Babette's Feast in Our Digital Age

December 10, 2010
The Trinity Forum-Update

Hospitality in a Digital Age

This weekend is reportedly the high-water mark for the holiday party season. Many friends are juggling multiple soirees in the course of an evening, in the attempt to see and connect with friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. Most of these same revelers (including yours truly) hold accounts with and spend time on social networking sites—so it’s worth reflecting on why we still make such efforts to gather together, to prepare homes and meals and music rather than just posting a quick and cheerful holiday greeting on our social network profiles.

Our newest Trinity Forum Reading, Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen, may actually speak even more profoundly in our digital age than when it first appeared in 1950. Martine and Philippa, the elderly and ascetic protagonists of the tale, live a form of precursor to our disembodied online life. They have “renounced the pleasures of this world” and physically withdrawn from much of the life of their village to better focus on what they believe to be “the true reality” of the New Jerusalem.

Consider now the half-billion people who use Facebook. The site reports that its average user has 130 “friends” and can “interact” with over 900 million “objects”—pages, groups, and events—generating more than 30 billion pieces of content each month. Those of us who use the site encounter an unending stream of information about people from every stage of our lives.

But while online communities can impart a great deal of information about us, they cannot provide the space for us to be known. A person is far more than a persona; an individual cannot be known only through words and images. It is little wonder that many people find that even several hundred online “friends” do not ease their profound sense of isolation. This is one reason many services are now working hard to connect themselves with real “places,” even by attaching GPS coordinates to people’s postings.

But even as our tools become more sophisticated, we will still find that our virtual communities can only flourish when they help us form and deepen real-world relationships, when they take seriously our embodied human nature. This is why hospitality of the most tangible kind is foremost among the practices worth cultivating in a digital age. In our story, it is only when Martine and Philippa open their home to the refugee Babette that they make possible her further act of hospitality that opens them to grace and connection, and helps to transform their small community.

Like most meaningful things in life, hospitality comes with a cost, requiring the sacrifice of money, time, and attention. Inviting people into our homes is of a different order than inviting their friendship online. The practice of hospitality can be inconvenient and disruptive, just as Babette’s extensive preparations detailed in our story upset the routine of the household, as we shift our focus from our own needs to those of our guests. How can we best welcome them? What food and drink would they like? Who would they enjoy meeting?

When someone is at our table, there is no convenient link to click to terminate a conversation or a friendship. We must be open to this person, their presence, and their conversation. Practiced properly, hospitality forces us to recognize the other as someone to be known, loved, welcomed, celebrated, and served—and so as someone who can begin to know us in turn.

Sincerely,
Cherie Harder
President