Paying Attention To The Sky

In 1956 the Danish writer Isak Dinesen (the pen-name of Susan Blixen) published a story called “Bahette’s Feast,” which, many years later, provided the basis for an extremely popular film. Dinesen’s story is about many things — friendship, loss, religious devotion, sensual delight, loyalty — but it is, I think, primarily about the Eucharist. In fact, I know of no other literary text that so fully expresses the complex of themes that cluster around this central Christian mystery.

The narrative is set in the late nineteenth century in a remote village nestled at the foot of a mountain at the edge of a Norwegian fjord. Two sisters — Martine and Philippa – the daughters of a revered Lutheran pastor who had founded an ardent sect of followers, preside over the small community. Though these disciples of the “Dean” were still admired throughout the country, their numbers were diminishing and the remaining adepts were getting “whiter, balder, and harder of hearing.” The great mark of this austere fellowship was Puritanism, the conviction that earthly joys had to be set aside if the journey toward the heavenly Jerusalem was to be facilitated. They would eat the simplest meals and live in the most frugal surroundings so that they would he free to help the poor and give themselves to prayer. We hear that Martine and Philippa have a maid called Babette.

When they were young women, both sisters were remarkably beautiful and accordingly attracted a number of suitors. But when prospective husbands would come forward seeking the Dean’s permission, the old man would respond that his daughters were `his right and left hand” and thus indispensable to him. Indeed, the girls themselves had accepted an “ideal of heavenly love” and therefore “did not let themselves be touched by the flames of this world.” Nevertheless, in their youth both were beguiled by romantic possibilities.

In 1854, when Martine was eighteen, a dashing military officer named Lorens Loewenhielm presented himself at the Dean’s home and was immediately smitten by the young woman. He followed her about, sought her out, visited her home, but became hopelessly tongue-tied and self-conscious around the Dean’s table, incapable of communicating his feelings. He loved her, but he knew that he would never be able to break down the wall of pious reserve that she had constructed around herself. Finally, on the day before he was due to leave, Martine showed him to the door. In his desperation he grabbed her hand, pressed it to his lips, and uttered, “I am going away forever. I shall never, never see you again. For I have learned here that Fate is hard and that in this world there are things that are impossible.” Upon returning home, he resolved to forget about romance and to concentrate upon the cultivation of his military career.

A year later, an even inure distinguished person came to the small town. Achille Papin, one of the most impressive opera singers of the time, had spent a week with the Royal Opera of Stockholm. He had heard of the ravishing beauty of the Norwegian coast and decided to see it on his way back to France. On a Sunday he wandered into the small church of the Dean’s congregation and heard Philippa sing. The girl had a voice so glorious that Papin became convinced that the music world of Paris would he at her feet. Through the sheer force of his personality, he managed to secure the Dean’s permission and commenced to work with Philippa.

His original intuitions were confirmed in the course of the lessons, and he predicted that soon she would be the finest singer of her time: “My greatest triumphs are before me! The world will once more believe in miracles when she and I sing together!” So ecstatic would he her reception that nobles and ladies in Paris would conduct her, after her performance, to the finest restaurant in the city, the Cafe Anglais, where a sumptuous supper would he spread before her.

During one of their sessions, Achille and Philippa sang the “seduction duet” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. As the last notes faded into the air, the master took his disciple in his arms and kissed her. Immediately afterward, Philippa asked her father to write to M. Papin, informing him that she wanted no further vocal lessons. Heartbroken, the great singer returned to France on the first boat, convinced that something irrevocable had been lost.

Fifteen years later, the bell-rope of the sisters’ home was violently pulled. When they opened the door, they found a pale, frightened woman who, upon taking one step inside, fell into a dead swoon. When she came around, the mysterious visitor produced a letter, written in French and signed by Achille Papin. It served as an introduction to the woman who stood trembling and anxious before them: Babette Hersant. She had been, Papin explained, a petroleuse [According to popular rumours at the time, the pétroleuses were female supporters of the Paris Commune, accused of burning down much of Paris during the last days of the Commune in May 1871. During May, when Paris was being recaptured by loyalist Versaillais troops, rumours circulated that lower-class women were committing arson against private property and public buildings, using bottles full of petroleum or paraffin (similar to modern-day Molotov cocktails) which they threw into cellar windows, in a deliberate act of spite against the government. Many Parisian buildings, including the Hôtel de Ville and the Tuileries Palace, were burned down during the last days of the Commune, prompting government forces to blame the mythical pétroleuses.] during the recent communard uprising in Paris and had lost both her husband and her son in the fighting.

Unable to remain in France, she was seeking, at Papin’s suggestion, refuge with the kind sisters whom he had known so many years before. He closed the letter with the tossed-off remark: “Babette can cook.” In great generosity of spirit, the sisters took in this forlorn character, and in time, in the friendly surroundings of their household, Babette “acquired all the appearance of a respectable and trusted servant.”

