I don’t know if you’re the cook for Thanksgiving dinner. I am, and I love it. I love the fussing and the planning, the shopping and the considering just the right green apple to go into the stuffing. I don’t love the cleaning the house, but it’s a good spiritual practice. I’m extraordinarily lucky to have a beautiful parsonage that goes with my parish ministry position, and I’ve hosted ten Thanksgivings in this house that was built in 1765.
There is a blessed alchemy in taking up the raw ingredients for the Thanksgiving meal and transforming them from (for example) cubed stale bread, an onion, a few stalks of celery, a green apple, some sage from the garden, some butter (okay, a lot of butter), some links of sausage and some chicken broth into a fragrant, brown, heavenly big dish of stuffing. As I do my bit to prepare these dishes I am ever mindful that hands before mine planted and harvested the onion and celery, produced the butter, killed and stewed the chicken. I think of the many steps of transformation that happened between the elemental ingredients and my table. Such effort, such work, such abundance from the Earth, such blessing from God.
God, our Maker doth provide
for our wants to be supplied….
Much of what we do here at BTFM is to try to get you to see yourself as a unique, potentially beautiful raw ingredient that you can transform through creative vision, effort and enjoyment into a work of art that graces the environment just as does a floral centerpiece on a table.
I remember attending a luncheon in my seminary years hosted by a minister whose personal appearance was, in a word, sloppy. As we gathered around a little table, she took containers from a local take-out restaurant and slapped them open on the table. She passed around napkins and plastic forks and paper plates. I knew right away that her lack of care spelled trouble for her ministry: how could someone with such a total unconcern for the art of hospitality function well as a pastor? I remember that she seemed somewhat embarrassed by the scenario once she realized how ugly it really was, passing around messy, dripping containers. There is a time and a place to pass around cardboard food containers at a working meal, but this wasn’t meant to be that. We had arrived in response to an invitation to lunch. When one invites other to lunch, there is an implication that some element of hostessing is involved, not just opening food containers. Picking up on the awkwardness and forced gaity of the shocked guests, this minister launched into a denunciation of class issues rampant in our denomination. She was a working class woman and proud of it, she said. She fooled no one. This wasn’t a class issue. This was a spiritual poverty issue, a care issue, and a respect issue.
I have remembered her dozens of times in subsequent years, every time someone puts out a pretty tray with coffee cups on it, and pours milk from a carton into a pretty pitcher just because it’s pretty and life calls for beauty whenever possible. I have remembered her every time I sat at table with families in rural Nicaragua, or Transylvania, or Chicago’s inner city and appreciated the ability of even those who have no money to set a table that communicates welcome and respect for self and other. I have remembered her every time I put butter on a dish, olives in a bowl, a tablecloth on the table, and lit candles on the buffet. I remember her when, eating dinner alone for the thousandth time at my kitchen table, I put my frozen dinner entree on a ceramic plate and unfold a cloth napkin in my lap. Because to eat my Amy’s Organics Low-Sodium Mexican Bowl (so GOOD!) right from the packaging would be easier, but not nearly as nourishing.
Setting the best possible table for the treasured guest is a central religious commitment among many faith traditions. Children of the Bible tradition hear in the glorious twenty-third Psalm of David that God sets a banquet before us (even in the presence of our enemies!). We are called, in turn, to offer generous and beautiful hospitality to those who sit at table with us, to feed them the best food we have, and to refill their cups before we fill our own. While clergy need not embrace a frantic, Martha Stewart level of hosting/hostessing, we should all know how to set a table that communicates that whether or not we are people of economic privilege, we are people who are called to feast in beauty.
Have a great one, darlings.
Yes, yes! A thousand times yes.
Yes! Yes!Yes! When I get out the good china and glasses people will protest, “Oh, you shouldn’t have bothered/fussed” What? I should do this for strangers? (Yes, I should do it for strangers and how much more so for the people I love and to whom I am indebted for my very life?). Besides, it doesn’t take any more time to wash a nice plate than it does a plastic one with a faded snoopy cartoon on it…
Have you read “Feasting with God: Adventures in Table Spirituality” by Holly Whitcomb (United Church Press, 1996) ?
