Come to the Table
Ever since the holidays, I have been part of several discussions about tables.
An odd topic, until you consider how much time we spend around tables with friends and family, and the memories they carry for us, especially at holidays.
It might be the table where you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle with your nephew which used to belong to your grandparents, and when it moved to your parents’ house it became the place where you learned to sew, the fabric and patterns spread out across the opened leaves. And now it belongs to your sister, hosting small and large gatherings of friends and family.
Or the table in your now empty parent’s house that you’re moving to your own house, carrying with it both the sadness of time and people passing and the happy memories that are soaked into the very grain of its wood..
The table in my kitchen when I was a child used to be in my father’s kitchen when he was a child. I ate supper at it with my family, and sat around it with my sister and brother to tear up stuffing for Thanksgiving turkeys, or dye Easter eggs. It went with me to my first apartment during grad school, and has stayed with me ever since. Only the color has changed – so many paint jobs over the years, each revealed in turn like an archeological dig when I finally stripped it down to its lovely beechwood.
Our tables are there for work, for everyday meals, for special occasions. They bind us with each other, and with our own pasts, and with the lives of previous generations.
It’s hard not to see the parallel with the table we gather around every Sunday. The next time you watch the communion table being prepared for its simple meal of bread and wine, think of what tables mean to you, and how much this table means to all of us.
Here we welcome. Here we celebrate. Here we share. Here we remember.
Barbara Ryther