Because they were suspicious of French cooking (the French, they had heard. are frogs), they taught Babette how to prepare their customary meal of split cod-and ale-and-bread soup. Given their religious commitments, they explained, their food must be as plain as possible. Luxury at the table they considered an immoral extravagance. Though she never mastered Norwegian and though she remained something of an enigma to the people of the village, Babette was eventually accepted as a respected member of the community.

We learn (returning to the present day) that the one hundredth anniversary of the Dean’s birth is approaching and that the sisters want to do something special to celebrate the date. Even as they contemplate this happy prospect, they are chagrined that the spirit of their father seemed to have dissipated among his followers, for “discord and dissension had been raising their heads in his flock.” The essential problem, expressed in a variety of ways and contexts, was the inability to forgive. Martine and Philippa vaguely hoped that the upcoming festivity would bring the spiritual family together again.

As they were considering how best to mark the great day, a letter arrived from France for Babette, containing the improbable news that she had won ten thousand francs in the national lottery. Soon after, Babette begged the sisters to let her cook a celebratory dinner in honor of the Dean’s birthday. This suggestion took them aback, for though they intended to celebrate the day, they had no intention of sponsoring a festive dinner. But their cook was so insistent and eager in her pleading that eventually they gave in. And Babette had more to say: she wanted to cook for their guests, not the simple, unappetizing fare to which they were accustomed, but a real, sumptuous French dinner; and she wanted to pay for it herself.

When the sisters balked, Babette stepped forward with great and even frightening resolve and said, “Ladies, have I ever in twelve years asked you a favor? No! And why not? Because I have had nothing to pray for. But tonight, I have a prayer to make from the bottom of my heart.” Their resistance broke down, and they granted her request.

A month before the feast, Babette went on a journey (her first in twelve years). When she returned, she announced that the goods necessary for the dinner were ordered and on their way. Though the very idea of elaborate preparations for a meal, requiring a journey to a foreign country, was preposterous to the sisters, they “gave themselves into their cook’s hands.” During the next days, the food, drink and other accoutrements began to arrive.

They were surprised by the numerous bottles of wine, each with a label carefully providing its name and point of origin (Martine never dreamed that wines could have names!); but they were flabbergasted beyond words by the enormous and primordial-looking turtle that poked its snake-like head out of its greenish-black shell.

The sisters began to fear that, in surrendering to the wishes of their French cook, they were making their father’s house into the setting for a witch’s sabbath. When Martine and Philippa communicated these fears to their friends and neighbors, everyone agreed that they would eat the French meal out of deference to Babette but that, as a protest, they would not speak of it nor take any pleasure in it. One of the white-bearded elders said, “On the day of our master we will cleanse our tongues of all taste and purify them of all delight or disgust of the senses, keeping and preserving them for the higher things of praise and thanksgiving.”

The great dinner took place on Sunday, the Lord’s day. The first guest to arrive was old Mrs. Loewenhielrn, who, at ninety, had lost practically all of her hearing and sense of taste, and who was, as such, the embodiment of the community’s puritanical indifference to the pleasures of this world. She was escorted by her nephew, General Loewenhielm, the man who as a young officer so many years before had sought unsuccessfully to court Martine. He happened to be visiting his aunt at this time, and the old lady, concerned about his listless spirits, had pressed the sisters to invite him.

Though he had achieved all of his worldly goals, satisfying all of his career ambitions, the General felt unaccountably depressed and came to the dinner only reluctantly. In time, the other guests arrived until the drawing room was filled with twelve celebrants. One very old brother, in his trembling voice, then began to sing a hymn that had been composed by the Dean himself:

Jerusalem, my happy home name ever dear to me.

Gradually, the guests took up the well-known tune, and as they sang, they joined hands in fellowship. So caught up were they in the spirit of the moment that they took up a second hymn and, hands still joined, sang it through to the end.

After this impromptu choral prelude, they entered the dining room where they saw the table elegantly prepared, the glasses and silverware gleaming in the light from a row of flickering candles. When everyone was seated, one of the elders recited the lovely grace that the Dean had given them:

May my food my body maintain,
may my body my soul sustain,
may my soul in deed and word
give thanks for all things to the Lord.

Then they all commenced to eat and drink. General Loewenhielm, the only guest at the table who had not vowed to take no sensual delight in the meal, now wore a puzzled expression. For the wine he was sipping was (he could barely believe it) “Amontillado! And the finest Amontillado that I have ever tasted.” And the soup was turtle soup — the best he had ever had.

