Delight to the Angels
Delight to the Angels
David Russell Mosley
My most treasured memories from childhood surround the events of yearly feasts during Christmas time. When I was young, all my siblings would come home for the holidays and we would have a big family meal at the table while my dog, Snicker—a boxer of rather large size—squeezed under the table trying to catch any food that fell. Sadly, as the years went by and my family grew bigger and busier, fewer and fewer came home for Christmas. But those early dinners, all of us sit- ting around the table, laughing and stuffing ourselves will always stay with me.
Perhaps this was part of my draw to Christianity in my teen years. Here I found potlucks and after-service coffee, as well as the anticipation of calendar days documented for the specific purpose of feasting, especially in Catholicism. For years now, I’ve considered Christianity the feasting religion—that is, a religion primarily focused on feasting as opposed to fasting. To be sure, we have our times of fasting too, but they are always outnumbered by our days and seasons of delight and indulgence.
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Despite years of thinking about the importance of these concepts, it was only on the second Sunday of Easter of this past year that I finally sat down and watched the acclaimed Danish film, Babette’s Feast. The film centers around two protestant sisters, whose father was a pastor of a small, puritan sect. Through the long journey of lost love and the meandering passage of time, the two sisters end up offering a French refugee woman named Babette a place in their home, serving as their cook.
As Babette and the two sisters grow in care for each other’s stories and situations, the film climaxes with a winning lottery ticket and a “real French dinner.” Babette, it turns out, was once head chef of a famous Parisian restaurant, and has just won 10,000 francs, which she spends entirely on a dinner for twelve to celebrate the sisters’ late father. The film is a masterpiece, engaging profoundly with the themes of love, joy, faith, grace, forgiveness and sacramentality.
At one point in the film, one of the sisters has a dream which causes her to fear that there is something implicitly evil about the meal that Babette is preparing for them. After all, she has seen a severed cow’s head, a live sea turtle and a dozen live baby quail all pass through her home in preparation—this is not the simple soup and bread that the community has been accustomed to eating.
Since the death of the sisters’ father, the congregation finds their numbers dwindling and their concerns narrowing to a main issue of paramount importance: they wonder, will God forgive them of their sins? The question is asked and uttered frantically and repeatedly throughout the film. A kind of scrupulosity seems to be at work as they constantly worry about God’s grace and forgiveness.
Bozena Garbinska
Eventually, this constant worry about their forgiveness seems to turn them against each other, where they be- gin to blame each other for the sins of their youth. One pair, a man and a woman, progresses from the woman asking if God will forgive them their act of adultery in their youth to blaming each other for falling into the sin in the first place.
But then comes the dinner. Because they feared it might somehow be evil, the congregants decide they won’t say a word about it as they eat—thinking that mere appreciation will deepen their guilt. But as the wine and food flow, they laugh together, admitting to past sins and having them forgiven and laughed off, atoned for into the oblivion of community and spiritual delight.
This is what a feast can do. A true feast—however rich or poor—can give space for laughter, for joy, for forgiveness. The troubles of yesterday and tomorrow can be forgotten, at least for a moment, and make way for the moment—a symbol of the eternal present, which is God’s view of all reality.
Here we see a deposit; an allegory even for the wedding feast of the Lamb where we all shall celebrate when Christ returns, and of the feast of communion, where we all receive the bread and wine from the altar which is also a table.
In the time of the pandemic, these kinds of feasts have not always been possible. Perhaps you were lucky to have a bubble which included some close friends and family, but most of us have missed out on the large gatherings we were once part of during the special feasting times of the year.
This makes it all the more important that we find ways to spiritually feast now and to plan the best feasts we can when the pandemic finally ends.
Spiritual feasting must take many forms, both independent and communal. We can feast by praying, reading the scriptures, participating in monastic practices. We can feast on poetry and good literature. We can feast on good shows and films. We can also feast together through Zoom, phone calls, texts and writing letters. The last is perhaps my favorite method, for by applying pen or pencil to paper, we impart a little bit of ourselves and send it across the street, the country, the world, and it arrives in the hands of another—the same thing you touched, impressed with your soul, breathed on. Whatever we do, we must remember that we do not celebrate, we do not feast, except as a way of relating to each other and to God.
During the dinner scene in Babette’s Feast, one of the sisters decrees to the table, “We take into heaven only what we have given away.” Babette gives away not only her money, but her skill in producing this feast, offering it to the people who have loved and cared for her, even if they’ve misunderstood or doubted her at times.
She gives them something that she will take into heaven with her, her art. She quotes a man, Achille Papin, a former lover of one of the sisters and says, “‘Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.’” This she has done in giving this feast. This we are all called to do.
I was nearly moved to tears when the film ended with its final words to Babette, “In Paradise you will be the great artist that God meant you to be. Ah, how you will delight the angels!”
In many ways, this is the call on all of us—on me and you—to be the kind of people who, in heaven, will delight the angels. But to do that, we must live now. We must create, we must tell the story of Christ through whatever medium is present to us.
For Babette, this story is found in the preparation and indulgence of a feast. For you, it may be poetry or bread baking or raising children or brewing beer or all of the above. We are all made in the image of the Creator; we are made to make just as we are made to feast. So let us feast, let us make, and maybe we too will one day delight the angels.
David Russell Mosley
Poet & Theologian
David has been published in The Christian Century & The Imaginative Conservative and author of The Green Man & Being Deified
Photography by Bozena Garbinska