Babette's Feast on Good Friday

It might seem like a strange choice; while the kids went over to watch The Passion of the Christ at the invitation of some Campion students, I watched Babette's Feast.

This capped a day of liturgy at the cathedral in Parramatta, where Bishop Fisher celebrated. I was thinking of our friends Peter and Leone, sitting a few rows away with their new baby, new Catholics experiencing the Easter Triduum for the first time. I experienced the liturgy partly through what I thought they might be thinking about the much more physical, visceral experiences of the Catholic liturgy: standing and speaking through the passion in parts, having to physically shout "Crucify Him"; watching the bishop take off his alb, then, shoes, then socks, his skull cap, and then witnessing this barefoot, capless bishop prostrate himself in front of the cross; eating the Body and Blood of Christ. The liturgy, when I first entered the Church in 1997, seemed to overwhelm the senses in some way, and why this is necessary remains a mystery. It is just so rich.

I looked out the windows of the cathedral and watched the beautiful golden light playing off the eucalyptus trees, that special light that only comes in ocean climates, and I thought of Wyoming where there's almost no water in the air, where the light is so crystal it does not not play like this light...and I felt the sense of going back into the desert; the grand, high desert. It always seems allegorical to me, the desert to a Mediterranean sea-loving person, a visceral, liturgical experience of the aesetic life versus paradise.

Babette's Feast is set in Jutland, Denmark, in a kind of desert--on the severe hills near a cold, northern ocean. The hills and the cold remind me of Wyoming, but I imagine the ocean makes it all the colder. Hanging on in the wind is a small village of severe, simple thatched white cottages, and in one lives a minister and his two beautiful daughters. Each daughter lives a simple life of piety; the joy in their faces as they sing hymns in the tiny church is reflective of their deep desire for eternity, for the things that last.

 Each daughter is also brought into contact with a different, richer life--in a worldly sense.

The elder is visited by a young soldier of wealthy family who sees in her and her life a choice, a different choice from the world of defeat and victory, conquests on the battlefield and in the ballrooms and backroom meetings. But he rejects this otherworldly beauty. He tells her, "I will never return here" and vows to himself that he will become successful...and he does.

The younger is discovered by a famous French opera singer who falls in love with the purity and beauty of her voice and her person; she refuses to go along the path to "Paris at your feet" and stays in the desert.

Years pass, and the sisters, older women now, receive a refugee from the civil war in France named Babette. Babette serves them faithfully and simply for fourteen years, cooking ale bread and soup, living in an attic, and aiding the sisters in their works of charity. Babette tells them she has lost everything in Paris, including her husband and son, to the war. So, Babette is the first to come from the riches of the world into the desert of the spirit and choose to stay. It seems that suffering the loss of her family has ripped the mask off the the world and she can now recognize the road to real peace in the simple love of the sisters.

The film is allegorical, simply written and filmed, but each element is full of meaning; nothing is wasted, and the art of the film itself is an emblem of wealth in simplicity. The desert that is the village in Jutland is not a slam on joyless Puritan-types. The little congregation are devout and deeply committed to living a desert hermit's life away from the temptations to pride that lace the outside world. Yet sin and dissension live here too; it is not paradise but rather an allegory for the Christian walk, the carrying of the cross, the single-minded purity that is required: "Be more righteous than the Pharisees." The village, in the cold and wind, is the life and the road that is not yet Home, a refugee existence that awaits true paradise.

So the little devout group which Babette serves struggles with sin, but they are at least struggling, trying to love but not able to do it themselves. Babette remains among them, disguised as 'one whom seemed pitiful, disfigured, who had no comeliness to attract our eye.'

And then Babette wins the lottery. She asks the sisters if she can prepare "a good French meal" for their late father's anniversary celebration. Reluctantly, they agree, and then strange things begin to arrive, from giant turtles to tiny quails. The sisters begin to be fearful that they will be tempted to forsake the riches they search for in the aescetic life-- a closely guarded life that keeps the passions from controlling them.

Afraid of offending God, the little group decides that they will "eat as if not eating" and keep their mind on higher things as they suffer this intrusion of a French meal.

The young soldier who chose worldly success, providentially turns up at the meal; he is now a successful general who has been all over Europe, including Paris. He comes back to reckon with his choice as a young man to reject the spiritual life, the carrying of the cross. He is expecting, I think, pain and regret, because his life has become empty, empty as a real desert.

They sit down to a table resplendent with Limoge china and crystal and candles. They begin with turtle soup, move to blinis with caviar, then Babette's own creation of quail tart, each course punctuated with exquisite wine, like violins plucking gentle notes to spice and make magic with the cellos. As the dinner progresses and the wine flows, walls between people slowly come down and the joy of the food on the tongue turns the 'instrument that can cause so much destruction' into an instrument of forgiveness, love, and joy.

Babette, meanwhile, in truth one of the greatest chefs in the world, having spent all she had on this one meal for those she has loved and served selflessly for fourteen years, sits in the kitchen, wiping the sweat from her brow. She is the self-emptying, crucified artist who makes the physical magic of food into a spiritual love-fest.

At the end of the meal, the general stands and makes this speech:

“Mercy and truth,  my friends, have met together. Righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.
Man, my friends, is frail and foolish. We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble.

“We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite.

“Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! that which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!”

In the allegory, the ascetic life has been kissed by the beauty of the artist, who works in mediums like food, and wine, and song--and it is a touch of paradise, a kind of foretaste. The little group sings in a circle under the stars, their souls freed and allowed to love more easily because the body is joyful. It is the proper relation between the spirit and the passions. 

Babette's Feast is often read as a criticism of severe asceticism, and there is a sense in which unrelenting Lent can begin to mar the soul, that the Feast is the point; but I do not think that is the only point of the movie. Rather, it is also a picture, a visceral one (you can almost taste the wine as you watch it, and feel the discipline of the cold climate) of where Good Friday and Easter meet, and that Easter comes through, from, Good Friday. 

For embodied souls marred by original sin, the desert is really the only way to understand the garden.  For us, the body, the senses, is the way to the soul; the lesson must be learned in this way and no other. 

And so, the Church has both desert hermits, bare monastic cells, and Michaelangelo. The liturgy is also visceral and we experience the asceticism of an empty tabernacle, only to be fed Babette's Feast in the Eucharist, as the Lord spends all He has to feed, really feed ( "This is my Body, this is my Blood, Amen") those He has served and loved from eternity.