Extravagance
Letters for the Road: May 2022
Dear reader,
The most appalling purchase my husband has ever made was a few packages of a meal-replacement powder. It worked well for him when he had days in the field for work, and needed something quick to make for those early mornings that was filling and nutritious. While I concede to the attractiveness of its efficiency, the product’s time-saving ethos reduces food preparation to a problem to be solved.
I won’t pretend that this is never a problem for our family—as our kids have grown, as we often rush out of the house in the morning and need lunches suitable for school, and as work has left us exhausted at the end of the day, food can often feel like a chore.
But the problem here is not actually food. It’s the schedule that we have created for ourselves, so that preparing food has become burdensome.
Underneath this burden, we forget that food is meant to be “the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than useful,” as Robert Farrar Capon declares. Our bodies are not insignificant, and attending to their nourishment is not simply like putting fuel in a car.
In the film Babette’s Feast, the significance of food is demonstrated through the film’s climax in an extravagant feast. The film tells the story of two women, daughters of a preacher and leader of a small religious community in late 19th century Denmark. Their lives are fairly ascetic, with little indulgence or decoration, and they devote themselves both to worship and works of charity. Years after their father dies, a French woman shows up at their doorstep. Sent by a mutual friend, she is seeking refuge from persecution, and the sisters agree to let her cook for them, though they don’t think they need any help.
Many more years pass, and the Frenchwoman—Babette—wins a large sum of money. Although the sisters assume she will leave them, as she is no longer without resources, Babette decides instead to cook a luxurious French feast as a gift to them, and to all the members of their religious community. The sisters protest the extravagance. Still, Babette insists, and they reluctantly agree to let her have her way.
What the sisters don’t realise is that Babette had been the head chef at a famous Parisian restaurant. From this expertise, she pours herself into the meal that she creates for them. Babette sends for delicacies of various kinds from Paris: a live tortoise, quail, the finest wine. Her creation is a work of art, with no expense spared.
As the feast day approaches, tension grows. Despite their unified uneasiness at consuming so much strange food, the religious brothers and sisters are not at peace with one another. Their relationships are marked by bitterness and grudge-holding, and their back-biting even begins to interrupt their devotional times together, to the sisters’ great dismay.
Unexpectedly, Babette’s feast becomes more than good food to fill her guests’ stomachs and please their palates. It is transformative. As the guests eat and drink, their grudges and bitterness melt away. Forgiveness becomes possible. Their eyes shine with love and gratitude for one another. Although they have no frame of reference from which to appreciate the exquisiteness of such a meal—only one, unexpected guest from outside the community understands its value—it has affected them spiritually as well as physically. They leave satisfied, and outside the sisters’ cottage they join hands and sing.
The beauty of this meal is the way that something physical—food and drink—affected a spiritual change. Too often in Christian theology, materiality is denigrated or dismissed in light of what is immaterial or spiritual. The focus on heaven, for a future without corruption or death, seems again and again to lead to a treatment of embodied life as a concession, a less-than-desirable state. But in doing so, we sound more like Screwtape, C.S. Lewis’ fictional demon who is disgusted with the human body in comparison to his own spiritual, body-less existence.
In Babette’s Feast, materiality is not only celebrated, it is the means to wholeness and health. When Babette first asks the sisters to allow her to cook a feast, they protest that they have only ever served their guests tea and coffee. Only tea and coffee! As wonderful as those beverages are, what an impoverishment of fellowship, what a failure of community life, that they had never feasted together.
The great feast—the marriage supper of the Lamb—awaits us in the future; we are not there yet. And yet, because Christ’s kingdom has broken into the present, there is a measure of feasting, a taste of the abundance of the life which Jesus gives, that we can enjoy here. While renunciation has rightly been a central idea in the Christian tradition, Babette shows us a renunciation of the self—a giving up of what one rightfully has, a free dispossession—that is at the same time a lavish giving towards others. Incredibly, she spends all her prize money on this one feast. She holds nothing back, either financially or skillfully, as she pours all of her talent and love into the creation of a meal that exudes abundance.
While we may not have as much money as Babette did to spend on food, and while a feast is not an everyday event, the food we serve matters. The way we cook, the things we cook, are not simply nutrients for the body. They communicate to those we feed a whole vision of the world and even of the character of God. Jesus, after all, is the one who not only agrees to create more wine for the wedding feast, but also makes it excellent. In this first miracle, Jesus declares the extravagant nature of his redemption—one that embraces the creation, even our food and drink.
When I think of extravagance in art, Makoto Fujimura comes to mind. One of his techniques is to use gold leaf—a technique, as you can imagine, that is quite expensive. Working with gold leaf for his MFA thesis, he wrote about this “experience of encountering the extravagance of beauty leading to a profound wrestling of faith and art.” In this piece, “Zero Summer,” Fujimura commemorates the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima. He writes that this piece “imagines the unimaginable horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and yet points to epiphanic awakening that transcend human imagination at the same time.”
A couple of books I have been able to finish this month: Wes Hill’s new book The Lord’s Prayer, and Myles Wertnz’s From Isolation to Community. I’ve enjoyed reading Hill’s book devotionally—it’s brief, with short chapters just perfect for a daily devotional time. Wertnz’s book draws on Bonhoeffer’s book about community to interrogate contemporary church practices. He argues that most churches moved seamlessly to online church formats during the pandemic because in reality they were already not true communities, but gatherings marked by isolation. He looks at the reasons for this isolation (some specific to our modern era, some universally true of the human condition) and offers ways to move towards community. I found his book insightful, and yet I walked away without a clear sense of what I ought to do or change. This kind of book needs to be thought through with others—I need a conversation partner!
My writing elsewhere this month: ‘Learning to See with Norman Wirzba’ in Mere Orthodoxy
Bless us, O Lord, as we linger over our cups,
And over tables laden with good things,
as we relish the delights of varied texture and flavor,
Of aromas and savory spices,
Of dishes prepared as acts of love and blessing,
Of sweet delights made sweeter by the communion of saints.
May this shared meal, and our pleasure in it, bear witness against the artifice and deceptions of the prince of the darkness that would blind this world to hope.
May it strike at the root of the lie that would drain life of meaning, and the world of joy, and suffering of redemption.
May this our feast fall like a great hammer blow against that brittle night,
Shattering the gloom, reawakening our hearts,
stirring our imaginations, focusing our vision
On the kingdom of heaven that is to come
On the kingdom that is promised
On the kingdom that is already, indeed, among us,
For the resurrection of all good things has already joyfully begun.
May this feast be an echo of that great supper of the Lamb,
and a foreshadowing of the great celebration that awaits the children of God.
From “A Liturgy for Feasting with Friends” by Doug McKelvey
On the road with you,
Laura
I love Babette's Feast! I so often want to make a comment about your blog, and I just don't sign in. Trying to find my pw now! I really enjoy your writing.