When you gather people together for a feast, says Barry Boyce, if you set the time and the table, the food, and the accouterments just right, it can bring grace.
Several years ago I had the good fortune to visit the refectory (dining hall) of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, which houses Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” The original fresco is naturally more striking than the crushed velvet versions found in many truck stop gift shops. It transcends the cartoonish image that we hold in our minds based on seeing so many reproductions.
To my eyes, the most noticeable thing about the painting is not its divinity but its earthiness, its everyday humanity. People are eating. In fact the recent restoration of the fragile work revealed more elements from the banquet table than had previously been seen: a platter of fish, sparkling wine glasses, finger bowls, an orange, a roll.
The celebrants are shown taking part in a sacrament, a sacred ritual, something that binds human beings together. The idea of sacrament that I grew up with was something held apart from every day life, something possessed and doled out by a priesthood, and therefore it had no direct influence on daily life. The last supper and so many other stories were fairy tales that bore no relation to the evening meal.
The sacred existed in a vault, not in the street. As time progressed and the logics I was given for taking part grew threadbare, rites and rituals seemed to become completely emptied of their connection to human life, to become mere repetition without the spark of newness, the faces of the participants drawn and bored. Rituals are vital to human life, but they all too easily are sapped of their vitality, when they become precious curiosities. Today, many of us are inheriting or borrowing rituals from other cultures and traditions, but it is the essential nature of ritual—the sanctifying of our experience—that we must pay closest attention to. New rituals can become as empty as those we have discarded or those ritualistic aspects of everyday life that we have chosen to neglect.
“A visible form of invisible grace” is the first definition of “sacrament” offered by the American Heritage Dictionary. If we understand grace as the innate goodness of human beings, we can see the sacramental possibilities of everyday life. When you gather people together for a feast, if you set the time and the table, the food, and the accouterments just right, it can bring grace.
A professor I studied with in college, Henry Johnstone, taught me more in the meals we took together than in any other context. In those meals, I learned the art of conversation. There was a kind of light talk that accompanied a pre-meal drink, then a focused conversation, an involved give-and-take that culminated at the end of the meal. If you began to speed too far ahead, to get distracted, the food brought you back. Dessert and coffee allowed for more sublime reflection, a slow pace in keeping with the satiation one felt at that point. The pace was set by the activity, not by the clock. A mere lecture in a classroom could not allow for this visible manifestation of invisible grace. It provided an enchanting type of learning, something that transcended books and tests.
In the 1987 Danish film by Gabriel Axel, Babette’s Feast (derived from an Isak Denisson short story originally published in the Ladies Home Journal), the French housekeeper Babette completely charms the members of a small Lutheran sect in remote Denmark with a sumptuous multi-course feast, and undermines their austerity. This sacredly profane ritual of dining allows them to rediscover themselves. Likewise, in Scott Campbell and Stanley Tucci’s Big Night, the two Italian brothers, Primo and Secundo, invite many friends to a feast built around a meticulously prepared torta rustica. Each of the guests becomes fully themselves. They laugh. They cry. They let go.
It is often the curse of human life to believe that the defining moment awaits us in the future, a simultaneously self-fulfilling and self-defeating prophecy. It gives us a false sense of time, the feeling that we’re getting somewhere. It is probably more true that life consists of a continual series of ritual, rites, even sacraments that we conduct. Perhaps one of the great marks of dignified human life is to treat those rituals with care, respect and attention to detail. The haphazard chase that life has often become battles with our rituals. Too many meals are taken on the run, barely tasted. Friends’ children are born with little participation from us. People die and are unceremoniously whisked away. We don’t sit down with our family and our friends often enough.
The organic patterns of life provide us with the chances to find grace, right here in the life that we are living now. That is the beauty and poignancy of ritual, when it is more than going through the motions in order to get on with the real serious business of our lives. Every supper is the last supper from the point of view of now.
