The Life force within the plant draws sustenance through its – the plant’s – roots, and uses that material to fashion and refashion a plant body for itself. The same Life force, now animating a much grander vehicle, uses our meals and snacks to fashion and refashion our physical reality, our workaday selves.

Within the new birth, the Life force maintains the dynamic, fashioning and refashioning this new creation, feeding, first, on Christ’s own body and blood, and then on our acts of loving obedience to his will.

“I have food you know not of,” he once informed his followers, and every other Christian.

This is not theology; it’s biology.