Dear Benedict,
We all have to eat and in any community, even a small one, the logistics of this will need managing somehow. You turn your attention to this in chapter 35 of your Rule.
From this is gather that feeding people is a central part of community life, begins and is sustained with prayer, and is passed onto others in a continuous stream by the same means. Everyone gets a chance to serve in this way, whatever their abilities. Each person’s service is dedicated through prayer and upheld through the prayers of the community. By prayer too, so the tasks are passed onto the next team of servers. So a seamless round of gospel based serving and being served is inaugurated.
I enjoy both roles. I love to be be part of the serving team, getting the meal together and presenting it, and I love to be amongst those served, enjoying what is being offered.
There’s a proliferation of cooking programmes on the TV. Some are more communal than others with the rounding up of tasters and the served. Some are more solitary; the server and the taster are essentially the same person. These reflect the range of eating options in our society today. Some serve and eat in a group, others do so alone.
Creative ways of making a community of servers are being explored in lock down. One of our preferred ways of socialising is with food. How to say ‘pass the sauce’ or ‘anyone for seconds’ in a zoom meal requires some thought, but this is true of our whole lives. Thinking about who we serve by our social distancing and mask wearing, or how we are served by those who keep the local down rules is a challenge every bit as much as actually keeping them ourselves.
There’s a lot of talk about doing Christmas differently, which mostly means the eating thing. It’s interesting how central a role this seems to play in the lives of so many. Needing to recreate Christmases past has always seemed rather odd to me, even though I do try to humour my 89 year old father on this one, largely because I’d hate for him to be lonely. But change can be good and help us to think afresh. After all we don’t require all Christian women to give birth in stables, do we.
The main things about eating together at any time of year seem to be to be:
Is it fair? If not what can you do about it?
Are we grateful? If not what can you do about that?
From the remembered bible: God come quickly and help us.
From the remembered gospel: Jesus said ‘I am just another server here’.
Help me to be fair enough, to be grateful enough.
From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.