The Gift of Chocolate

Easter is a good time to revisit Chocolat (the film). It is the story of Vianne, who arrives with her daughter in a little French town called Lansquenet.

 They rent a shabby, disused shop and transform it into a chocolaterie. The snag is that it is Lent, and the town - under the leadership of its morally rigid and upright Mayor - is fervently Catholic.

At first the little community refuses to partake of Vianne’s chocolate offerings. They cannot tell the difference between the extravagance of love and the love of extravagance.

But Vianne is a beautiful and skilful engineer of human kindness. She dispenses gifts intuitively, and people change.

The mayor is violently opposed to her, and voices his opposition through the local priest, who is young and compliant. In the end, though, even he is won over and the final church scene shows him at last preaching a sermon from his own heart. It is not deeply impressive, but it is profound.

He says, to paraphrase: ‘It is absurd to measure our moral worth by what we don’t do. What matters is what we embrace.’

On the Monday of Holy Week we read: ‘Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of her perfume.’ She is rebuked by Judas who, mistaking the extravagance of love for the love of extravagance, asks: ‘Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?’

My first encounter with Mahler happened through a friend who knew the music and thought that I would love it. So he took me to The Resurrection at the Royal Albert Hall. It turned out to be one of the most emotionally overwhelming experiences of my life.

The extravagance of love is demonstrated in gestures and in symbols, based on accurate perceptions of what the loved one needs and wants; without being told and without explanation. Such moments are, in any relationship, rare, for few of us are attentive enough to others to undertake such gestures and succeed. Yet when they are undertaken, and when they succeed, lives are transformed. And if an attentive friend can make such a life-changing offering to another, based on finite knowledge and human intuition, how much more so the Divine?

Alison Webster is Social Responsibility Adviser to Oxford Diocese