Toasting Etiquette

Teaching and learning how to toast

It was 2014, a celebration. Nearly thirty adults took their seats, gathered for a feast. Prior to beginning our meal, we received a lesson on toasting etiquette. When clinking glasses with our closest table mates, we were to take a spectacular moment and look each other in the eye. The eye contact was never cursory, it was meant to be a sort of soul brushing, a sweet exchange of seeing. If someone in the group was the subject of the toast, they were to graciously and humbly accept the acknowledgement, and not partake in the sipping. The memory of the lesson stays with me, and I realize how much I long for this type of interaction, the frozen seconds in time that so elegantly persuade us to take time with one another and eye gaze for the sake of connection. Cheers or good cheer is the hope and wish for another...

No eye contact

My mind goes to the opposites in life, the experiences that have me realize how derailed we have become with one another. Recent experiences of derailing came when words were spoken and eye contact could not, would not be made. Exchanges of verbal aggression, of condescension, and irritability-a forgetting that human connection is broken, when we deny the person in front of us, the grace that they are entitled to by virtue of being a human. 

Looking someone in the eye when venomous words come pouring out, is quite the task. Try it and you will quickly realize that there is always a looking away, either by the one who is being spoken to or the one thoughtlessly spouting off. Running off at the mouth is similar to waters that have been dammed up and have suddenly broken loose, destroying everything in its path; taking solid ground out from under the feet, and washing away relationships, arms and legs akimbo in the rush. It is a horror and an aberration to the soul. 

Christmas

Christ mas, being like Christ... it is time again dear reader, to look at ourselves. To look into our own eyes. This morning I passed a mirror and gave myself a grin. I laughed after this, because I realized that this is actually how I treat myself! I treat myself like I would anyone I happen to be passing: I say hello with smiling eyes and a welcoming smile. How about that? This realization made me very happy and it does still, as I type, because I know my own heart. I know that I have joy and that I am a joy activator. 

While it pains me to hear meanness, I do not look away from it, I subtly and sometimes not so subtly, make suggestions, write a blog, and even step in to defend others, when mean-spirited-no-eye-contact-cruelty threatens to destroy relationship. In toasting, there is a raising of a glass, in life, there is the raising of the bar and this, we must do, dear reader. 

Making eye contact

Someone must make eye contact with good and evil and call each what they really are: Someone did and soon we will celebrate a babe born to save the world from... ourselves. Etiquette is taught and the question is, are we willing to learn, be instructed, elevate, looking up into each others eyes to see the soul of another? 

When toasting this Christmas, will you raise your glass to the One from whom all good and perfect gifts come? Will you look into the eyes of the Saviour, and give Him his due? 

He will not look away from you, in fact, He has never taken His eyes off of you...