Table Reflections

1) Everyone is welcome to come or not come to the table.

2) At the table, everyone is equal. There is no hierarchy, no pecking order. We are one, across the board, around the table.

3) Everyone receives and serves.

4) Table fellowship is the heart of what we are about. Commensality. Easy acceptance. Caring presence. Grace. Mercy. Peace. We are here that you might have life and have it abundantly. You are here that we might have life and have it abundantly. We bring forth life in each other by the quality of our being with each other. And, the words of Rumi guard the fellowship: “If you are not here with us faithfully, you are doing terrible damage.”

5) Anything is possible with everything on the table. What are you willing to put on the table? What are you unwilling to put on the table? What are the assumptions that you consider sacrosanct? The expectations you regard as holy and beyond examination? Put them on the table. What is your sense of how things ought to be? Place it on the table.

6) We have to empty ourselves of our ideas of how things ought to be in order to be open to how things truly need to be. We have to start with nothing. t all depends upon what we bring to the table, upon the spirit with which we come to the table. We have to be hungry in order to be fed. We have to be thirsty in order to drink fully. If we cannot come empty to the table, we cannot be fed.

            We have to empty ourselves of everything. Convictions, certitude, beliefs, opinions, assumptions, expectations, desires, biases, attachment to the way it is supposed to be, and supposed to be done. Everything has to go as we come to the table. Coming to the table is an exercise in emptying, an engagement with emptiness. The work of the spiritual journey is emptying ourselves of all that cannot satisfy so that we might be fulfilled and made whole. The table represents, symbolizes, the fulfillment, the wholeness, that is available to us as we empty ourselves of our ideas of what our life ought to be, and are receptive and open to the life that is ours to live. This might have nothing to do with what we do for a living, or with what we wish for ourselves. How we earn our money has no necessary connection with the life that is ours to live, with what we must do to be alive, and whole, and well. We empty ourselves of it all, and wait to see, to find, what truly feeds us, fills us, makes us whole.