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By: Michael Kornelis You may listen to this devotion in audio form via podcast here.
Better is a dinner of herbs where love is
than a fattened ox and hatred with it.
- Proverbs 15:17
A common misconception about gluttony is that the vice has only to do with overeating. However, Mr. Wormwood (the demonic mentor in C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters) explains that in fact gluttony is a vice much broader, much more basic, than just overindulgence. He gives the example of a woman who on the one hand is remarkably austere, always insisting on only tea and toast. And yet, she is diagnosed by Mr. Wormwood as a textbook glutton. Lewis in the person of Wormwood writes:
She is a positive terror to hostesses and servants. She is always turning from what has been offered her to say with a demure little sign and a smile "Oh please, please . . .all I want is a cup of tea, weak but not too weak, and the teeniest weeniest bit of really crisp toast". You see? Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognises as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others.
In short, gluttony is privileging palate over people. God’s design is that food and drink would bring us together. But gluttony divides us. The glutton would rather sit alone at a meal tailored precisely to and for himself than sit with friends at a meal by and for many.
For instance, a couple years ago my wife and I spent three weeks in Guatemala. We stayed with a host family and the food they made for us was out of this world delicious. But, and I think this is the American vice, I became frustrated with my loss of choice. When it came to my meals I missed choosing the what, the when, the how much. That’s gluttony.
Then I had a meal I’ll never forget. In a poor rural village a family made us a soup for lunch: a chicken foot and half a small potato stewed in the pureed innards of the chicken. Now, it was actually pretty good. But what was so satisfying, so moving, about that meal was that from their poverty that family gave everything, literally the last vestiges of their butchered birds. “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fattened ox and hatred with it.” Better to leave the table with a full heart than a full stomach. Consider that the table that the Lord prepares for us is simple and sparse, mere bread and wine, but he does not invite us to that table to give us food, but to give us himself.