’ve started
insisting on one thing—I pray before having coffee.

Sometimes I practice morning prayer with friends. Sheer embarrassment, at the
very least, keeps me from giving in to any sleepiness. Speaking aloud, standing,
and kneeling allow me to focus myself even when my mind wants to wander. Once we
finish, we flock to the church kitchen for several cups of coffee together. It’s
a perfect start to my day.

There are all sorts of ways to engage in prayer without caffeine in our systems.
It might be a worthwhile practice to abide in God’s loving presence in a mental
state unaltered by psychoactive substances.

The question the church needs to ask is how caffeine is affecting our communal
lives—whether it’s enabling us to mistreat our bodies and the bodies of others.

Are we giving in to the temptation of caffeine that promises productivity
without rest? Are we practicing sabbath, or are we fueling a hustle culture that
values success over well-being? Are we tangibly caring for brothers, sisters,
and neighbors overworked by financial strain? Are we letting prayer nourish us
as the Eucharist teaches?



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let’s go back to coffee on Sunday mornings. The brew I hold was made by a good
friend who just asked me how I’m doing, audaciously expecting an honest answer.
In the circle of chairs, parents, teachers, and technicians discuss the
difficult drudgery of the everyday. University students tell of adventures and
philosophies and aspirations. Retired-aged gardeners and hikers share their
joys, hopes, regrets, and hard-earned wisdom. Hospital workers speak hopefully
about their work. These words encourage and instruct, comfort and enliven me.

In this time, I am sustained by the body of Christ—the church that gives the
gift of communion with God by communing with one another.

After the benediction, a middle-aged father empties the dishwasher so we can
fill it with mugs again. Some caring hands might put away the chairs so they’re
out of the way of the next gathering. And we will ascend the stairs to the
sanctuary where our bodies will, once again, receive the nourishment of the body
of Christ. And in that moment, through that gift, our bodies will be fulfilled
in the transcendent love of God.

Whatever it looks like, honoring our bodies allows us to worship as the birds
do: Saint Francis’s birds “exulted marvelously in their own fashion, stretching
their necks, extending their wings, opening their mouths, and gazing at him.”
Let us remember our needs and tend to them. And we will glorify God with our
arms and legs, our skin and neurons.

Isaac Wood is a NextGen Accelerator Fellow for Christianity Today, and produces
local history podcasts in East Tennessee.


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