The Feast

We had two feasts in a row last week. We decided to throw a goodbye party for all the teachers and our friends on Thursday night, and they decided to throw a goodbye party for us on Friday night! And they were two of the best nights of my life. Kicking a football around in the dusk-light, laughing and dancing with the women who were helping us cook the dinner on about 6 different fires, sitting around an open fire chatting and listening to a hilarious mixture of African pop, Christian songs I used to sing in church when I was ten, and Malawian marriage songs – “I can’t wait to marry you, my laaa-ooove.”, “I am never ever going to change my mind”, and many other delightful and encouraging lyrics. 

There was an entertaining moment (or infuriating, depending on your level of commitment to the feminist cause) when we declared that the meal was self-service. The men sat, looking confused. I was thinking – ‘Usually they’re dead keen for the food, why aren’t they going for it like mad?’ – but then they started saying, “Are the ladies not going to serve us?”. They seriously couldn’t deal with the idea that they weren’t going to have the food brought to them! Kamanga just kept saying “Self-service... self-service... self-service...” as if he was chewing the concept over to make it a little more digestible. But when we did manage to encourage them up from their places and towards the food, we discovered the reason for this social convention. A couple of the teachers – who shall not be named – took a big portion of rice, then a heap of meat, which they then attempted to hide with another huge mountain of rice, until the tower looked fairly precarious to me. Luckily we had over-catered on the rice, so we didn’t run out, but they did end up throwing away a lot of food! “Wastage of resources...” as they like to say.

Slightly laughable sexism aside, it was a fantastic night. We laughed, and we danced, and we tried to convince Mr Chunga to dance, failed, carried on dancing anyway, and I did not stop smiling for hours. It turns out that sober Malawians dance as hilariously as spectacularly drunken Westerners. And the night sky studded with stars, dark enough to see the star clouds made by the edge of the Milky Way, makes the whole thing somehow epic, somehow profound, somehow glorious.

And the whole thing got me thinking about the Great Feast, the wedding feast of the Lamb – which is the way Jesus talked about heaven.  Jesus and us, his bride, having a massive, beautiful, joyous party. Because I realised that here I was, at a party, without alcohol. At a feast. And that made me think of the bit in the bible which says about getting drunk on the Holy Spirit – and how ridiculous that always sounded to me. But Thursday night made me think that maybe our whole drinking culture is part of a thirst for something, a hunger for a kind of party that we can’t quite imagine.

We drink to forget our worries.
                In the kingdom of God there will be nothing, nothing left to worry about.

We drink to give us self=confidence we don’t really have.
                At the feast of God, we will know, for absolute certain, right in our heart of hearts and out into our lips and our fingertips, that we are loved, loved by the Beautiful One, the Awesome One, the Only One. We will be able to see his face, and we will be able to see for ourselves that when he looks at us, he laughs in delight. His beaming grin at being with his children, being with his bride, will be so bright there will be no need for the sun any more. And how could we, looking into that face, dancing in that love, be short of confidence, be short on absolute, glorious freedom?

We drink to remove our inhibitions.
                At the feast, we will have no inhibitions. We will not need to worry about ourselves or our lives or our images or anything at all – there will be no one to mock us to sneer at us, no one to humiliate us. Just a big bunch of people that love us, laugh with us, dance stupid dances with us.

We drink to make everything seem better, funnier, more exciting.
                At the feast, we will need no illusion. The feast of God will be infinitely better, funnier, more exciting than anything we’ve ever known. We will not need to fake it any longer. Every one of our deep and beautiful desires will be thoroughly, thoroughly fulfilled.

We drink to lose self-control, so we’ll do exactly what we want to do.
                At the feast, we will do exactly what we want to do. There will be no internal conflict, no temptation, no confusion. St Augustine said, “If you love God, you can do what you want,” and it’s true. We will love God and we will love our brothers and our sisters with our whole hearts – and I can’t even begin to imagine how good that will feel. Absolute, self-giving, Jesus-style love will flow like a great river out of our hearts in perfect, unstoppable freedom.

I had the tiniest foretaste, the most beautiful appetizer for this feast last night, and I tell you what – even though I can’t really imagine this feast, I can’t wrap my head even a little bit of the way round a hope so huge, I honestly cannot wait.