AfterWords | A Right-Sized Table

A short read
by Laura Boggs

A Big Enough Table

May he bring you home rejoicing once again into our doors.
     –  from the Northumbria Morning Prayer

Sunday marked the start of a brand-new ministry year at The Parish.

Around these parts, we talk about a Big Enough Story—and a Big Enough Table. The Table, big T, is the culmination of each service—at The Parish, seminal, but not solemn. Our kids have just spilled in, joyfully, from their classrooms. No one knows quite how to line up, who starts and who goes next. As we shuffle toward crackers and wine, eyes are met, shoulders patted, hands squeezed. Chaos Communion!

Some Sundays I want to laugh; others, I want to cry.

On this Sunday, I did both. After a July pause in regular gatherings, here we are, our bodies moving with one accord. A Shared Way, affirming we are not alone.

Once in a while, Jordan invites us to the Table with, “Come, not because you have enough faith, but because there’s enough food. Come, not because you understand, but because you’re understood.”

Another thing we like to say at The Parish: What happens at the table is truer than the darkness outside.

Can I get an amen?

A Small Enough Table

Those times do shift, those times do shift
Each thing its time doth hold
New things succeed, new things succeed
As former things grow old
     –  “Candlemas Eve” by Kate Rusby

Two weeks ago, my parents left their big table (and ten chairs), trading spacious house for small apartment. Farewell, mountain home outside Greenville; hello, retirement community in Roswell.

I am delighted Mom and Dad are nearby, but I grieve the loss of that big table, where we congregated for holidays and birthdays and sometimes plain old Tuesdays. Festival days, ordinary time.

Some folks eat to live; our family lives to eat. In more recent years, my dad, a marvelous cook, printed menus detailing his meals, from cocktails to dessert. We’d walk in, set down our bags, search the countertops for the menu. Lamb chops with madeira and mushrooms. Pasta with bolognese. Chicken roasted with lemons and root vegetables.

Yes, chef.

When I was a kid, we called dinner guests “company.” The pre-company hour was high and holy—I loved the anticipatory hush that fell over the house. Swept floors, lit candles, good smells from the stove.

I was raised on it, the table. With all my heart, I believe in it. When we share a meal, we defy busyness, self-sufficiency, isolation. We sit and eat and declare we are not alone.

Now, my table will be the center that holds. I am up for it. But I already miss my parents’ big table, with the dog’s teeth marks on its pedestal base—patina! A sign: we were here.

On moving-in day, stacks of boxes threatened to swallow my parents’ new digs—their place, but not yet their place. Luke and I fetched Thai takeout for lunch. With flimsy plastic forks, the four of us ate basil stir-fry and noodles with shrimp. An inaugural meal, entirely without ceremony. We sat at my parents’ first-ever table—a small oval table with four Hitchcock chairs. It was the table of my youth, once positioned in front of a fireplace in our Connecticut keeping room.

Decades ago, my parents bought a bigger table. The little table, basement-dwelling all these years, seems to have shrunk with age, as things do when we grow away from them, then return.

For this new chapter, it’s precisely the right size.

The table is solid, but not perfect—behold the fiftyish-year-old scarlet marker stains, for which I take the blame. Or credit. A red-smeared reminder, an ebenezer. Laura was here.

Again, we were here.

And now, here we are, still saying grace, pass this-or-that, are you going to eat that last shrimp? Still insisting, we are not alone.

Amen.