The kind of feast you are capable of enjoying depends on the kind of appetite you have acquired. Children who have not acquired a taste for vegetables do not like all-you-can-eat salad bars. Surf-and-turf specials are only appealing to those who have a taste for both seafood and meat. Bar crawls tend to appeal to those with high alcohol tolerance or low degrees of self-knowledge, or both.
We know that we can acquire tastes. I remember in college when the dining hall introduced soy milk. I do not really like milk as a beverage, and I didn’t care for the taste of soy milk, but I was also strangely committed to getting the highest-value items in the dining hall on a regular basis. I am slightly obsessed with value, so much so that I was willing to try to change my taste to like something I didn’t like just to get more value out of my flat-fee, prepaid meals. So I started filling my cup at meals with a small portion of soy milk and a large portion of chocolate milk (I liked the chocolate part, not the milk). Over time, I slowly reduced the amount of chocolate milk and increased the amount of soy milk. After several weeks of doing this once a day or so, I started to prefer the taste of soy milk. I don’t know if that would work with everything I don’t particularly care for, but to this day, some two decades later, I still like soy milk. I acquired a taste for it.
You can indeed have too much of a good thing if you don’t like the thing that is good for you. In fact, even a little bit of a good thing that you don’t care for is usually more than enough. You are far from interested in feasting on things that don’t appeal to you or for which you have no appetite. To enjoy a feast, you have to enjoy the fare. A carton of soy milk was of no interest to me when I was 19, but it is now. What changed was not the taste of soy milk but my taste for it. The same goes for salad bars — or seafood platters for that matter — which would have repulsed me as a child. Might it be possible, then, that the things that are really good for us — maybe even best for us — do not appeal to us because we haven’t developed an appetite for them? In fact, being presented with more of a thing we don’t like is no kindness, just more for us to reject.
Aligning our desires with God
If we shift from thinking strictly about food and consider the more lasting things that nourish or even complete us, we confront a scary possibility: If we were invited to feast everlastingly on those things that are most noble, beautiful, dignifying and truly fit for human beings, we might turn them down if we hadn’t developed an appetite for such things. Witnessing someone else excel and thrive is no joy to someone who is strictly self-interested, while seeing everyone else being fulfilled and admired is a nightmare for the person who has only indulged in envy. It turns out that not everyone wants others to be happy. In fact, maybe each of us struggles with that, at least from time to time.
St. John Henry Newman had something like this in mind when he preached on the importance of developing a taste for heavenly things. What he presents turns a lot of commonplace thinking on its head. In a sermon titled “Holiness Necessary for Future Blessedness,” Newman writes:
We are apt to deceive ourselves, and to consider heaven a place like this earth; I mean, a place where every one may choose and take his own pleasure. We see that in this world, active men have their own enjoyments, and domestic men have theirs; men of literature, of science, of political talent, have their respective pursuits and pleasures. Hence we are led to act as if it will be the same in another world. The only difference we put between this world and the next, is that here, (as we know well,) men are not always sure, but there, we suppose they will be always sure, of obtaining what they seek after. And accordingly we conclude, that any man, whatever his habits, tastes, or manner of life, if once admitted into heaven, would be happy there. Not that we altogether deny, that some preparation is necessary for the next world; but we do not estimate its real extent and importance. We think we can reconcile ourselves to God when we will; as if nothing were required in the case of men in general, but some temporary attention, more than ordinary, to our religious duties,–some strictness, during our last sickness, in the services of the Church, as men of business arrange their letters and papers on taking a journey or balancing an account. But an opinion like this, though commonly acted on, is refuted as soon as put into words. For heaven, it is plain from Scripture, is not a place where many different and discordant pursuits can be carried on at once, as is the case in this world. Here every man can do his own pleasure, but there he must do God’s pleasure.
If we were to conceive of heaven as a banquet or a feast, we would not be wrong; indeed, we would be profoundly right in imagining heaven in such terms. What is wrong, according to Newman — who is here interpreting Scripture — is to imagine heaven as a feast of our own private choosing, as if each individual had his own private dining room where what he has always privately preferred is presented to him in endless supply for an endless appetite, regardless of what is good for or desirable to others. Rather than call something like this heaven, Newman would more likely call it hell. It is an image of permanent division and isolation, where reality is fixed to individuals’ private preferences. To switch images, it would be like a concert hall with a different band playing for each of the 10,000 audience members’ disparate and peculiar tastes. No one can enjoy music amid such a cacophony.
Developing a taste for heaven
What Newman teaches is that rather than imagining heaven on our terms, the whole point is to reimagine ourselves on God’s terms. To do so, we have to reckon with the fact that we do not yet love what God loves — we have not yet fully acquired a taste for God. We can and must develop that taste, Newman argues, not because everything depends on our own actions to make ourselves worthy of heavenly bliss, but instead because if we never developed any kind of liking for the things of God, then the heavenly banquet just wouldn’t appeal to us. We would reject it. That is the final and only tragedy: rejecting what is fully, ultimately, unendingly good for us.
A feast is only a feast if you have an appetite for what is offered.
It didn’t matter all that much whether or not I developed a taste for soy milk. One can get by in life without eating seafood or meat. It probably is a good idea to develop a taste for at least some vegetables in order to be properly nourished. And yet, none of these rivals the importance of growing in our appetite for the things of God.
Time spent in prayer is, among other things, the practice of stretching our appetite. Engaging in works of mercy is, among other things, acquiring a taste for godly things. The consumption of Scripture in slightly larger or more attentive helpings introduces us to new cravings. And the immersion into the sacramental life may very well change the kind of reality we become capable of enjoying.
We will enjoy heaven later if we practice enjoying heavenly things now.
