My wife says I just like to say “huevos rancheros“. While it is true I love to pronounce that beautiful phrase, I do like huevos rancheros, as a meal. I will go to brunch at a nice restaurant and pay top dollar for dirt cheap food. Eggs, corn tortillas, frijoles negros, and salsa for somewhere between $12 and $15, a dish a short order cook can and, probably does, prepare.

Anyway, I bought corn tortillas and salsa at BJ’s the other day. Everything else I had on hand. I fixed my own huevos rancheros for my luxurious at home brunch.

It was yummy. Sadly, my wife could not join me. Or my favorite Word Press girl/woman crushes (I hope you know who you are) weren’t here, either, except vicariously, for me.

Food and Love. Food, we know what that is, except Jesus gave food a deeper meaning, when he stated, “I am the Bread of Life.” We live on another plane, as Christians, because Jesus changed our understanding of the world and the components that support us.

Love, on the other hand, has many definitions, love between friends and neighbors, parent and child, the love we have for our country, erotic love, sexual love. I make a distinction between the erotic and sexual, because the passion of attraction we have for others, need not express itself sexually, in a sexual act. In other words, we don’t have to have sex with someone with whom we are “in love”.

The sexual act can be devoid of love. People have sex in order to assure their own survival, either immediately or long term. Desperate women have exchanged sex for food or the means to acquire food. We have sex to have children, expecting (hoping?) these children will care for us in old age. Romantic (erotic) love is secondary to the demands of survival.

It is very common in all cultures that food is shared with the people we love. Many of us will have that experience over the next few days, some of us at Passover seders, others at Easter dinners. And that these feasts involve a transcendent love, where we thank God and celebrate, sometimes, with the people we brought into the world ourselves, or who brought us into the world.