The Welcome Table

This summer, I completed a piece of art that I had begun nearly two years earlier. There are several reasons it took so much time to complete, including the fact that the finished size is more than 4 x 6 feet (and was an interesting challenge to create in my 300 sq. ft. apartment!). Commissioned by St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Orlando, where I used to serve as one of the pastors, the piece is titled The Welcome Table. With paper collage and acrylic paint, the piece depicts Jesus sharing a meal with a colorful array of women, men, children, and a couple of pets. (Visit the enlarged view.)

I pieced together the artwork on a table that, when it’s not serving as an extension of my art studio or office, is my dining table. As I created The Welcome Table there over a couple of years, I had lots of opportunities to think about tables I’ve shared with family and friends. I thought of the elaborate Thanksgiving feasts in my hometown, where nearly everybody who lives there joins in, and the town’s population swells as far-flung friends and family travel back to share in the festivities. (Pecan pies as far as the eye can see!) I recalled and re-savored the generous tables my grandparents offered as I was growing up. I thought of how my parents kept (and still keep) the Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary beside the dining table, and how often the dictionary came out during our mealtimes as we tracked down a word, often stopping to visit other words en route. To this day, food and words are intimately intertwined for me, each of them providing food for body and soul.

I remembered tables from my trip to Italy a couple of years ago, many of them in the company of Eric, my pal from college who now lives in Rome (and whose areas of expertise as a journalist include, wondrously, food and wine). On the day I arrived in Rome, Eric took me to a sunny patio table where we feasted with friends in four languages. He led my sister and me to a splendid table overlooking a lake outside Rome, and to a tiny neighborhood restaurant where the owner simply sets up four tables along the narrow street outside his home. But one of my favorite tables was the one in Eric’s apartment, where one day for lunch he pulled out a loaf of bread, some cheese, marinated artichokes, roasted red peppers…and we savored the simple fare as the sounds of the Eternal City wove through our words.

In the introduction to her book The Gastronomical Me, famed food writer M.F.K. Fisher observes, “There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.” Communion happens in all kinds of ways, not only at the table of the altar but also beyond it. There’s something about sharing a meal that invites us to notice the generosity of God in the gifts of the earth and to encounter the presence of Christ in the hospitality of friends.

The Gospels make it really clear how much Jesus loved to eat with folks. All kinds of folks. So much was he known for hanging out at tables with sometimes questionable dining companions that his critics said, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” (Matthew 11.19) I think one of the many reasons that eating with folks was important to Jesus is that it was a way of inviting them to think about what they were really hungry for. Jesus urged people to consider what would sustain them not only in body but also in soul. And he challenged them to consider how they would offer sustenance to one another.

What are you hungry for? Are you giving yourself the time, the space, to notice what kind of sustenance you’re craving these days?

Maybe you’ve already noticed that among the women and men and pets who have gathered at The Welcome Table, there’s an empty space.

We saved it for you.

Binding Words

This week has found me in the midst of doing some bookbinding. I’ve been replenishing the inventory of a couple of my Wanton Gospeller Press books. I love doing this kind of work periodically, work that engages my hands but lets my brain go wandering instead of being its usual hyper-focused self.

It’s a happy bit of synchronicity that I’m binding books at this particular point in the year. This trinity of days from October 31 to November 2, encompassing Halloween, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day, tends to be a thin place in the landscape of my year. The ancient Celts believed that the veil between worlds became especially permeable at this time; perhaps like them, I’ve often found that these days offer an invitation to ponder the past. Not with a desire to return to it, or to second-guess it, but with a mindfulness of what has gone before, and perhaps, just occasionally, to have a brief visit from the ghosts of What Might Have Been.

It’s this kind of impulse that gave rise to the feasts of All Saints and All Souls. Recognizing the ancient impulse to look to the past at this time of year, the church created new ways to remember the dead with practices in which we can still hear the echoes of the ancient celebrations.

Binding these books in the midst of these sacred days, I’ve been thinking about those whose lives have been bound together with mine. I love Jane Hirshfield’s poem “For What Binds Us,” in which she writes about the tender and fierce connections that love draws us toward, how our loving marks us and creates a fabric that, as she writes, “nothing can tear or mend.”

It’s a good time of year to think about what and whom I’m bound to, and what I’m bound for. It’s an occasion to ponder where I’m giving my energy and to consider what threads of connection may be confining me and what threads are weaving a welcome path into the days ahead.

Where are you bound these days?

Happy Feast of All Souls to you.