This past Friday my Godparents visited us. It was delightful to see them, though it's difficult to know how to spend time with them since it's been so long -- years, really, and both of them were raised in very different family cultures then I was (very much traditional American Anglo-Saxon Protestant and a restrained liberal American Jewish family cultures, respectively, which work well together, but are very different from the crass heart-on-sleeve Welsh/Irish amalgam I was raised in). I love them, and after not very long at all things started to take a certain shape -- the conversational tone found a comfortable spot, the topics drifted into and out of each other smoothly, there was a good give and take (and probably an extra give on my part), but all went well. It was a delightful visit, especially after so long (two years or more, I think).
I was cleaning up the kitchen somewhat after they left, and as my wife and daughter had gone off to bed, when I emptied the pot of "Ancient Trees" tea that we had let brew that evening. They both had a cup of tea, and so did my wife, so it was not wasted, but there was so very much tea left over, and it could probably have had hot water added to it two more times before really diluting.
Something about the leftover tea bothered me. It wasn't that the tea is expensive, though that somehow contributed to the sense of the tea being "important." It wasn't that there was a wasted resource there, though that somehow registered a problem, that the wasted tea was merely collateral for something else. I think it was the formlessness of the whole thing that bothered me.
I've been reading pieces from Adam Gopnik's book Paris to the Moon lately for a paper I'm trying to bring out of rough draft form. One of the passages in it is telling (even if oversimplified and exaggerated):
New York is devoted to the cult of busyness, but like all cults, it has as its heart the worship of a single, unforgiving idol, the office. After the idol has been served, life can be pretty formless. The things Americans miss [when they leave the States] tend to involve that kind of formlessness, small, casual, and solitary pleasures.
As I emptied the teapot I thought of a tea-ceremony that was somehow aborted, never having arrived. There is something wonderfully liberating about ritual, something that is usually missed by modernist Americans who can only see in ritual a kind of stultifying "formalism" (when it's not Asian, that is). I remember an acquaintance of mine, Ray, mentioning this problem after reading Adorno's Minima Moralia: one of the centuries following the Enlightenment (the 19th?) decided to throw off the constricting role of ritual in social relations, thinking that spontaneous and authentic forms of interaction would follow, that people would be freed to truly be present to one another by abandoning these traditions. It turned out that when the rituals were done away with, there wasn't even a common language in which to signify the consideration they hoped would be ungagged and unshackled by this "liberation."
Something about that tea signified the presence of that "freedom," and the dearth of richness that social visits often seem to suffer from as a result. My wife seems to feel the truth of this in her heart, for she tries to impose a form to visits that are often rejected by Americans as awkward and artificial (even if they capitulate). There's something to be said about traditions when one visits. My prayerbook says that the same prayers one prays at the opening of the morning and evening prayers should be prayed when one enters a Church. The prayerbook also says that they must be prayed when entering a Christian home, and only after they are prayed should one turn to greet the other person.
Friends! For the sake of hospitality, for the sake of true communion, let us do what we can to recover these things. Let us not make the extra energy involved, the initial awkwardness, or our exhaustion from the other predations of modernity a pretense for leaving off from this work. It happens now, or it does not happen. The iron is hot. It will grow cold. We must strike now.
