Table Manna

From the website of theTable, a church in California:

“I see a table, patina’d with age and laughter... Meals were shared. Stories were told.... We remembered who we were, we dreamed of who might become. At that table, we experienced the nearness of God…”

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Dear Alex,

Sometimes at the table, conversations are heard in silence - sentiments mocked, expectations muted, questions dismissed, window shutters closed before the hurricane.  Unspoken yet lucidly expressed and received.

Other times, voices are hushed by the clamor at the table.  Laughter becomes the language of pain. And it only gets funnier as the ridicule of sorrow deepens.  The noise from children is loveliest for remedy.

Then (t)able faces.  I have known them for life until I gather around the table again to discover something odd: not about them but me.  The unveiling of me at the table enables me to peek at the obvious missed.  The table, my table, is a living space where I am able to give and take, grieve and forgive.  Face (t)able.

Yours,

Kate

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Dear Kate,

Last night I missed Christmas.

It all started with a song playing in my head.  I'm not going to say the name of the song now or else you will be distracted, singing along in your head, carried away.   Or so I assume.

I assume you like Christmas too and you have a repertoire of Christmas songs in your head as big as mine, that you know the words better than lines from the Bible.  I assume a currency that might not exist between us.

Gathering around the table; it is an apt metaphor. Not that we're doing a very good job with even that, being simply physically present, as a family, let alone as a community.   Willy-nilly we all need to acknowledge in some way it's on a common ground we stand.   Table or not we'll need to "get along."

If around a table is indeed where and how we gather, then the currency of a community has to be our table manner.  We can claim, even come up with mission statement on how we operate, but the truth is not known or faced until the wine runs dry and food scarce.   It's just as easy for a person to fidget on his seat even when facing a sumptuous feast, often one he takes for granted.

Illusion tends to self-perpetuate once you started it. The only prefix one can add to the word is dis, and that's when one leaves the table. Sometimes flips it over too. Anger burns up table wood and that's how hell starts its fire.

"I'll be home for Christmas...if only in my dreams."   Every good table is a morsel of heaven on earth.  You know the love is real when a Person wants to sit beside you, not just to tolerate or pity, but to expect to receive what you don't even know you have in you to give.  Eagerly.  We don't relate just because our blood says so.

I hope I'm making sense.  I am walking to work now and dictating this letter to my phone; "walked and wrote," I call this.  A train just came by and it's long and noisy but I like it.  It moves people towards and away and back.  I hope my words do not taste like fast food.

Yours, Alex