Table Talk: Part I
The Placement of the Table
If these walls could talk, I would surely lend my ear. But if our dining table could talk, I’d lend much more, settle in and time could, well, just wait. I have a soft spot for this piece of furniture. It entered my life the same time marriage did so has a natural starting point of sentimentality. So much of life has happened around our table; it’s seen many a high and plenty of lows.
For a few years, it never saw the light of day under my sister’s house while I sat at the tables of others in North America. Having the chance to study at Asbury Theological Seminary, we went. And weren’t disappointed. It was the combination of us asking the right kind of questions plus gifted Biblical scholars and theologians that hospitality kept appearing in the Scriptures. I now cannot understand holiness or the Trinity in terms other than hospitality, i.e., welcome of the Other.
What I learnt sitting at tables in lecture rooms dovetailed with what I learnt at dinner and coffee tables at a faith community called Communality^, with the likes of fellow students* at the time, and strangers in Michigan who hosted us during a summer internship. Ten years since we pulled into their driveway, they are still wonderful friends. We were just talking this week on the phone.
If I’m to model my life on that first century Jewish man who continues to puzzle and impress me, then hospitality is a value and practice of high priority. And if the dining table was the chosen space for Jesus to practice his hospitality, then I can use the space around our table for that too.
Our table was set up in what became the dining room at a rental in New Farm in 2002, and we set sail. We didn’t really chart a course; we weren’t sure where this kind of lifestyle would take us. All we knew is that the Spirit would have to animate the venture or else we’d just run out of puff. And we just tried to steer towards a destination where God’s kingdom was on earth as it is in heaven.
We weren’t out to convert people, so there was no underlying agenda in a friendship. I like this about mission and its departure point from traditional evangelism where a friendship was made with the purpose of turning him/her into a fully devoted follower of Jesus Christ. I’m more comfortable with trying to be a faithful witness and hoping that a friend can join the dots from me to my God and like what they see. And if no dot-to-dotting went on, then dang, we’d still be able to eat at our table together even if our gods were different.
That table of ours has seen many a face, plate, cup, pen, notebook, and candle. At it has sat so many people unlike ourselves as we learnt what it means to be hospitable neighbours to well people, unwell people, professionals, addicts, children, asylum seekers, immigrants, tradies, seniors, and the list goes on. In a small capacity we seemed to be a place to drop in when welfare places in the community had shut. Our city’s Lady Mayoress even awarded our attempts, but really I think it’s a tradition our grandparents’ generation seemed to be strong at – having a cuppa with a neighbour and not being aghast if a visitor didn’t phone beforehand.
In this space of offering hospitality, its mystery worked in me. Issues I only read or heard about now became close to home as they accompanied visitors who came over. Because those issues are attached to people, they are by their very nature social issues. In my proximity to people grappling with all sorts of difficulties, I saw how complexity wound itself through these issues. And I suspended judgment on things I probably would easily have had an opinion on before.
New words and roles like justice and advocacy emerged. Thanks to hospitality I moved from not knowing what I didn’t know, to knowing what I didn’t know, to the start of knowing. It only took several years, but that was ok. We weren’t planning on going anywhere in a hurry. This model of a faith community required us to be in a neighbourhood for the long haul.
But on a Saturday night in October 2009 around our endeared dining table, a guest in our home for the weekend put some questions on that table which, between the lines and unknowingly for him, whispered that it was time for me to once and for all address the elephant in the room.
^ theashram.blogspot.com
*
www.geoffandsherry.blogspot.com ; thegladdings.blogspot.com ;
temperance-girl.blogspot.com
)
