Something of the divine has touched me this week. I started a new book, Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert. A dozen books were waiting on my shelves to be read, and none of them seemed right, until I spotted this one, a recent birthday gift from a dear friend. I felt something akin to relief when I opened its pages and started to read.

In the opening chapters, she spoke of her failed marriage, and how she cried on her bathroom floor every night until one day she found herself praying to God for the first time in her life. When God told her (in her own voice) to go back to bed, she did. I closed the book and slept with her.

The next morning, I woke to a letter from my husband telling me he had this strangely out-of-character thought that God might be challenging him so he could be a better person. There was something in his letter that connected with the chapters I had read the night before, so I left them for him to read. After he read them, he said, “That’s just plain spooky.” And I had to agree.

As I read further, something else she wrote connected with me. She said to a Balinese medicine man, “I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God.” This is an important theme for the memoir, and an important theme for me too. To deny myself the pleasure of love and good food and wine is to deny myself a connection with the divine.

Last night I spent the evening with my three best friends in celebration of an upcoming wedding. We ate a wonderful meal at a Spanish restaurant we’d never been to before, and afterward we had wine and chocolate while listening to live jazz music and sharing gifts with the bride to be. I stared across the table at these three women I love, watching them laugh, loving their talk of language and connecting with people across the world, and I felt blessed.

Today I am resting. I wrote in my journal, read part of my book, took a long nap with the dog and watched a movie. The movie was Babette’s Feast about these two austere women in Denmark who have devoted their lives to the memory of their father, a pastor and leader in their small community. They give shelter and work to a Parisian woman exiled from her home, and she teaches them about the enjoyment of life, love and good food.

At the feast we hear the words of the long-dead father spoken by one who remembered them. “For mercy and truth are met together. And righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Asia, Continental Europe, India, food travels, sweetness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.