Gathering at Tables
A gesture, a posture, a gift and a blessing…
We have this space where two or more gather each week… our corner-table in the universe where love and blessing meet.
Each week it reminds me of the Eagle and the Child Pub.
A table at the Pub where CS Lewis and a few of his friends and colleagues would gather twice a week.
They had stories to tell. Writings to share. Ideas to press into. Conversations to have. Ones they wanted to have with each other. For thirty years they stretched this connection into deeper places within their lives. They stopped meeting after Lewis died in 1963.
I leave Table each Wednesday with a deep sense that more is
happening than what I can see or name.
Nothing is ever really off limits here.
I can question a belief I once held. A map I was given to follow that led me somewhere different than I had planned. A certainty that has evolved into mystery.
One of the things I long for is what my grandpa Clay allowed me to taste very early in my young life… I long for a place to share openly, deeply and honestly with women. Women who commit to gather for thirty years in pubs, at tables, in circles of friends and pour love, listen, and believe the blessing never ends. To hold their stories and storytelling. To watch their words turn into imaginings that transform us and also find release as she remembers why she is here. New ways of birthing thought, change, and ancient knowing.
Like Lewis and his male friends… pouring, challenging, discovering, questioning, doubting, lecturing, listening… loving each other as they stayed close to the talent and longings and musings they were witnessing but had not yet named.
This is how it felt last night after table. I closed the zoom window… and imagined that CS Lewis and his friends must have felt this too…
To believe that love expands the table…
To believe that the blessing is the gift…
To believe that the gift of gathering at tables, that allow us to pour from our souls, is the blessing… the blessing that knows us and loves us still. This is the gift of gathering.
These words from Jan Richardson settled my soul as I reached out to turn
off the lamp on the table…
Blessing that Does Not End
From the moment
it first laid eyes
on you,
this blessing loved you.
This blessing knew you from the start.
It cannot explain how. It just knows that the first time
it sat down beside you, it entered into a conversation
that had already been going on
forever.
Believe this conversation has not stopped.
Believe this love still lives—
the love that crossed an impossible distance
to reach you, to find you, to take your face into its hands
and bless you.
Believe this does not end—
that the gesture, once enacted, endures.
Believe this love goes on— that it still takes your face into its hands,
that it presses its forehead to yours as it speaks to you
in undying words, that it has never ceased to gather your heart
into its heart.
Believe this blessing abides.
Believe it goes with you always.
Believe it knows you still.
Jan Richardson
Love Expands the Table ~ Shelly
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