Hemingway’s Moveable Feast (a Steve Orr scripture reflection)

As I sat watching the film Midnight in Paris, I realized I might very much enjoy a visit to 1920s Paris, France. 

The movie stars Owen Wilson as a modern man unhappy with the way his life is turning out. But one midnight in Paris, he finds what may make him happy by traveling back in time to the 1920s. There he enjoys the company of such luminaries as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and many more creatives of “the lost generation.”

I wondered what it might really be like to do that. How could I know what it would be like to live there, walk there, eat there, all at that seemingly magical time when the writers and artists we celebrate were all together in one place? And then I remembered: Hemingway had done all that—and he wrote it all down. 

Sure, he lived in near poverty, but he had known the people whose ideas and artistic expressions changed the world. He filled notebooks with his thoughts on the places, the people, and the events of his life in that place and time.

Eventually, Hemingway had those notebooks transcribed, and then organized them into a book. He named it A Moveable Feast. The book was his memoir of those years and those people as he knew them. The title of the book comes from a comment Hemingway made to a friend in 1950: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast."

This week's scriptures are about a different kind of moveable feast. Phrases like “delight yourselves in rich food” (Isaiah 55:2), and “My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast” (Psalms 63:5) capture the reality of eating the spiritual food God has prepared for us. And we are urged to not forget their true source when we ingest the "same spiritual food" and the "same spiritual drink" as the Israelites in the wilderness (1st Corinthians 10:3-4).

We may not be able to travel back in time to 1920s Paris. Many of us, perhaps, have no desire to. After all, those icons of the lost generation immersed themselves in Hemingway’s moveable feast, only to learn “There is no there there.” Ultimately, it was a feast that left an aftertaste of bitterness and disappointment. In contrast, we are urged to come to the feast prepared for us by God. It’s a feast that moves with us through our lives. 

We can expect to be richly fed. 

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PHOTO (from the Paris Convention and Visitors Bureau): https://en.parisinfo.com/

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Join us for a feast Friday morning at DaySpring’s Lectionary Breakfast. As usual, we meet in person at Our Breakfast Place and on Zoom**. We start at 8:00 for an hour like no other. We feast on food, we feast on God's word, and we feast on fellowship. And when we leave, part of those feasts moves with us, out into the day, the week, and the lives of those we meet.

Blessings,

Steve

**Contact me for the Zoom link

NOTE: Zoom allows you to mute the camera and microphone if you don’t wish to be seen or heard.

SCRIPTURES FOR SUNDAY AND THE COMING WEEK

Read them here: 

https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=120

Print them here:

https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/pdf//Cx_ThirdSundayinLent.pdf

Isaiah 55:1-9

Psalm 63:1-8

1 Corinthians 10:1-13

Luke 13:1-9

Third Sunday in Lent (March 20, 2022)

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