(a Steve Orr Bible reflection)
The film Midnight in Paris made me consider a visit to 1920s France.
Owen Wilson stars as a modern man unhappy with the way his life is turning out. Then one midnight in Paris, he finds what may make him happy: He travels back in time to the 1920s. There he enjoys the company of such luminaries as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and many more creatives of “The Lost Generation.”
How might I discover what it would really be like to do that: live, walk, eat in that seemingly magical time when the writers and artists we celebrate were all together in one place? The answer: Hemingway was there and he wrote it all down.
Sure, he lived in near poverty, but he knew the people whose ideas and artistic expressions changed the world. He filled notebooks with his thoughts on the places, the people, and the events of his time in Paris.
Hemingway later organized those notebooks into a book. His wife named it A Moveable Feast. The title comes from a comment he made to a friend in 1950: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast."
Those Lost Generation icons immersed themselves in that moveable feast, only to learn that for some places, “There is no there there.” Ultimately, that feast left an aftertaste of bitterness and disappointment.
This week's scriptures are about a different kind of moveable feast. Phrases like “delight yourselves in rich food” (Isaiah 55:2) and “My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast” (Psalms 63:5) capture the reality of eating the spiritual food God has prepared for us. We are urged to remember their true source when we ingest that "same spiritual food" and that "same spiritual drink" as the Israelites in the wilderness (1st Corinthians 10:3-4).
We may not be able to travel back to 1920s Paris. In contrast, we are urged to come to the feast prepared for us by God, a feast that moves with us through our lives.
We can expect to be richly fed.
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