Then a new dish was served, and as everyone quietly ate, the General thought to himself, “It is Blinis Demidoff!” But when he tasted the main course, his astonishment was complete. Many years before, at the Cafe Anglais, he had eaten “an incredibly recherche and palatable dish” called Cailles en Sarcophage, which had been invented by the chef of that establishment. Turning to the man on his left, the General said, “But this is Cailles en Sarcophage!” Having no idea what the General was talking about, the man said, with utter blandness, “Yes, yes, certainly. What else would it be?”

As the meal progressed, something strange and wonderful was happening. As stories of the Dean were exchanged and as the fine food and wine gradually were having their effect, old animosities were melting away, old resentments were being healed, broken friendships were being repaired. A spirit of forgiveness and good cheer seemed to take hold of all those around the table.

So moved by what he had experienced at the banquet, and still regretting his tongue-tied self-consciousness in this same home so many years before, General Loewenhielm rose to speak. He himself was surprised by the words that came out of his mouth, for though he had been formally trained to give commands and orations on drill grounds and in royal halls, he now felt that he was but a vehicle for a higher presence. “In our human foolishness and short-sightedness,” he said, “we imagine that grace is finite…. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened and we realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends,” he went on, “demands nothing of us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude…. Grace takes us all to its bosom and declares general amnesty”

In the wake of this extraordinary oration, the entire place seemed suffused with the very grace that the General spoke of: “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.” All during the meal, it had snowed, so that when the guests were taking their leave, they noticed the entire countryside blanketed in white. As they set out, they staggered and wavered on their feet, slipping and sliding in the snow. Some slipped down or fell forward, so that their elbows, backsides, and knees were covered in white, and they resembled, as they walked away, “gamboling little lambs.”

But the story does not end on this gentle note, all things simply reconciled, all enemies simply forgiven. Our attention shifts to the kitchen, so that we can see the price that was paid to make this mystical, grace-filled gathering possible. We are told, bluntly enough, that “Babette alone had had no share in the bliss of the evening.” Like a sacrificial victim, “Babette sat on the chopping block,” surrounded by a plethora of greasy pots and pans, as exhausted and deadly white as she had been on the night when the sisters first took her in. After twelve years of silence on this point, she then spoke her identity: “I was once cook at the Cafe Anglais.” This meant little to the sisters, but Babette continued, laying out to them the full extent of her sacrifice. Her husband and son were gone, lost as we have heard, in the communard uprising, but gone too were the whole bevy of gentlemen and aristocrats who used to frequent the Cafe Anglais. Babette’s world had disappeared. Moreover, she said, “I have no money.” When the sisters protested that she had just won the French lottery, Babette calmly explained that she had spent every centime of her winnings on the great dinner.

This summary that I have presented can barely hint at the artistry in Dinesen’s beautifully understated narrative, but it can serve at least as a framework for discussing the eucharistic symbolism that suffuses the story. The fundamental motif is that the gracefulness of the meal is interwoven with, and made possible by, a whole series of sacrifices, most notably Babette’s.

We recall that the Dean’s congregation is characterized by a rather marked dualism or puritanism, according to which the things of God are divorced from the affairs and pleasures of this world. Though it has haunted the Christian tradition from the beginning, this kind of dualism is, in fact, deeply unbiblical. According to the scriptural reading, God is intimately involved in the world that he has made, and every nook and cranny of creation speaks of the beauty of the Creator.

Accordingly, the biblical imagination is not dualist, but sacramental. Though the world is other than God, the world serves as an icon of the one who made it, and therefore, whatever is good, true, and beautiful in creation functions as a potential point of contact between human beings and God. In their conviction that the heavenly Jerusalem is attained only through the eschewing of the pleasures of this world, in their exaggerated asceticism, the Dean’s congregation had lost sight of this basic truth. In fact, the very sadness and dwindling size of the community could be seen as consequences of this forgetfulness. One of the most poignant features of the story is that this dualist asceticism extended as far as precluding the sisters from romantic involvement. They had, as we saw, rejected “the flames of this world” in order to give themselves to the service of God, and hence both had turned away from giving themselves in love to a man.

Into this dualist milieu, came, unexpectedly, a visitor from another world. Babette, the master chef accustomed to the highest and finest things, arrived from Catholic France, but she was weak and lonely and bore the haggard look of a beggar. This is our first clue that the exiled cook is a figure of Christ. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul said that Christ, “though he was in the form of God, emptied himself and became a slave, being born in the likeness of men.” Christ left his natural dwelling place and willingly entered into the limitations of our world in order to transfigure it by his presence. Paul comments, in a similar vein, that “by his poverty, we became rich.”

