So you can imagine how encouraged I was yesterday reading the book Greening Paul: Rereading the apostle in a time of ecological crisis which I would humbly suggest is trying to the same with St Paul as I and others are trying to do with the Eucharist.The authors of this book try to develop some "hermeneutical lenses" which are from the Christian tradition and yet at the same time can be the means for its critical reading afresh. I know that this sentence sets up some barriers immediately to those not initiated into the secret mysteries of the theological ! Hermeneutics is all about meaning and interpretation and the idea of critical reading is about what sense we make of it all in our current context; St Paul lived in a somewhat different world to us now and certainly wasn't thinking of environmental crises.
So my answer to my friend at breakfast could have gone like this: I am working with others to research how we might "Green the Eucharist". How can we understand the Eucharist afresh in this time of ecological crisis. I think it's a problem that one of the main things we do as Christians does not obviously connect us with thinking, talking about the environment and what action we might take to protect life. I hope that what we are doing at my Church may lead us to reflect in such a way that leads to a renewal of our practice of the Eucharist and our talk about God.
Do you think that would make sense to her ?