Ode to [Waffle House]

The nearest Waffle House is 357 miles from Los Angeles, CA.

In July of 2023, these photos went around the internet:

They show American singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey apparently in the middle of a shift at a Waffle House in Alabama. My personal history with Lana Del Rey goes back to the early 2010s when I first heard “Summertime Sadness” on the radio (in my friend’s mom’s minivan outside a Catholic merchandise store somewhere in Pomona, CA; I remember like it was yesterday) and when I bought my first CD for my car and it was Lana Del Rey’s breakout album Born to Die. My personal relationship with Waffle House goes back to these pictures. The simple fact is I’d just never heard about it before.

And I didn’t really think much of it after, if I’m perfectly honest. I didn’t think about it until I was almost driving out of Mississippi on my way to Atlanta through Alabama. For whatever reason, it became important to me to stop in Mississippi, even just for gas. I’d never been, and God only knows if I’ll ever have a reason to go back, so I wanted to stop, and stop I did.

This might or might not be my phone’s wallpaper.

I ordered what would become my standard order: the country ham and eggs breakfast. It comes with country ham, two eggs, toast, and hash browns or grits. To drink, a coffee and a water.

The phenomenon of the 24-hour American diner is easily—in my opinion—one of the cultural upper hands the United States has on the rest of the world, alongside apple pie and Beyoncé. One of the closest to me the last two years was the Original Pantry Cafe in Downtown Los Angeles, but they lost their 24-hour status during the Covid-19 pandemic, and I’m still in mourning.

What’s most wonderful about Waffle House isn’t its hours, its food, its helpfulness in identifying just how severe a storm is (see the Waffle House Index), or even its cheerful color scheme; it’s the people there.

Over my half-dozen-or-so trips to Waffle House these last three months, I have not once walked through those doors and not shared or experienced some charming, delightful, endearing, or otherwise joyful moment with someone inside. There’s the kid running up and down the length of the Waffle House because that’s what kids do and the hostess cheering him on and giving him a free waffle for running so well; there’s the hostess who clocked my Carly Rae Jepsen So Nice Tour t-shirt and asked me all about the concert; there’s the cook who struck up conversation about my car and travels and invited me to add him on Facebook in case I’m ever passing through Russellville, Alabama, again. These aren’t life-changing encounters, they’re so brief and unassuming, so human, and so lovely to me.

There’s a sense of community that’s at once both subtle, because there’s nothing but food connecting us, and profound, because there’s nothing but food connecting us! Yet we’re all here, we’re all doing the best we can, and we’re doing OK. Sometimes more than OK, sometimes less than, but we’re always doing OK.

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A trip to Waffle House gives me the same sense of random but intentional and meaningful community that I experience at the abbeys I’ve visited, that I remember experiencing the first time I went to a drag show, and that I experience every year at Christmas Eve Mass. My family does nearly the exact same thing every year, and it’s my favorite day. On Christmas Eve, we go into LA for an evening Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. This isn’t our home parish; we don’t know these people; but we’re all here together in a wonderful space for one wonderful purpose. Sort of like a Waffle House.

Sort of like a Benedictine abbey.

I am growing up in a generation that is ravenous for community. A not-insignificant number of people have been abandoned, forgotten, or ignored, especially by the Church in America, and when one loses that which has been a key community across the last two thousand years, one comes up with a gap in the social resume. So we make communities, we make movements, we find families when ours have disowned us.

But we need not do so blindly! So, I ask, what can young people learn from the Benedictine art of community?

1. Humility: You are not the center of the world, and thank God! Thank God you do not have that kind of pressure on you. You are free to be as God made you if you can be humble enough to accept that.

2. Austerity: You have one life, and you owe it to yourself to work hard. Rest—isn’t rest one of the first things we can learn from scripture? Rest, but earn it. Live meaningfully and without frivolity; stand your ground.

3. Stability: Know yourself and own it; love it; celebrate it. I repeat, stand your ground. This is most efficiently done when you have others to flying buttress you when it gets hard to stand on your own. All for one, one for all, et cetera.

4. Hospitality: We are all of us strangers here. We are all doing this for the first time. Let’s meet each other as friends, if we can, or as strange but endearing persons otherwise.

5. Awareness: Anthony de Mello, S.J., is always saying, “Wake up! Wake up!” in his book Awareness. Taylor Swift instructs in her 2012 song “Eyes Open” to “keep your eyes open.” Jesus Christ says in Matthew 25:13: “Keep awake…, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” We cannot embody humility if we are unaware; neither can we uphold austerity, maintain stability, or live and love hospitably if we are unaware of ourselves and of the world around us.

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I cannot remember where I read it or heard it, and maybe I made it up, but I believe G. K. Chesterton said something along the lines of: If he weren’t Christian, he would not be atheist but pagan, because that, at least, is starting over.

Maybe what endears me so to Waffle House is that, should the Catholic Church stumble off the face of the earth tomorrow (it won’t, but let’s use our imaginations), we will still come together at Waffle House. Should we forget the sacrament of the Eucharist or the wedding feast of the lamb or even the Last Supper, we will still meet at Waffle House for the country ham and eggs breakfast. Should we forget to love God, we will still love each other, even in brief, unassuming, and human ways.

Things in the world are weird, right now, to say the very least. My prayer for us is that we continue to meet each other, if not in church then at our 24-hour diners—truly the pride of our nation. Let us not miss out on the women at the well, the men in the trees, the monks in their abbeys, the nuns in theirs, and the Gen Z in the Waffle House.

Highlights from the last week:

• Reaching 10,000 miles

• Finishing The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

• Attending Mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey in Pecos, NM

• Surviving the 13-mile dirt road driveway at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert

• Driving home after 10 weeks away

Monasteries visited:

1. Our Lady of Dallas Cistercian Abbey, Dallas, TX

2. Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey, Pecos, NM

3. Monastery of Christ in the Desert, Abiquiu, NM

4. Monastery of Our Lady of the Desert, Blanco, NM

5. Santa Rita Abbey, Sonoita, AZ

1. Dallas; 2. 10,000 miles; 3. Pecos; 4–5. Abiquiu; 6. Coffee break #2; 7. Blanco; 8–9. Sonoita