Sipping Like Babette
Portland Magazine
September 24, 2020
By Karen Eifler
Pandemic, painful racial justice reckonings, vitriolic political discourse, with a killer hornet chaser—all these have given my inherent dour prophetic imagination plenty of fodder in 2020. That is, when I’m even able to think about such things as imagination of any stripe, as my brain is frizzled from what the experts are calling Zoom fatigue. And yet, people of faith know that despair, pestilence and violence do not have the final word as we ponder how to lean into this world. In these onerous times, which I readily admit I am eager to have in the rearview mirror, I propose six reasons it’s still possible to cultivate a sacramental imagination, the kind of imagination that finds grace and wonder in the smallest of things:
- Sipping like Babette: Recall the scene, well into Babette’s Feast, in which the diners quaff down their fourth and fifth glasses of wine and we glimpse Babette pause in the kitchen to enjoy a single perfect mouthful of her modest pour. I’ve noticed that with so many of our usual pursuits curtailed, little things like Thai takeout on a Friday evening, or the sunshine that oozed out of the first tomato I have ever grown in a lifetime of black thumbitude, have so much more zest. People are writing me actual letters on paper, and I realize that unlike emails or even the most nuanced emoji, handwriting is a medium with the power to call one specific person to mind. Their hand touched the same paper I hold in mine. In an era when 3-D encounters are rare treats, I am for the moment sharing the same physical space that someone precious to me occupied. It feels glorious. I want to remember what it means to savor a solitary taste, a single aroma, a moment of communion, even when the time returns that I can do whatever I want to on a Friday evening.
- Better beholding: One of my favorite lines in the English language is from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “Hurrahing in Harvest:” “these things, these things were here, and but a beholder wanting.” The discipline of honing our senses to see and hear and taste all that is possible—in order to more fully behold the grace that ushers all goodness into being—is a cornerstone of a University of Portland education. I have colleagues who have been working quiet miracles all along, using their capacious imaginations to seek and to master new tools to connect with their students long before Zoom and VoiceThread became de rigueur. Now those people are morphing into gentle rock stars on my campus, and they are prodigally generous in helping the rest of us catch up. For years, their talents were there, but a beholder wanting. I hope that looking for and genuinely beholding the gifts of my colleagues is a habit that outlasts the current situation.
- Finding new muscles: I’ve been teaching, and loving it, since the earth was cooling. I’ve even picked up a few awards for teaching. But translating what I love about this vocation to digital formats has been rough. Part of it is my uncanny ability to arouse the demon inside any device or app. (More than one priest on my campus has offered to perform the rite of exorcism on my MacBook Pro). But if I’m being honest, it’s just really difficult for me to get proficient at a new digital tool in a week. I’m not naturally gifted at these things, which is tough for a former gifted child to admit. And there are a lot of new tools to learn (yes, yes, I know: those things, those things were there, but a beholder wanting)! So it’s been kind of thrilling to click the “Open all rooms” button in Zoom and pop into those breakout rooms and see students doing what I asked them to do! And with the documents that I loaded into the Chat all by myself (well, with help from the rock stars described in #2)! And have all 27 faces re-appear in the main room when Breakout learning is over! To discover that no one has been left wandering in cyber-space! And to hear them say “thank-you” as they wave goodbye at the end of class! This otherwise bleak professional purgatory has shown me I’m still able to be a learner, not just one of the learned, a fountain of grace I hope to tap all the days of my career.
- Freedom from perfection: My spring teaching after The Pivot was ugly. Summer teemed with tutorials and reading and tech boot-camps that made the start of the fall term a bit less ugly. Somehow I am finding myself waaaay more grateful for things being “less ugly” than I ever managed to be during all those semesters when I was on top of my teaching game. More than one professional advisor has exhorted me not to let a quest for perfection interfere with adequacy. As I’ve spoken with students, colleagues, and my bosses this fall, I’ve been astounded at the number of times the word “grace” has come up in advice about how to face the inevitable glitches and moments of despair. For reasons I am still sorting through, the expectation of perfection is off the table in just about every aspect of professing, and it’s a reciprocal dynamic relationship. Like my students and co-workers granting me grace when I forget to unmute them. Or when my rambunctious terrier unfurls his full fury on the mail carrier in the background, just as my lesson is reaching its crescendo, I find my inner voice, traditionally a bit of a harpy, speaking more gently, more grace-fully to myself, and offering more grace to those in my orbits. Most of the time, it even feels like that grace is flowing less begrudgingly. I’d be delighted if these emerging habits extend into the After that will come one day.
- Taking “a God’s-eye view:” For me at least, this has been the most sacramentally vibrant of all, if we take “sacramentality” to describe an experience that reveals the infinite, prodigal love of God. When “Blursday the fortyteenth of Juprilember” morphed from a clever-adjacent internet meme to a lived reality, I realized that quarantine had altered my perception of time. Not long after that, the Psalm for the day referenced “God, for whom a thousand years is like a day,” and I felt a click of recognition in my heart, which slowly turned into appreciation, and then an invitation. Experiencing time as deeply as possible—what some call being fully present to the moment at hand—is a powerful contemplative exercise, a discipline, really, with all the entailments of that term. It’s a genuine spiritual mystery, what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “an incomprehensible certainty,” distinct from “a comprehensible uncertainty,” which is more like an Agatha Christie detective story: once Miss Marple deduces it was the butler in the pantry with arsenic, the mystery is over, solved. Incomprehensible certainties are mysteries that are with us for good; time’s paradoxical capacity to trudge and to rocket is that kind of mystery. Pandemic time has given me the tiniest glimmer of how, maaaaybe, God experiences time.
- Looking through the lens of love: Planning my remote teaching this fall—which I recognize as a process quite distinct from that done during the Terror of The Pivot—has been one in which I am keenly aware of meeting the diverse needs of my students in a manner that feel orders of magnitude more mindful and compassionate than just a year ago. Without the cues of face-to-face meetings, or seeing what their handwriting tells me about their moods or confidence, I find that I am trying to anticipate gaps in understanding. For me, that means lists, along with an ironclad promise that if they use the checklist, I guarantee that they will not miss anything. But now my lists also include self-care, to underscore that those habits too are part of a balanced diet of being a student and human being in these oddest of days. And as I assemble and review those exhaustive checklists each week, I am reminded of Jesus’ words to his friends in Luke 12:7: “The very hairs on your head have been counted.” Even the most solipsistic among us do not care so passionately about ourselves that we have taken count of the number of hairs on our head. But that is the loving attention our Creator lavishes on each one of us.
Students can choose to ignore my checklists. I too can opt to ignore the evidence that I am deeply loved by the Author of it all. While I must acknowledge that my good health, steady paycheck and dependable wi-fi are evidence of tremendous and unearned privilege—and that millions of deserving people everywhere unjustly lack one or all three of those—I hold on to the notion that I am loved by a God who counted the hairs on my head. And I want to maintain that perspective when this is over.
As I write this, my city of Portland in Oregon is covered in fine ash. Smoke from multiple forest fires has rendered the air unbreathable. Fine ash and smoke officially complete our set of Apocalyptic Horsemen, and make it even easier to succumb fully to the direness of it all. So much healing and feeding and bandaging and upending of injustices to be done! And I will get to it, I really will.
I’m banking on a sacramental worldview to help.
Karen Eifler co-directs UP’s Garaventa Center for Catholic Intellectual Life & American Culture.
