There Will Be Cake

I've had a lot going on this week.  In lieu of a new post, here's a short essay I wrote last year as an exercise in spiritual biography.

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Matt loves cake.

No, that’s not quite right.  To say Matt loves cake makes it sound like Matt has a dessert preference.  Truth be told, his dessert preferences tend more toward ice cream than cake, but Matt loves cake not for its sugar content but for its ceremonial function.

You see, cake means more than sugar, butter, eggs, and flour.  Cake is no longer an everyday kind of sweet for most of us, as cookies and candy might be.  Even the most everyday forms of cake that persist in our culture—the church potluck cake comes to mind—signals a party.  That’s why Matt loves cake.  Because where there is cake, there’s a party.  And, where there’s a party, there needs to be a cake. 

Birthdays?  They’re obvious. 

Weddings, too—which are his favorite:  really big cakes there.

Baptisms?  Cake.

Mother’s Day? Cake.  Valentine’s Day?  Christmas?  The Fourth of July?  All cake-worthy occasions.  And the gaudier the grocery store icing, the better Matt likes it.

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Pies don’t suffice.  Neither do brownies (which I like better, myself), nor cobblers or other kinds of desserts.  Cupcakes are okay,  but better still is a proper cake, a surface for frosting and food coloring in the service of the occasion.  One glance at a well decorated cake, and you’ll know what it’s about.  Cake as communication as well as cake as ceremony.

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A few years ago, Matt carried out his own archival project.  He poured over the file boxes of family photographs that go back twenty years or more and carefully retrieved all of the pictures of cake.  Collecting these into a single album, he produced an anthology of pictures that tells a fascinating family story.  Grandpa’s 75^th birthday; Mark’s high school graduation, Jenny’s college graduation, Dad’s birthday, Mariana’s going-away party, Mother’s Day after Mom’s cancer diagnosis, Karen’s wedding.

No one knew he had compiled this album until he was finished.  We knew that he loved cake, but we didn’t know entirely what cake meant.

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I’m still not sure that we do know entirely what cake means to Matt.  He doesn’t have the means to sit down and analyze the social and ritualistic functions of cake.  He communicates largely through pictures; the weekly grocery advertisements with their parade of bakery cakes marking the upcoming holiday are rarely far from his reach.  But because we do know this much, we can learn to think about cake differently ourselves.

What does Matt think about God?  About faith?  About grace?  Original sin?  Redemption, sanctification?  All of these abstractions with which we surround ourselves; knots of doctrine into which we tie ourselves. 

What does Matt believe? 

What we have in our lives together is a series of moments—small and large gatherings—that bring us into relationship with one another:  celebration, joy, grief, sorrow, relief, comfort.  And when we gather, there’s usually a cake.

Perhaps Matt is right, the cake matters.  The cake signals that we intend something to happen in this moment—we intend to share something meaningful with the people around us.  Is cake a glimpse into the resurrection?

The gospel writers use the image of the wedding banquet as an image of the resurrection.  And what kind of wedding would it be without cake?

This is the grace Matt knows and the grace he has taught me:  In the community of faith, there’s always reason for a party—even when it’s a party shaped by mourning.  The grace of God calls us to gather together, to sustain one another, to eat and drink beyond the ordinary.

I don’t know much about what the afterlife will be.  But I believe, as Matt does, that there will be cake.