Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (4 page)

5.
It feels relevant to talk of meals because our modern lack of a proper sense of community is importantly reflected in the way we eat. The contemporary world is not, of course, lacking in places where we can dine well in company – cities typically pride themselves on the sheer number and quality of their
restaurants – but what is significant is the almost universal lack of venues that help us to transform strangers into friends.

While contemporary restaurants pay lip service to the notion of companionability, they provide us with only its most inadequate simulacrum. The number of people who nightly patronize restaurants implies that these places must be refuges from anonymity and coldness, but in fact they have no systematic mechanisms by which to introduce patrons to one another, to dispel their mutual suspicions, to break up the clans into which people chronically segregate themselves or to get them to open up their hearts and share their vulnerabilities with others. The focus is on the food and the decor, never on opportunities for extending and deepening affections. In a restaurant no less than in a home, when the meal itself – the texture of the escalopes or the moistness of the courgettes – has become the main attraction, we can be sure that something has gone awry.

Patrons will tend to leave restaurants much as they entered them, the experience having merely reaffirmed existing tribal divisions. Like so many institutions in the modern city, restaurants are adept at gathering people into the same space and yet lack any means of encouraging them to make meaningful contact with one another once they are there.

6.
With the benefits of the Mass and the drawbacks of contemporary dining in mind, we can imagine an ideal restaurant of the future, an Agape Restaurant, true to the most profound insights of the
Eucharist.

Such a restaurant would have an open door, a modest entrance fee and an attractively designed interior. In its seating arrangements, the groups and ethnicities into which we commonly segregate ourselves would be broken up; family members and couples would be spaced apart, and kith favoured over kin. Everyone would be safe to approach and address, without fear of rebuff or reproach. By simple virtue of occupying the same space, guests would – as in a church – be signalling their allegiance to a spirit of community and friendship.

Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and odd benefit of making it a little more difficult to hate them with impunity. Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction. However, the proximity required by a meal – something about handing dishes around, unfurling napkins at the same moment, even asking a stranger to pass the salt – disrupts our ability to cling to the belief that the outsiders who wear unusual clothes and speak in distinctive accents deserve to be sent home or assaulted. For all the large-scale political solutions which have been proposed to salve ethnic conflict, there are few more effective ways to promote tolerance between suspicious neighbours than to force them to eat supper together.

Many religions are aware that the moments around the ingestion of food are propitious to moral education. It is as if the imminent prospect of something to eat seduces our normally resistant selves into showing some of the same generosity to others as the table has shown to us. These religions also know enough about our sensory, non-intellectual dimensions to be aware that we cannot be kept on a virtuous track simply through the medium of words. They know that at a meal they will have a captive audience who are likely to accept a trade-off between ideas and nourishment – and so they turn meals into disguised ethical lessons. They stop us just before we have a first sip of wine and offer us a thought that can be swilled down with the liquid like a tablet. They make us listen to a homily in the gratified interval between two courses. And they use specific types of food and drink to represent abstract concepts, telling Christians, for example, that bread stands for the sacred body of Christ, informing Jews that the
Passover dish of crushed apples and nuts is the mortar used by their enslaved predecessors to build the warehouses of Egypt and teaching Zen Buddhists that their cups of slowly brewing tea are tokens of the transitory nature of happiness in a floating world.

Taking their seats at an Agape Restaurant, guests would find in front of them guidebooks somewhat reminiscent of the Jewish
Haggadah or the Catholic missal, laying out the rules for how to behave at the meal. No one would be left alone to find their way to an interesting conversation with another, any more than it would be expected of participants at a Jewish Passover meal or in the Christian
Eucharist that they might manage independently to alight on the salient aspects of the history of the tribes of Israel or achieve a sense of communion with God.

The Book of Agape would direct diners to speak to one another for prescribed lengths of time on predefined topics. Like the famous questions which the youngest child present is assigned by the
Haggadah to ask during the
Passover ceremony (‘Why is this night different from all other nights?', ‘Why do we eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs?' and so on), these talking points would be carefully crafted for a specific purpose, to coax guests away from customary expressions of
superbia
(‘What do you do?', ‘Where do your children go to school?') and towards a more sincere revelation of themselves (‘What do you regret?', ‘Whom can you not forgive?', ‘What do you fear?'). The liturgy would, as in the Mass, inspire charity in the deepest sense, a capacity to respond with complexity and compassion to the existence of our fellow creatures.

One would be privy to accounts of fear, guilt, rage, melancholy, unrequited love and infidelity that would generate an impression of our collective insanity and endearing fragility. Our conversations would free us from some of our more distorted fantasies about others' lives, by revealing the extent to which, behind our well-defended façades, most of us are going a little out of our minds – and so have reason to stretch out a hand to our equally tortured neighbours.

For new participants, the formality of the dinner-time liturgy would no doubt at first seem peculiar. Yet they would gradually appreciate the debt that authentic emotion owes to well-judged rules of conduct. After all, it is hardly natural to kneel down with a group of people on a stone floor, to gaze towards an altar and to intone together:

– and yet the faithful who attend a Mass do not hold such structured commands against their religion; instead, they welcome them for generating a level of spiritual intensity that would be impossible to summon up in a more casual context.

Thanks to the Agape Restaurant, our
fear of strangers would recede. The poor would eat with the rich, the black with the white, the orthodox with the secular, the bipolar with the balanced, workers with managers, scientists with artists. The claustrophobic pressure to derive all of our satisfactions from our existing relationships would ease, as would our desire to gain status by accessing so-called elite circles.

The notion that we could mend some of the tatters in the modern social fabric through an initiative as modest as a communal meal will seem offensive to those with greater trust in the power of legislative and political solutions to cure society's ills. Yet these restaurants would not be an alternative to traditional political methods. They would be a prior step taken to humanize one another in our imaginations, in order that we would then more naturally engage with our communities and, unbidden, cede some of our impulses towards the egoism, racism, aggression, fear and guilt which lie at the root of so many of the issues with which traditional politics is concerned.

Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism have all made significant contributions to mainstream politics, but their relevance to the problems of community are arguably never greater than when they depart from the modern political script and remind us that there is also value to be had in standing in a hall with a hundred acquaintances and singing a hymn together or in ceremoniously washing a stranger's feet or in sitting at a table with neighbours and partaking of lamb stew and conversation, the kinds of rituals which, as much as the deliberations inside parliaments and law courts, are what help to hold our fractious and fragile societies together.