The Lunch Date and Communion

Something in Adam Davidson's The Lunch Date stirred something in my mind that came back to me during today's class. When Professor Leeper was telling us how to read a work of art well, I remembered a book that I read in high school titled How to Read Literature Like a Professor. There is a chapter in the book, the second chapter, that is all about communion, which is exactly what came to my mind as we watched the scene in The Lunch Date where the woman shared a meal with a stranger.

You may not think that films are literature, but as is made absolutely clear in How to Read Literature Like a Professor, any work of art can tell a story and is therefore literature. The author, Thomas Foster, also claims that all literature is interconnected, together creating the world's one big story, which I agree with. That is another topic worth discussing, but I will now discuss communion.

My high school English teacher forced me to make an outline of the book, so I still have some of the following points from the communion chapter. In literature, a shared meal is communion; meal scenes tend to be boring, so there must be a good reason for writing them; and communion represents peace, kinship, and trust.

"A Simple Meal" - Marilyn Ross

In the short film, the woman is thrown into a situation where she shares a salad with a man she does not know, a man who could be homeless, judging by his attire. She thinks she has good reason not to trust the man, since something was stolen from her by a poor man not long ago. Communion represents trust, and she begins to build it with the man. He even buys her a drink with his own money. As he is apparently impoverished, that could have been all the livelihood he had. 

At the end, when she sees that her bag is gone, that trust is shattered in her mind, and she automatically thinks that the man stole it. Who would have thought that the lowest people could shame the highest, wisest ones?

But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. (1 Corinthians 1:27)

"The Widow's Mite" - James Christensen