Beyond Time: The Beauty of the Spirit in Wine and Worship
Unnumbered: Finding Beauty, Finding God
This is the fourth and final post in the series on beauty and the Trinity. Click here to read the first post. Subsequent posts are linked in the article below.
I cannot think of a better way to transcend moments of grief than to savor a glass of good wine. I have noticed over the last several years that the greater the grief, the higher the quality of wine I desire. It is not a “glass of anything red so I can relax”. It is a desire to drink beauty. Sometimes it is not enough merely to see or hear beauty; we need to ingest it, take it in. In her book The Spirituality of Wine, Griselda H. Kreglinger writes, “If we understand our spiritual lives as fully embodied and physical, can the sense of taste and smell not also become vessels for prayer and contemplation?” This prayer and contemplation enter the eighth day – timelessness. The timelessness of wine is a gift of grace.
In her short story “Babette’s Feast”, Isak Dinesen tells the story of an émigré, Babette, who has fled the French civil war. She moves to an ascetic Lutheran sect in Denmark, living with sisters Martine and Phillipa, and working as their housekeeper. After living with them for twelve years, she learns that she has won 10,000 Francs in a lottery. The sisters grow sorrowful, sure that Babette will use her wealth to return to France. Instead, on the hundredth anniversary of the sect, Babette begs the sisters to allow to her to prepare a French feast. Unbeknownst to the community, she was the chef at a famous Parisian restaurant, Café Anglais. Her cooking is described as transforming a dinner “into a love affair of the noble and romantic category in which one no longer distinguishes between bodily and spiritual appetite or satiety.”
The villagers have no category for the rich beauty of the feast that they are experiencing. They are unaware that wines have names, and mistake Veuve Cliquot for lemonade. It is the visiting guest, General Loewenhielm, who speaks the truth about the transcendent grace of the feast. Though they do not understand his speech with their minds, their hearts are transformed. For a moment, they see the universe as it really is. During the feast, time merges into eternity; they have been given one hour of the millennium. Though not a sacrament, the feast is sacramental – a merging of the transcendent and the imminent.
Like Babette’s feast, good wine is sacramental; it is transcendent without losing its particularity of place or time. Time as we know it is created. Consider how much grief is due to a longing to transcend time. This may be time’s separation between the living and the dead. It may be the regret of times past or the worries of time yet to come. It may be the time we wait for justice and his kingdom to come. Whatever the grief the timelessness of wine helps us, for a moment, to step outside of time.
Wine weaves in and out of time at three different points of contact. The first is the vintage of the wine. Soil takes time to develop. In her book, Kreglinger writes that it took over hundreds of years for the Cistercian monks of Burgundy to achieve the character of Clos Vougeot. (In Babette’s Feast, this was the very wine that the sister Martine heard named for the first time). In addition to the years and centuries of developing soil and practicing skills, the year in which the wine is grown matters greatly. Acts of nature can devastate a harvest, and rainfall levels can make a particular vintage more or less desirable.
Once bottled, wine enters a new realm of time. This is less true of mass-produced wines found in grocery stores as taste is often manipulated through flavored yeasts and additives. Old world wines, particularly the French, have laws to prevent technological modification. These more sophisticated wines improve with age. Once uncorked, wine reinters the world of time, changing. As air enters the bottle and the glass, the wine breathes, opening and developing.
Slowly savoring wine is a way to step in and through layers of time, though just for an hour or two. Fr. Alexander Schmemann describes a similar timelessness as the body of Christ enters Eucharistic worship. He refers to this as “constituting” the Church. He writes,
It is because we have “constituted” the Church, and this means we have followed Christ in his ascension; because he has accepted us at his table in his Kingdom; because, in terms of theology, we have entered the Eschaton, and are now standing beyond time and space; it is because all this has first happened to us that something will happen to bread and wine.1
Exiting after the Eucharistic service, the body re-enters time.2 The Father is, and we glimpse his beauty in nature. The Son knows that he is, and we see the beauty of the Son in word. The Spirit rejoices in his being and his knowledge of it, and we see his beauty in wine and worship.
Not every glass of wine is Eucharistic, but its transcendent qualities can, temporarily, allow us to exit time. This is what T. S. Eliot refers to as “the still point” in the second of his Four Quartets.3
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that, is to place it in time.
In stillness, we find God. In stillness, we are able to worship. And the Spirit, rejoicing in his being and his knowledge of it, enables us to do so.
In Ecclesiastes, Solomon writes that God has put eternity into man’s heart. “I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil – this is God’s gift to man.”4 The Eucharist, the still point, and the convivial glass of wine all share in timelessness. It is the Spirit who enlivens our hearts so that the moment of timelessness is a moment of worship. It is he who unites us with the Triune God in work, wonder, and worship.
For the Life of the World, 48
Ibid, 59
“East Coker”, Four Quartets
Ecclesiastes 3:12-13, ESV