Memorial of St. Lucy, Virgin & Martyr
‘Tis the season for Christmas specials: The Grinch. A Charlie Brown Christmas, Home Alone, It’s a Wonderful Life. Set out some Christmas cookies, a bowl of Chex Mix, and a few mugs of hot chocolate. Add a snowy forecast, a few loved ones, and a screening of your favorite Holiday special, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a Christmasy evening.
And for good reason. One way or another, those specials (along with those holiday treats) capture something important about the season—that it’s about generosity, losing yourself to joy, seeing the good in your life now, discovering that your enemy isn’t, well, your enemy, taking pleasure in the flavors of the season, and so on.
As you plan your festive evening, I’d like to suggest an addition to your annual Christmas “specials” list: Babette’s Feast (1987). The film is set in a very small fishing village in 19th century Denmark. The people of the village are haunted (for good and ill) by the memory of the Protestant pastor who nurtured his flock there. His two daughters, who (though very gifted and beautiful) never married because their father didn’t want them to leave his side.
Many years after his passing, a middle-age woman from Paris shows up one stormy night on their doorstep. She has lost her husband to political violence in the city and is at risk herself. She arrives with a letter from an old admirer of one of the sisters—he asks her and her sister to take the woman in. Reluctantly, they do.
But what will they do with her? She comes from the city. She wears fine fabrics. She obviously knows nothing of life in a small fishing village. What can she possibly do to earn her keep?
Turns out Babette can cook, and so she lives in an upper room in the sisters’ home and serves as their cook and housekeeper. In time, she takes over the sisters’ roll cooking and delivering meals to shut-ins in the village. Notably, even with very limited access to grocery items, herbs, and spices, Babette manages to transform the thick and pasty fish stew that the sisters traditionally served into something downright tasty. Recipients receive her meals like tiny miracles.
Things take a dramatic turn in the tiny village when Babette finds out that the lottery ticket she bought years ago (and a friend renewed annually) won! Suddenly, she is rich with 10,000 Francs.
I will resist the temptation to tell you the rest of the story because you must see it for yourself. But, I do want to say this.
With her winnings, Babette creates a work of art that transforms her guests such that old slights are resolved, anger turns to laughter, delight replaces judgment, joy overcomes fear, envy falls to friendship, a cold austerity gives way to loving excess. A Christmas story, to be sure.
The crucial moment in the film comes when the very pious church members (who feared that the “strange” items on Babette’s menu were somehow satanic) begin to enjoy it (and especially the fine wine). This is when the community begins to learn who Babette is.
When Babette arrived on the sisters’ doorstep, she was destitute. She had nothing and no one. The sisters took her in. They were her providers. She, their very efficient, frugal, and hard working cook and housekeeper.
Babette certainly was those things. But to sum her up that way was to misrecognize her—to not really see who she as.
Lots of people did not recognize Jesus in his time for who he really was either. And, as we learn in the Gospel passage for today, that was true for John the Baptist too. Like the sisters and their church community, people in Jesus’ time misrecognized him and John the Baptist. All they could see were two men who threatened the powers that be and the status quo. Problems to be eliminated, exiled, imprisoned, beheaded, crucified.
Recognition: Seeing the other for who they really are, as best we can. This is by no means easy. And, Jesus wants us to know, it’s our calling. Moreover, he thinks we can do it. May we make it so.
—Sue Trollinger