Tea and Honey and the Inner Ring

Sometimes I feel like God is urgently trying to tell me something but however hard (S)He tries, I’m just too stupid to understand. Fortunately, at other times the message is clear enough.

One bright and shiny day about a year ago I went to a tea house to enjoy a quiet while with a book. To my pleasant surprise I turned out to be their first guest of the day, so the room was all mine. I was reading Anthony de Mello’s The Way to Love, at times even thinking I was getting what the author had meant, so I felt very spiritual and uplifted.

Some minutes later, two ladies came in, settled nearby and started to talk. They were obviously excited about being in a tea house. Perhaps it was their first time. Either way, one could see it was a real adventure for them to sit there, look around and read the tea menu and everything. I, on the other hand, was not so thrilled. “Oh well, there goes my moment of quiet spirituality,” I thought.

I had just returned to my book when the tea master came to take their orders.

“Would sencha be good with honey?” one of the women asked.

I rolled my inner eyes. Japanese green tea and honey? Oh my! I’d swear I heard the tea master gulp hard. However, he managed to maintain his composure when he replied, “I wouldn’t really recommend that. You know, the sweetness of the honey would go against the key tones of the tea’s natural taste.” The ladies, a bit disappointed, said they would take some more time with their pick and I started reading again.

I was just getting back into the zone when the tea master returned. They said they would have Nepal FOP. Good choice. I had always loved Nepalese teas. But then one of the tea savages added, “But this one will surely be great with honey, won’t it?”

I suppressed a howl. This was a bit less of a heresy than with the sencha but it felt all the more personal.

The tea master, however, had barely blinked before he replied, “If that’s how you’ll like the tea best, of course it can be served with honey.”

Suddenly, I had an epiphany. What kind of a haughty donkeyhole was I to judge? Had I ever tried the tea that way? No. I had only been visiting tea houses for a decade or so and learned that a group of self-proclaimed connoiseurs had ruled that these teas tasted best served this way and those teas were to be prepared at that temperature. How could I be sure that what I had learned to perceive as barbaric would not have tasted delicious only to the two tea-thrill-seekers, but perhaps to me as well? I was a snobbish, hypocritical idiot and if it made their beautiful tea house adventure wilder, sweeter, cuter, it was the holiest right of these two ladies to drink their Nepal FOP with honey.

I felt humbled and ashamed and returned to the book. Maybe two, maybe three pages later I arrived to this: “Apply this to every image that people have of you and they tell you that, ‘you are a genius or wise or good or holy.’ And you enjoy that compliment and at that minute you lose your freedom because now you will be constantly striving to retain that opinion. You will fear to make mistakes, to be yourself, to do or say anything that will spoil the image. You have lost the freedom to make a fool of yourself, to be laughed at and to be ridiculed. To do and say whatever feels right to you rather than what fits in the image others have of you.” You just wouldn’t drink tea with honey not because it would have been too sweet or would have spoilt the taste – you wouldn’t drink it that way because it was not right.

It was not all yet. Later when I came home I opened C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces, and read the essay The Inner Ring. The key part said, “Three or four people who are together for the sake of some piece of work exclude others because there is work only for so many or because the others can’t in fact do it. Your little musical group limits its numbers because the rooms they meet in are only so big. But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident: it is the essence.”

That was exactly what we “tea lovers” were doing, what drinks experts were doing when they sneered at people drinking cognac on the rocks, what … you get the idea. Just like when kids have a little secret and hop around another, screaming, “I know something and you don’t, I know something and you don’t!”

I love going to tea rooms, I feel enriched by being able to distinguish between different tea varieties. But I will forever remember that the only relevant reason for someone’s taste is ‘like/dislike’. And none of my little secret business.

Jason

P.S.: Anyway, the Inner Rings must have had some rational beginnings. I wonder when, how and why the “If you mix sencha with honey, you probably won’t like it.” changed into a “Thou shalt not taint your sencha with the impure sweet abomination!” commandment set in stone.