Setting Tables Where We Can
Last weekend I had the chance to gather with some good people to discuss important questions in this moment in history, in both formal and informal settings, but usually at tables over food. It was a pleasure to sit at those various and vibrantly different tables, and to eat and converse with various and vibrantly different others.
Since then, I’ve been pondering the vital human business that can happen at tables and meals — and what I don’t mean by this are solely business deals and the inane chatter and velvety power moves that are common there. I’m sure some business deals can also be authentic, vital, and human, but I mean a kind of exchange that isn’t merely transactional. Something real can happen between people eating at tables that mere digital data-exchange cannot fully duplicate.
Long ago, when I was in seminary, students and faculty were expected to eat together regularly in the seminary’s refectory. No one took formal attendance, but it mattered that we showed up regularly. The refectory had long wooden tables at which we would sit, and the expectation put us in awkward yet vital contact with one another regularly. Sometimes I found myself sitting with people I wouldn’t normally interact with in class; that could be awkward. Sometimes the awkwardness was due to the fact that I wanted to impress someone, and it can be hard to do that while also trying to eat unruly forkfuls of salad or pasta.
My alma mater also practiced regular “Silent Days,” usually prior to exam weeks each semester. It was a small monastic practice in our mostly non-monastic world. Classes weren’t held (because everyone was studying for exams), but we would still gather midday in the refectory and eat meals at those tables together — only silently.
My experience of meals on silent days revealed to me both the power of silence and of shared meals at common tables. Living it, and repeating it periodically, deepened my confidence in them both, though I would hesitate to call them techniques, and I wouldn’t force feed the practices on just anyone.
Regularly, at meals on silent days, I found that some kind of holy business happened in me around other people that I was unable to effect in myself just by thinking good thoughts about them. A person that I might have been having a fierce, nearly existential argument with in a classroom the week before — and an even fiercer, demonizing kind of battle with them in my mind and heart — would be rehumanized to me at a meal on silent days. The prevailing silence made space for me to actually hear their slurping, chewing, and swallowing sounds that invariably softened my heart towards them: Here is an ordinary human being that, like me, needs to eat and drink to survive another day. Here is a person, unedited, vulnerably themselves - a person I am discovering as given to me as much as I am to them, both of us participants in this silence, at this table, in this moment in time.
We each had to practice silence (for silence takes much greater effort in a world accustomed not only to noise but especially to noise as an anesthetic and escape from ourselves and others) AND we each had to participate in the meal. The silence wasn’t withdrawal from one another, although eye contact was usually very awkward! Rather, we were actively abstaining from instinctually reaching for the usual buffering chitchat. Doing so while eating was incredibly awkward! And yet it also produced the most powerful “rehumanizing” in my heart. Perhaps that combination was the only way it could happen in me, and I grew to anticipate each semester’s silent day alert for these mysterious possibilities.
I sat at a variety of different tables last weekend, and each one of them did me good. None of the meals were silent, but I was alert to the fact that someone had set the tables, gave thought to the meal ahead of time, prepared for me and others to enjoy, and welcomed us to it, and then did the washing up afterwards. Each table offered me a place to experience shared encounter and rehumanizing with others.
I have been on the lookout for how I might be able to attend to and be aware of setting tables in my life, and to more deeply appreciate where I participate in those that are often set for me. I suppose this regular email is a kind of table, as most creative work seeks to be a place of genuine encounter or a quiet pause to invite possibility. It is so essential to human flourishing that we have places of genuine, non-exploitative connection in which to give thanks, commune and communicate, and often, that happens by sharing a meal with others, or in sharing a word.
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Reading currently:
The Women Are Up to Something, by Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb. (I’m loving this book!)
Degenerations of Democracy, by Craig Calhoun, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, and Charles Taylor (an important and dour read!)
Thankful for the work of:
Andrew DeCort - author, ethicist, activist. Check out his website and ever-growing corpus of books and other written material, in the midst of his teaching and practitioner work.
Elizabeth Oldfield - author, coach, consultant. Check out her website, Substack, podcast, and her book Fully Alive is now out in paperback!
Carolyn Marshall Wright - artist, teacher. Check out her website, be amazed and nourished by all that you see there.
Andrew, Elizabeth, and Carolyn are all productive writers and artists — wise, insightful participants in the world, giving voice and sight to good things. I think as generative AI grows in the ecosystem of our lives, we are going to miss the embodied, holy reality of people who write, listen, paint, lead, teach; people who have studied, daily practice, and who invite others into that kind of experience.
We do not live by data alone. Data, disembodied, is hard to know and trust without real, massive costs to actual human lives.
Real people and real places will continue to need our love, financial support, and care - not pitied cared, but participating care! Whether it is for people like Andrew, Elizabeth, or Carolyn, or for another creative human being in your life who offers real good in the world, remember them.