Dinesen says, in the very cadences of Paul, that though Babette “appeared to be a beggar, she turned out to be a conquerer.” But the transformation that she effects is not an immediate one. Rather, it is prepared for by a long period of humble identification with those to whom she was sent. Although she was one of the finest chefs in Europe, she willingly agreed to prepare the simplest and least appetizing of meals; although she was used to mingling with the elite of French society, she acquiesced to making the rounds of an obscure Norwegian fishing village. But all the while, clandestinely, secretly, she is having her effect: “Her quiet countenance and her steady, deep glance had magnetic qualities; under her eyes things moved, noiselessly, into their proper places.” In a word, Babette’s humble self-emptying was remaking a disordered world from within.

But we see the full extent of this sacrifice and this remaking only in regard to the great meal. It is a biblical commonplace that God desires to express his intimacy with his people through a festive meal. In the prophet Isaiah, we find wonderful images of a great feast that God will host on the summit of the holy mountain. There will be, we are told, “juicy red meats and pure choice wines.” In the book of Wisdom, moreover, God is pictured as a Jewish mother spreading a sumptuous feast before her people. A meal at which the good things of this world become evocative of the divine presence and at which brothers and sisters sit down in intimacy with God and one another is a consistent biblical symbol of what God wants for us. It is absolutely no accident that Jesus takes up this theme, embodying it in his ministry of table fellowship. All were welcome around the table of Jesus — the rich and the poor, the respectable and the marginalized, the saint and the sinner, the healthy and the sick.

This festive eating and drinking was appreciated by Jesus as an eschatological symbol, as the concrete realization of Isaiah’s dream of divine-human fellowship. And at the culminating moment of his life, Jesus sat down with his twelve disciples and hosted a final meal. Recapitulating the whole of the biblical tradition of the festive meal and summing up the whole of his life and ministry, Jesus fed his apostles with his very self, offering himself to them in a total sacrifice, dying that they might live: “Take this all of you and eat it; this is my body…. Take this all of you and drink from it; this is the cup of my blood.”

And so Babette, as the culmination of her life and work among the people of the village, hosted a meal, which, at the symbolic level, is both the Last Supper and the Mass. It commenced, appropriately enough, on Sunday, the day of the Christian liturgy. As soon as the guests assembled, they sang a hymn, evocative of the opening song of the Mass. They then entered a great dining room and sat at a table bedecked with candles, in the manner of an altar. And at this table, a sumptuous, expensive, delightful meal was served.

As they ate and drank, their spirits were uplifted, old memories were stirred, resentments seemed to melt away, forgiveness was offered, and in the words of Martine, the stars came nearer.” General Loewenhielm’s magnificent speech, in which he invoked the infinity of God’s grace, named precisely the dynamic of the meal. God (who is nothing but grace) had indeed, through the mediation of the sensual sign of Babette’s feast, addressed and blessed his people. Heaven was not, as they had imagined, far away, and in its light, they saw the earth for the first time as it really was. The liturgy is a sacred meal at which God, in sheer graciousness, feeds his people with his own substance, thereby uniting them to him and to one another, offering the forgiveness of sins, and displaying a new vision of the world.

But then we see that this communion was made possible by a terrible sacrifice. Babette had paid a price, emptying herself out utterly, spending money, talent, and energy in abundance, in order to allow the grace to flow. It is a basic biblical truth   that a world gone wrong can be corrected only through sacrifice, that is to say, through an act of love which takes on evil and reworks it from within. In Jerusalem, the night before his death, Jesus indeed hosted a festive meal at which humanity and divinity were reconciled; but at the heart of the feast was sacrifice, the giving away of his body and blood. An act of self-negating love made possible the communion that they enjoyed. Like Babette, Jesus situated himself on a chopping block as the festivity unfolded.

There is a rather shocking detail mentioned at the very end of “Babette’s Feast.” As the dumbfounded sisters were trying to take in the full significance of their maid’s tiff, Martine remembered a tale that an African missionary had recounted to her father. It seems that the missionary had saved the life of an old chief’s favorite wife and, in gratitude, the chief had treated the Christian to a meal. Only many years afterward did the missionary learn from one of his own servants that the main course at the meal had been “a small fat grandchild of the chief’s, cooked in honor of the great Christian medicine man.”

Meal and sacrifice coalesced around the densely textured reality of what was offered. Though it repulsed her even to think of it, Martine realized that Babette had effected something very similar, giving herself away as a sacrifice that made possible a meal of grace. So real was her gift that it was as though they were eating and drinking her very substance.

At the Last Supper, Jesus said, “take this all of you and eat it; this is my body” and “take this all of you and drink from it; this is the cup of my blood.” What the disciples are invited to eat is the very self that Jesus offers in sacrifice. The grace of communion was so real because the sacrifice of self was so real. In this interweaving of meal, sacrifice, and real presence, we discover the heart of a Catholic Eucharistic theology.