On Sunday, my roommates threw a barbecue. Kim had made blue ribbon French bread (by which I mean mixed, kneaded, and baked herself) and I told her it was as close to the perfect loaf of bread as I’d ever tasted, which was the truth. I was in an uncommon good mood that night, and everyone around me seemed to notice and comment on it.

One of our guests had brought a bottle of champagne, and as we poured glasses for a toast, I had the greatest realization of an entire weekend already full of strange coincidences. It started when I asked why we do not toast with water, or if we did toast with water, why it would somehow hold less meaning than toasting with wine. And Kim said simply, “Because love went into making the wine!”

And it’s true not just of the wine, but of the bread as well. Bread is the “work of human hands,” but undeniably love goes into it as well. Wine is the “fruit of the vine,” and also the way that humans have devised to preserve the grapes from spoiling, but each batch of wine tastes individually different, some better than others. And indeed love and care goes into the preparation of both these gifts. Neither bread nor wine is necessary for human life. We can find water in the stream, and we can hunt animals or eat starchy roots. But bread and wine are uniquely the creation of human beings (and let’s not forget the contribution of the yeast to both ventures), and thus the physical manifestation of human collaborative effort, that is to say, spirit.

Bread, which takes a lot of work to make, but ultimately is more nutritious and tasty than the individual constituents, cannot be made without society’s cooperation, division of labor, and trust. The synergy that occurs in bread is a physical metaphor for the synergy that occurs “wherever two or more (people) come together.”

Wine, on the other hand, can be made by an individual, but gains meaning when it is shared with others. All of the love and attention an individual focuses into making a batch of wine (which is a weeks-long process where many things can go wrong, believe me, I’ve made beer before) are not just for the winemaker, but to be shared with those around him. And all that love and care are literally tasted by the participants, and the common drinking of wine, including the alcoholic flush, binds those people together more closely through the initiator’s actions than just filling up one’s water glass.

And all of this came to me in a flash, and I was overcome because at once I understood what this meant: That spirit can be carried through bread and wine. Bread and wine are already vehicles of human spirit, as I have described above. But consecration can imbue these physical vehicles with Holy Spirit.

Bread, the body, the corpus, represents the fact that Christ is in all of us, just as all of us contribute to the making of bread, as it is only made possible by society coming together as one body. Wine, the blood, represents individual sacrifice, the love and care one individual, Christ, could invest in all of us, which we, in turn, can invest in others.

And then came time for the toast. Because I was still in my somehow radiant good mood, everyone looked to me to lead it. Being, as I was, among non-Christians, I didn’t say anything about body or blood. Instead, I toasted the fact that love goes into making wine, as opposed to say, grape juice, which mostly contains high fructose corn syrup and very little love, and everyone seemed to accept that.