Experiment 11: Set a beautiful table.
Photo Credit: Brooke Lark on Unsplash
A couple of months ago, my husband’s mother and father came from Ethiopia to live with us. We have the gift of seeing up close how they live their lives: the daily rituals, the ways of waking up, folding shirts, washing pots. One of the things I am learning from my mother-in-law Lucky is how to set the table.
In the everyday rush of filling stomachs to get on with the next thing on the to-do list (chasing chubby legs and making that call and repotting the begonia), I’ve tried to be as efficient as possible with meals. Dinner is often thrown together in the squeeze of minutes between speed-walking back from the park and the sound of the back door bleeping as my husband walks in from a day at work. I feel there is little time to waste on ceremony. When we eat tacos for example, I toss the plastic bags of tortilla chips and shredded cheese onto the table and serve the meat and beans straight from the steaming pans.
But Lucky sets her table differently. She takes time to find a fresh bowl and a silver spoon for each of the dishes she has made. For the salad, a cream-colored bowl rimmed in fading gold. For the shiro, a ceramic one the color of delphinium. The meat perhaps in a cut glass bowl that before I only fished out for parties. My Americanness (and busy motherhood) revolts at the unnecessary doubling of dishes that must be washed.
What is the point?
In the Ethiopian tradition, meals are sacred spaces of fellowship and angel-feeding (like Abraham under the terebinth trees, Ethiopians treat their guests as divine emissaries). During meals, everyone tries to encourage everyone else to eat (more, more), and the hosts must express dramatic dismay if their guests do not eat to the point of gorging. To express your love and affection to an Ethiopian, you feed them–with your own fingertips–a bite so big the hinges of their mouth can barely grasp it. Outside of mealtimes, food is an essential step in conversational ritual. I am learning to ask my Ethiopian parents each morning (even if I know the answer), Have you eaten breakfast? Are you full? Could I get you more?
Taking the time to place each of the dishes in its own bowl slows me down. Slowing down, I can acknowledge the gifts abundant in the everyday act of eating. The gift of the lives given to sustain mine: the cows butchered, the plant ovaries (a.k.a. fruit) chopped, the seeds pulverized. The gift of tasting the spark of lime and spice fireworks and meat so tender it dissolves on the tongue. The gift of eating in a world where hundreds of millions of people are chronically undernourished.* The gift of sitting down in such close proximity to my beloveds that I can see the lines tracing stories on their faces.
Taking time to set the table with care also helps me to see meals not just as means to an end (fuel for doing, working, being busybusybusy). But to see meals as they really are: a foreshadowing of the Great Supper of the Lamb (Mark 14:22-25, Revelation 19). One glorious and holy day–the culmination of all time–the saints from all the ages will sit together to a lavish feast. Abraham and Esther and Augustine and Phyllis Wheatley and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and your Nana who would sing about Jesus when she opened the curtains in the morning all jostling elbows and passing the focaccia and pouring the Pinot Noir and being full to bursting, bursting not so much from the food (which is the best you’ve ever tasted) but from the sheer, ineffable delight of being in the presence of Jesus.
To eat together is to taste heaven.
Some days, in my impatience or practicality (we do live in time, after all), I don’t set out special bowls and silver spoons for each dish. But when I do, there is a blessing in the slowing down, in the care. There is beauty in setting the table with inefficient gusto.
And some days, I might even light a candle, too.
* https://www.worldvision.org/hunger-news-stories/world-hunger-facts
This blog is part of the “Experiments in Inefficiency” series, which explores what it means to resist unbiblical cultural and personal pressures to produce in favor of Jesus’ easy yoke.
