The Dining Room

continuing my house tour with Thomas Howard in Splendor of the Ordinary...

My house's dining room is part of what I think they call the Great Room -- it's a combined living room and dining room, with a kitchen set apart by a counter only, not a completely separate room.  We wanted it that way because our vision was that we had large central spaces to gather, and smaller private nooks tucked away in various corners of the house.

Thomas Howard asks us to consider the deeper significance of "dining" or eating our meals, and why the activity has commonly been associated with some kind of ceremony.
 

This made me wonder what dining and meals means to me, which in turn means thinking of the meals in my memory.

I grew up in a home where we ate dinner together every night as a family, gathered around the table.   It was simply what we did. 

At present my family eats meals together, except for the adult children who have left the nest, but we seem to have gotten in a habit of gathering around the living room in different chairs as we eat, each reading a book.   Hmph.  Not exactly the ideal.  I keep suggesting that we go back to family meals at the dinner table but so far haven't gotten around to actually making it happen. 

Then there is the sociological research, which often ends up confirming the wisdom of earlier generations --- so now there is evidence that regular family meals have broad benefits for kids, particularly.    If you want smart, non-addicted, good kids, one of the best things you can do is eat meals together (with the TV off) 

Who would think that family dinners could make kids do better in school and say no to drugs and have a more balanced diet?   This is only one way that the reality of things seems expansive rather than reductive.

I don't know if our bookish meals count as family meals.   We are together, eating a home-prepared meal, but it lacks something of the ceremony and shared experience of a tradtional family dinner table.  So probably not. Hmph.  

Besides my childhood, my present life and the American cultural landscape,  the meals that I have kept most clearly in my mind are literary meals.   I think CS Lewis says somewhere that meals are key elements of classic literature.  Take a look sometime.   How food is treated in a literary work reveals something of the philosophy or worldview of the book.    For example, food, the provision and preparation and partaking of it, is a key, even central element in Scripture 

• There are the recurrent celebratory feasts in the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid.   Epic stories seem to be associated closely with epic feasts.   There are oxen roasted and wine drunk and lots of songs and later, competitive games.   
• There is Abraham preparing food for the angels.
• There is the Passover meal, of course, and the manna made into a kind of cake in the wilderness.   
•  There is Heidi eating bread and milk and cheese with Grandfather, without a proper table, and later Grandfather making her own stool for her so they can both sit down.
• There is Lucy's tea with Tumnus the Faun, and the other Pevensies' meal with Mr and Mrs Beaver
• There are the feasts with the elves in Fellowship of the Rings
• Most of all there is the Last Supper, and later, the Risen Savior cooking and serving fish to His disciples.  

.I am not as interested in the china and silverware and linen and ceremony aspect of the dining room as Howard is  Most meals that I have been part of or read about were not notable for stateliness.   The Homeric feasts sound convivial and probably loud, Abraham had no dining room, the Passover meals took place in slaves dwellings, the manna was prepared and eaten in the desert, Grandfather's dining arrangements were rudimentary,... and so on. 

The theme I see is the other ones Howard brings out -- the sharing aspect, the bringing together of things that are suited to the occasion, a certain gravity-- not mournful or stiff, but appreciating the very particular things involved in that meal.   Grandfather's preparations for Heidi's meals are described with great care, as is Tumnus's very nice tea preparations for Lucy.    The simple words describing the Last Supper seem to have deep pauses between them, which of course is reflected in the ceremony of the Mass today. 

You can also see in all those literary meals how the occasion, humble in setting and trappings as it often was, provides or consolidates what we might now call a bond between the participants. 

There is a kind of rhythm to a meal -- from the first preparations to the last cleaning up, and at the center of it the meal itself, a sharing in many ways.    Every meal had its remote beginnings in the fields or vineyards or orchards, its mediate beginnings in the work of the farmer and later, perhaps, the work of the family to bring the food into the home, then the proximate beginnings of the meal in the preparations of the cook, and finally the gathering to sit down before it.

 Kathleen Norris talks about this in Quotidian Mysteries -- how she was surprised to see the priest "doing dishes" at the conclusion of the Liturgy of the Eucharist, but realized that it said something very real about beginnings and endings and the deeply significant nature of seemingly mundane tasks.  

