Restaurants are returning to candles. Real candles – not the pretend kind with the fake flame, but the waxy kind with the live flame – the live flame you have to light by hand, and re-light by hand when it goes out, and watch very carefully lest someone or something catch fire.
Candles have costs. They don’t last. They burn up staff time, and they eat up air filters at the rate of two per week. Restaurants estimate that candle-related costs add at least $600 a month to their budgets, plus the occasional expense of replacing a guest’s singed clothing.
So why this costly candle trend? LED lights are out. They may be efficient and affordable, but they don’t speak to the yearnings that bring people into restaurants. “The best lightbulb still can’t emulate the candle,” commented a service director at one restaurant in Los Angeles. “It’s not alive, but there is life to it.”
The owner of Vela restaurant (pictured above) in Chicago observed, “it’s definitely worth the extra work; people love them …. If someone laughs a candle out at the table, it’s a nice extra touch to come over and re-light it.”
Before your church board table gets populated by Chianti bottles cascading with wax, or you add a candle at the end of every row in your worship space, let’s consider what it all may mean. Restaurants in our time are struggling to survive. They are cutting every cost they can … and yet they are adding the cost of 450 new candles each week?
There is increasing anecdotal evidence that the ultimate investment we placed in secular progress, technological innovation, and cyber connection is faltering. There is not, in fact, a way to automate connection. There is no technique that ensures community. Tellingly and painfully, we are discovering that loneliness and isolation are not being helped by digital platforms. Wise church leaders are attending to this. The enduring truth that “what got us to today will not necessarily get us to tomorrow” is activating church boards to pay even greater attention to these emerging trends.
Restaurants are taking on extra costs in a time when their budgets are strained because they see candles as essential to serving the needs of their customers. Somewhere in their storerooms we guess there is a pile of “efficient LED bulbs” that no longer fit the moment. What is the equivalent in your ministry?
Everything in how and why a church does ministry needs a deeper look and a more careful consideration. In the following poem, American poet Naomi Shihab Nye invites us to think a little more deeply about the things that pre-occupy us in this life—things we might even be tempted to write “Dear Abby” about.
Alive
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Dear Abby, said someone from Oregon,
I am having trouble with my boyfriend’s attachment
to an ancient gallon of milk still full
in his refrigerator. I told him it’s me or the milk,
is this unreasonable? Dear Carolyn,
my brother won’t speak to me
because fifty years ago I whispered
a monkey would kidnap him in the night
to take him back to his true family
but he should have known it was a joke
when it didn’t happen, don’t you think?
Dear Board of Education, no one will ever
remember a test. Repeat. Stories,
poems, projects, experiments,
mischief, yes, but never a test.
Dear Dog Behind the Fence, you really need
to calm down now. You have been barking every time
I walk to the compost for two years
and I have not robbed your house. Relax.
When I asked the man on the other side
if you bother him too, he smiled and said no,
he makes me feel less alone. Should I be more
worried about the dog or the man?
What connects the letters to Abby and Carolyn at the start of this poem? What does the letter to the Board of Education add to the thread?
How about the letter to the Dog Behind the Fence? Who should the poet be more worried about?
If you were to write Dear Abby a letter about your church board work, what problem would you be trying to solve?
Given the turn to candles in restaurants, what might your church board want to be rethinking to serve people’s yearnings in this time?
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