Jesus, the Host, not in the sense of the wafer but as the one who presides at the table.
There’s nothing like a dinner party to draw people together. After a glass of wine the laughter begins amid intense conversation at this or that end of the table. People begin to tell stories out of their past, they let down their guard. I remember the effect of such dinners upon the members of a religious community I knew. Most had known each other for years. They had shared dormitories, refectory, chapel, class rooms for so long that they knew each other’s qualities and faults. There were the jolly types, the brooders, the intellectuals, the conservatives and liberals, the pinochle players and the ultra-pious — a mixed bag that harbored resentments, formed cliques, gossiped about each other; Thomists wary of biblical scholars; papalists wary of ecumenists. But then along came May and their annual formation gathering in New York and a miracle took place. After a few days of formal presentations and debate (often fueled by the way Father X snidely responded to what he thought was a stupid question), they would all assemble in the upper banquet room of an Italian restaurant near Washington Square. After only one round of Manhattans and a taste of antipasto – they suddenly became a band of brothers, candidly amused by their collective faults! Overly serious intellectuals lambasted each other playfully with tears in their eyes. Cliques got reshuffled. The pious few began to smile with “pleasant” guilt at the scandalous remarks of more irreverent confreres. What I’m trying to say is, conviviality, mutual affection had taken over as dinner, in some sacramental way, revived their deeper feelings of solidarity and kinship.
Isak Dinesen’s story “Babette’s Feast” reveals the same phenomenon. Babette is a French refugee who comes to this cold Norwegian town to work as cook for two aging sisters who belong to an austere religious sect. Whenever its members get together they resemble the Israelites of today’s first reading, people who seem lost in a “vast and terrible” spiritual desert. They all dress in gray and black; they speak little; they’ve renounced all the pleasures of this world. Behind their facade of piety they engage in petty quarrels, backbiting; they perpetuate resentments. And they are desperately in need of manna from heaven, which begins to descend upon them when Babette, having won a lottery, offers to make them a French dinner. They accept her offer reluctantly, vowing among themselves to discipline their sense of taste. But to no avail! After a bit of Amontillado and pleasant portions of turtle soup, Blinis Demidoff, Cailles en Sarcophage and other items washed down by Veuve Cliquot 1860, two women who held a grudge begin to recall how as children they used to fill their village roads with song. Two men, one of whom had long ago cheated the other, began to laugh over the incident as if it had been a practical joke. Another old couple, burdened with guilt over an affair of their youth, gave each other a long overdue kiss of reconciliation. – – – – Of what happened that evening nothing definitely can be stated. None of the guests later on had any clear remembrance of it. They only knew that the rooms had been filled with a heavenly light, as if a number of small halos had blended into one glorious radiance. Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues; ears that for years had been almost deaf were opened to it. Time itself had merged into eternity. Long after midnight the windows of the house shone like gold, and golden song flowed out into the winter air.
No wonder Jesus chose a supper as his sacramental way of passing on his legacy to the world – a supper he perpetuates at every Eucharist. What better ambiance within which to reassert his only commandment: “Love one another. Nurture one another. By this will all know you are my disciples, by your constantly candid and convivial love.”
(An old one revised)