Why we choose beauty when we're tired

Babette's Feast & the transcendent

It is for some of us that moment following Christmas when we can rest from our preparations, hosting, and serving but may find ourselves a bit worn out. Although joyous, holidays often tax our minds, hearts, and bodies in different ways than we’re accustomed to. I love beauty, but I get tired (especially at this point in pregnancy).

Our Christmas table this year!

In the week leading up to any holiday, in the midst of cooking, baking, wrapping, decorating, and attending to ordinary needs, a part of me questions all the effort. Why is this work worth it? Why labor over meal plans, spend energy baking trays of cookies, consider flower arrangements and table settings, wrap gifts with real ribbon? Why feast?  

At their core, these are questions about the nature of beauty and our responsibility towards it. Why does it matter—in any season? What is it—at its simplest and barest?

Art often unsurprisingly provides the best answers. Through the 1987 Danish drama Babette’s Feast, one of my favorites, I’ve returned to considering that beauty, like prayer, is actually useless—(maybe an ironic answer to the questions above).

Of course, we can think of many benefits to prayer and beauty, but, being such high things, both are ends in themselves, serving no other purpose than to exist for the delight of the divine. They are helpful but not necessarily useful.

This uselessness, I think, explains why we find it easy (although not salutary) to skip our morning meditations when we are busy, or to put off leisure, and to question the worth of beauty—especially when we’ve a long list of “practical” items on our lists.

A similar disposition permeates the community into which Babette enters later in her life, a life punctuated by suffering, loss, and apparently—as we learn later—very good food. Fleeing France, Babette comes to live in a small coastal village in Denmark, a place set deeply in ways of stringent simplicity. The landscape is harsh and gray, the worship stifled, and the food comically unappetizing.  

We discover gradually through the account of passing characters that Babette was once a well-known cook in Paris, that food is her passion and art, the expression of her interior beauty. 

When Babette learns that she has inherited a large bit of money, she decides to spend it on the ingredients to cook a truly splendid meal for her new community: many exotic courses that take hours to prepare. The pair of sisters with whom Babette lives are skeptical and intimidated: “A French meal?” they ask. Upon tasting the meal, which lasts several hours, however, their hearts and minds seem awakened.

Meanwhile, Babette works in the kitchen, meticulously preparing each course, finally able to share her art with the hungry.  

“That was a very good dinner,” the sisters complement, beaming into the kitchen with rosy cheeks. For one evening, Babette has given her friends an experience that, by delighting their senses, lifts them beyond sense, beyond themselves and the limitations of their lives, choices, and surroundings. 

When the women discover that Babette has spent all of her money on the meal and has nothing left (nor a home or family to return to in Paris), they are at first horrified. She smiles though not without melancholy: “An artist is never poor.”  

As one sister embraces her, she whispers that this is not the end for Babette’s art: “How you will delight the angels.” She is confident that Babette’s gift will find its fullness in paradise. In other words, her gift, although rooted in their material world, because of its beauty, takes its rightful place in another.  

Furthermore, Babette spends her money, herself, offers everything she has, “her best,” to her art. It is not frivolous, although it may be useless. It is a gift. But of course, as the film ends, an uncomfortable question rests quietly: What if Babette had not made the meal? What might never have been revealed? How would the lives of the characters end? 

Although these may seem dramatic in relation to our own lives, these are also the counter-questions we can ask when discouragement and doubt and tiredness set in: What might be lost?

People are almost always struck by beauty and effort. They are transported by simple experiences of quality and intention. We can hope that, by our efforts, our families, children, and friends encounter it. 

Another view.

However, we should not confuse such a gift with notions of perfection or performance. At its simplest and barest, beauty is what we can see of goodness—but actually less about looks and more about content. Goodness is full, authentic, true, both drawing from us and coming towards us. In this way, when the days cannot hold all of our endeavors, we can pare back what is not essential and examine what is. And as a person who tends to over-do, I made a concerted effort to be simpler this Christmas season without sacrificing beauty.

I encourage you to continue celebrating through the twelve days and choosing beauty. Here is my list of ongoing necessities (yours will differ): a tidy house, fresh clothes and linens, live greenery draped here and there, real candles, gifts tied with fabric ribbons, food that nourishes my families eyes and bodies, good drink, poetry read aloud, prayer, and song. When possible, we’ll lean into ritual; this too has a way of lifting us out of weariness.

It is the transcendent that is at stake around questions of feasting and garlands and song—and preparing beautiful food and investing in our houses. We should be prudent and humble in our efforts but not forget to prioritize it. Rather than enclosing us within the world of sense, beauty is among the only things which breaks open our senses towards heaven.