Preparing for a Feast

Next week is Thanksgiving, so most of us are making our plans and thinking about food: what to cook, where to buy, how much we need, how long it takes, where to store it, when to pick it up, and a hundred other considerations. If you are the one hosting your family, you have the house to clean, the table to set, chairs to locate, and dishes to wash. If you are traveling, you have to pack, prepare sides to bring along, and load all the kids into the car. The preparation before a feast can be overwhelming at times, it can beg you to ask yourself whether it wouldn’t be easier to cut corners or skip out entirely. But the joy of a feast, of traditions carried on and family gathered together over the banquet of food, is worth every effort we put in, and we are reminded of that every year when we sit down at our full plates and tables.

But if you need a little extra encouragement and inspiration going into the busyness of next week, may I recommend to you the 1987 movie Babette’s Feast, a movie which centers on a feast that is lovingly prepared and lavishly set out for others who don’t even have the background or tastebuds to fully appreciate it. The movie is long and slow, just like the preparation of the feast. In it, the French chef, Babette, is forced to leave her homeland and takes refuge in Denmark as a housekeeper to two pious members of an ascetic Christian cult. When later she wins the French lottery, she decides to spend the entirety of her winnings on the ingredients for one spectacular feast that she serves in honor of the two women’s late father. She spends all her money and an entire day’s full work on this food. Her skill as a chef is evident, her love for the work and the food is obvious in every detail. In this movie, she finds a way not just to enjoy the feast itself, but especially the preparation of it. Simply by making the best meal she possibly could, and serving it to others, she is loving them.

For a slow moving film that isn’t even in English, there is a lot going on in it. It compares prodigality and asceticism, law and gospel, indulgence and restraint, and while it centers around the moving experience of this feast, it doesn’t end with a new lifestyle of feasting every day. The money is spent, life returns to normal. There is no tidy message to be drawn from it. Instead, it invites the viewer to think over the movie, play it back in their head, savor, chew on, and digest it, if you will. It asks questions of religion, questions of lifestyle, questions of taste, questions of art. While your Thanksgiving plans are likely nowhere near as elaborate and your guests nowhere near as pietistic, this movie speaks to all feasts, and the worthiness of the work and artistry put into them. And it also reminds us of all that we have to be thankful for, both here in this life, despite any hardships we endure, and there at the perfect wedding feast in the next.

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If you’re interested in reading more about this excellent movie, I can recommend this article by Joshua Gibbs that digs into the themes in a much deeper way, and includes the hilarious line “the first paragraph of Dinesen’s story suggests members of the Brotherhood “renounced the pleasures of this world, for the earth and all that it held to them was but a kind of illusion,” and this sounds like exactly zero Lutherans I know.”