I think you would enjoy it very much.
Blessings and thanks for your ministry.
I remember all the years I ate alone… and intentionally gave thanks for and felt connected to all the hands that had gone into growing/processing/delivering the food on my table.
A table that is lovingly prepared is indeed a spiritual place, Blessings on your Thanksgiving.
I feel the way susanp does about “the good china.” I LOVE using it and setting a pretty table for my guests. Sometimes I have used the everyday stuff (respectable enough pottery, though a little chipped since the dog got her collar tags stuck on the dishwasher rack and pulled the whole thing onto the floor in a panic) when I worried that my guests might feel self-conscious about the fabulosity of my table… but after reading your post, I will go back to using “the good stuff” for dinner guests (and yes, especially for Thanksgiving dinner, which this year will consist of my husband and me, his adult daughter, her 17-month old son, and one colleague). (The 17-month old will get plastic Bunnykins, which isn’t half bad, and nicer than his usual dishes.) [ YAY! So glad I inspired you to put on the full glory! -PB ]
Do you remember Patrick O’Neill’s sermon at Convo about the woman who died having never unpacked a carton containing 12-place settings of gorgeous Spode china, and how her daughter wept because she didn’t even know her mother owned it? [No, I wasn’t there. It sounds like something that would have made me cry. – PB]
Friends, it’s not only about hospitality (though that matters a lot and I can’t help wondering who the takeout-and-plastic-forks colleague was). It’s also that beautiful things were meant to be used.
It is such a lack of attention to hospitality and beauty (even in the simplest things) that I experienced in my childhood home that figured large in my call to the priesthood. But I find now that I want to live that priesthood out more in the home with family and an ever-widening circle of friends than in the parish setting. Gardening and otherwise obtaining ethically grown/ raised food, cooking it well, and serving it to God’s beautiful people in an intentional manner is important. I have been blessed with beautiful china and silver for which we registered and, finally, have completed 8 sets of each after 13 years.
I actually wrote a blog post thinking about hospitality in terms of how we do our confirmation classes/Christian Education — how we “feed” people by forcing them to eat, rather than offering them hospitality, saying, ‘Try a little of this. What do you think?” Or – heaven forbid! – allowing people to bring their own favorite dishes. (http://confirmnotconform.com/blog/what-confirmation-keeping-feast)
I am thinking about adding another post drawing on this one, about how presentation matters, but I may have already stretched the conceit to the breaking point.
and if you want/need lovely china go to an antique store or a higher end thrift store – so many people just dump their parents’ china when they die – I saw a gorgeous set of Haviland China today for 80.00 – 4 of everything a few serving pieces and a set of Noritake made in occupied Japan for $150 – 12 of everything – so tempting but I have my mother in law’s and my own from marriage #1 and not enough space for anything else – I use everything I have often because I can’t count on what my children will want – [Or you could go to a church fair! That’s where I have picked up countless sets of China for a few bucks and then re-donated them a few years later. – PB]
Before she died, Mary Harrington and I were in the midst of a year-and-a-half long conversation about beauty/ugly and eros/thanatos. During part of our conversation, she said this:
beauty i think is underrated. in worship life, the spiritual, the religious. beauty is as essential as love, as breathing. yet it often gets portrayed as bourgeois, a luxury, or superficial. when protestants and more recently uu’dom, especially fellowships, wrote it off as frivolous and more- they knocked one leg off the 3 legged stool of beauty, love and justice.
I wonder if part of the reason that UU-dom has so many issues with how many congregations greet/welcome visitors has to do with the collective neglect of beauty and all that comes with it.(I see that Judy W has written, so maybe she’ll have a response too) When you have something beautiful, sharing it with the “stranger” is truly seeing the divine in both them and yourself. It doesn’t take a lot of money, but it does take attention and patience–which I’m not sure enough UU congregations understand.
food for thought. thanks.
Between you and my gay friends, I was motivated to polish up the good silver yesterday. Thanks for the added incentive.