Learning to Eat Again.

Eating in France takes a while.  The French schedule budgets two hours for lunch break, from 11AM to 1PM, or from 12PM to 2PM, typically.  If you are invited to someone's house for an informal meal, plan on easily spending two to four hours around the dining room table.  You'll start with an aperitif and some hors d'oeuvre before having your salad course, and then you'll progress to the main meat course (with carefully selected wine, of course) and then finish with some dessert before lolling about trying the cheese platter out while sipping a digestif of choice.  You absolutely will not eat more than one type of food off your plate at the same time.  You'll talk in an animated matter, covering family, politics, world history, literature, politics, religion, philosophy, politics, immigration, and maybe a little politics to change things up a bit.  If your hosts are very trusting and open with you, they will feel comfortable speaking about religion.  The French love ideas, and I like to say that where there are four Frenchmen, there are six opinions.  You can't just agree on a topic, you have to examine it.  If you do agree on the topic, you'll find that your friend has shifted his stance, just for the sake of argument, and is examining it from another point of view.  It is entirely possible to end up in a debate with someone who agrees with you completely!  For the French, this is simply the logical result of a culture that has children in preschool stand up to have their first tentative handwriting efforts critiqued in front of and by their entire class.  For Americans, hailing from a culture of self-esteem and individualism, it can feel very uncomfortable, very personal.

You get over it.

If you're like me, you start to wonder why your meals with friends require you to eat in 30 to 45 minutes and then move to another room or start an activity.  Maybe a nation founded by immigrants has a sort of hereditary restlessness, things to do (or build, milk, shoot, trap, make, as it were).  At any rate, it is a sign of trust to be invited for a meal here, and it is a time-hallowed and quotidian event that has a complete list of rituals and habits.  If you make a false step, they are very patient, but they'll correct you ("Thank you for the gift, but it's unthinkable to drink even a fine white wine with wild boar!") and love it when you ask them how to find a good cheese or wine.  They know their regional and national history and many know more American history than I do.  They are witty, they struggle with doubts, they feel the weight of their history (praise France and they'll bring up all of her faults, criticize her and they'll bring up all of America's), some struggle with infertility, some struggle with loneliness, but you won't find out any of this if you don't eat with them.

Somehow, that's not that much to ask.  I feel a little closer to the culture of the Old Testament, where hospitality reigned so supreme that a man would raise the best of his flock for God and the second-best for a complete stranger to dine on while he stayed the night.  It requires me to slow down, to be willing to load sleeping children into a car because we arrive at four in the afternoon and we're leaving at one in the morning, and our hosts give us a ride home because we don't have vehicle.

I think that God's like that.  He invites us over, He assumes all of the cost, He accepts our clumsiness, our ignorance, our maladroit attempts to seem sophisticated and He bathes in the fact that for this once, we came to visit.  And He'll stay up talking late, if we will, too.