The other aspect that Howard brings out, that Kathleen Norris also emphasizes, is the repetitive "quotidian" nature of things like meals.   We will come to the table again and again, thousands of times during the years of our lives    But the dailiness of it does not take away from the significance.   Kathleen Norris writes:

"The Bible is full of evidence that God's attention is indeed fixed on the little things. But this is .. simply because God loves us--loves us so much that we the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life. It is in the ordinary, the here-and-now, that God asks us to recognize that the creation is indeed refreshed like dew-laden grass that is "renewed in the morning" or to put it in more personal and also theological terms, "our inner nature is being renewed everyday".

Finally, there is the celebratory aspect -- the "something very like perfection" in the Homeric feasts.   Pagans often seemed to intuitively associated the afterlife with bountiful provisions --  like the Valhalla of the Vikings.   And in one of His parables, Jesus compared heaven to a great wedding feast, so it seems plain that God means us to associate the particularity and temporal nature of meals with joy and eternity   In the wedding at Cana, among other things, Jesus seems to show how God takes the elements of an ordinary, biological series of events -- things planted and grown and harvested and prepared for the table --  and makes it way more than the sum of its parts.

Hallowing the House: Focal Points and Entryways

When I was in Oregon I visited a house that some friends of my sons had just moved into.  The parents of the family were from Singapore; the house was spacious and new.   What I remember vividly was that even though they had already unpacked, almost every closet was nearly empty!   My own house was stuffed--  the attic, the closets, even under the beds --.   Of course we were six people living in 1000 square feet.  But this was a family of five and they apparently had WAY less stuff than I did, even though by the size and location of the house they could have afforded lots more junk than I could.

The other thing I noticed about the house was that every room had a focal point.    In the living room attention immediately went to a huge but simply spray of branches (or something like that -- it was elegant and spare and eyecatching).    All the surfaces were clean and empty.   It did not look barren, though.    My interior would not be suited by an exterior like that, but I did admire it, and it has lasted in my mind as an example of simplicity than was not barren, but beautiful.

I'm getting to the entryway ....

Thomas Howard suggests that entryways have gone out of favor because we don't admire "show" and ceremony in our culture.   "Come in through the garage door -- make yourself one of the family!"    He thinks that this blurs a distinction and misses an opportunity.  Not that everyone has to rush out and buy a house with a formal entry and then decorate it at great expense -- BUT...

Coming in and leaving a place involve a transition, a sort of pause and preparation.  An entryway is sort of an architectural statement of that.   Even entering a tiny house or a tent, there is usually some sort of place to stop for a moment, take off your coat and shoes perhaps, and make yourself ready to join in the stream of the family life.    This physical space, even if tiny and simple, provides a welcome, and evokes the dignity of the guest or newcomer -- it respects and acknowledges them.

Thinking over all the entryways I've been in, I'm thinking that they also provide an early preview of what kind of house one is going into.    Hospitality is a relationship between guest and householders, and the entryway serves as a sort of introduction and preparation.   It may also indicate somewhat the kind of manners that are expected.   My mother in law has a condo in town and a cabin up in the mountains.   The condo is elegant and spic and span.  The cabin is homely, with old comfy furniture and "mountain colors" (my mother in law's term for colors that hide the mountain dust!).   The condo has an entryway through a little garden patio; the mountain cabin has three entrances and all are open and lead right into family living -- one to the kitchen, one to the living room, and one to the dining room.  Both are very welcoming, because the hosts are welcoming and love visitors, but they are welcoming in very different ways. 

So to tie into the beginning of the post, which you probably wondered had to do with the rest of it, the entryway (Howard says) CAN seem like wasted space, but really it is a focal point.   It hopefully gives the message that you welcome your guests (and returning family members) and want to make things pleasant and attractive for them.    You don't want them overwhelmed with clutter or dirt; you don't want them puzzling over where to put their coat; you don't want them left in the darkness because the light bulb is burned out.   On the other hand, I think most of the time in the US you don't want them intimidated by fancy features that are more about impressing them than welcoming them.