Just Enough is a Feast 2-13-12

Anderson, South Carolina

Circumstances worked out for me to participate in a three-day wedding extravaganza in Torino, Italy. The venue for this grand nuptial banquet was a wondrous sienna brick castle with its moat and draw bridge still intact. One can only wonder at the stories held in mute secrecy by those seven hundred year old walls.

At 3 PM we guests convened with the wedding party under marquees in the bottom of the drained and landscaped moat for assorted spirits and starters, lifting toasts to two lives reaching unity in love. About 4 PM we entered a grand ballroom from another world, decorated with epic battle paintings and inlaid parquet floors, illuminated by grandiose chandeliers, looking like something from the winter palaces of Russia. At 9 PM we slowly staggered out of the banquet hall having gained something on the order of five pounds or more, bloated into absolute misery.

Perhaps an hour or so into the main feast, wondering just how many courses there were to be, it seemed expedient to start writing down exactly what we were eating. It would make the stuff of great party conversation. Various platters of whole flaming things, feathered things, things still recognizable as once living beings, and dozens of side dishes filled out a full fifteen-course spread that effectively bankrupted the bride’s family. During those six hours I often wished we had Styrofoam coolers, dry ice and Tupperware. This one gut-wrenching feast would have fed me in opulence for two weeks. I think our collective post-prandial wretchedness was the equal or greater than the misery experienced during a forty-day religious fast. I nearly had an existential crisis, wondering if there wasn’t some middle ground, a Holy Grail of moderation.

Last night I dined from a plastic tray on a bedside table in a seventh floor hospital room. A dear friend attempting to qualify for lung transplant has spent much of the past year hospitalized. We have occasional dinner dates in Karen’s room and dream of making a road trip to the nearest transplant center; I’m appointed her medical guardian if she’s granted this chance at new life. I stop by the cafeteria to buy dinner, timing my arrival to match her meal service. My friend’s medical condition is such that eating much of anything makes her bloated beyond measure, creating breathless misery. Consequentially her four-ounce yogurt and fruit cocktail containers became my dessert course after I dispatched a vegetable plate and small salad.

Karen’s room faces the helipad, well illuminated with intense red and green landing lights. She commented how it always looks like Christmas when she gazes out the window at night. What an attitude. Someone suffocating with end-stage lung disease, confined for nearly a year, unable to walk to the bathroom, thinks the world looks like Christmas. I sat there thinking how good my vegetable plate tasted to me, enjoying a good friend’s upbeat attitude. I had a fine banquet, one from which I left feeling light of foot and spirit, not bloated with the misery that comes from trying to grasp too much from the world, from life itself. No one was bankrupted paying for this repast; $4.12, tax included.

A family nearly bankrupted itself trying to grasp for too much, pretending financial abundance, only to send guests away in the dark, miserable and burdened down. I had dinner last night in a world that looks like Christmas all year to one who needs the ultimate gift of life – new lungs – something another will offer as a supreme gift in death. No amount of money could buy such a gift. Karen knows that gift will come from the one who invented Christmas. She often dreams of a giant Christmas tree with pink lungs on it.

Sitting in a recovery meeting recently, one of our members was speaking about contentment and acceptance. Out of the mouth of this life-worn man came the most profound thing I’ve heard in a while, ‘enough is a feast.’ It took me a moment to grasp what he had just said; the theological implications offered the makings of several sermons.

Contentment and acceptance are mission-critical aspects of successful long-term sobriety. Without them, resentment fuels emotional pain more than capable of driving one back into catastrophic addiction. This newly-sober alcoholic was in wonder at having found the Holy Grail of moderation, not too much, not too little, enough, the fertile soil of contentment. In between too much and too little, he found by being average of station and resource he could be quite at peace with himself, God, and his world. He had grasped contentment, a prize nearly the equal of new lungs.

The Apostle Paul made a declaration of acceptance and contentment in his own life, one that’s been a foundational imperative for two millennia: rest in contentment, no matter one’s state of affairs. “I have been on frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my countrymen, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers on the sea, dangers among false brethren; I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need.”

Those in recovery often speak of dealing with life on life’s terms. Sometimes we eat in castles. Sometimes we eat on plastic trays. Sometimes health is robust. At other times illness takes our breath away. We learn to turn our lives and will over to the care of God, asking only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. When we let him do the choosing, we get His best. Then we really have reason for the world to look like Christmas every day, no matter what.