Our Crowded Table

Dear Fellow Pilgrim,

As I write these words, my elbows are resting on a table that is nearly one hundred and ten years old.  It has been passed from one generation of Jonathan’s family to the next, until, somehow, it found its way to us.  I often wonder about the hands that have rested where mine now do.  How many loaves of bread have been broken here?  How many birthdays celebrated?  How many prayers whispered before meals?  How many ordinary Tuesdays, long forgotten by everyone except the table itself.  And then another thought found me.  How many empty chairs has this table seen?

Behind me, above the dining room window, hangs a frame my mother-in-law gave me a year or two ago. It bears the words to one of my favorite songs:*  “We want a house with a crowded table.”*  I’ve loved those words for years.  I thought I understood them.  Didn’t you?  A crowded table.  It sounded like hospitality.  Like opening your home.  Like squeezing one more chair around the table.  It seemed such a lovely prayer.  “Lord, give us a crowded table.”  But these past few weeks…  I’ve begun to wonder if I have been praying for the wrong thing.

As many of you know, our family is preparing to leave for Honduras for a little while. A year, perhaps. Maybe longer. Maybe less. We have learned that tomorrow is one of God’s favorite mysteries, so we’ve stopped trying to solve it before it arrives.  After much prayer, this road unfolded before us with a quiet peace.  And then we began telling people.  Something curious happened.  It wasn’t the questions that stayed with me.  Nor the surprise.  It was the pauses.  The conversations that lingered. The hugs that lasted just a little longer than they usually do.  The smiles that somehow carried both joy and sorrow at the same time.  Love, I’ve noticed, often speaks with two voices.  One says,* “Go. We’re so happy for you.”*  The other whispers,* “We’ll miss you terribly.”*  And somehow both voices tell the truth.

Ever since then, I’ve found myself thinking less about Honduras and more about empty chairs.  Strange, isn’t it?  We spend so much of our lives hoping for crowded tables.  We rarely stop to think about what makes them crowded in the first place.  Surely it isn’t the furniture.  Some of the fullest tables I’ve ever known could barely seat four.  And some of the emptiest could host a banquet.

So what fills a table?  I wonder if it has something to do with ordinary days.  The kind we almost never remember while we’re living them.  Tuesday dinners.  Spilled milk.  Coffee growing cold because the conversation mattered more.  Boardgames lasting till midnight.  The same familiar faces.  The same familiar prayers.  The same seats filled by the same people.  Again.  And again.  And again.  Until affection quietly puts down roots beneath them all.  Perhaps love grows the way trees do.  Not upward at first but downward.  Silently.  Patiently.  Hidden beneath the surface.  And then one day, a strong wind comes.  A move.  A goodbye.  A funeral.  A graduation.  A child grown.  And suddenly we discover that what looked like ordinary soil had become a forest.  Perhaps departures don’t create love.  Perhaps they simply reveal it.

A few evenings ago I wandered through our dining room after packing another box.  The table was still there.  The chairs were still there.  The frame still hung above the window.  Only the boxes were new.  I looked up.*  “We want a house with a crowded table.”*  And then a question came to me that has refused to leave.  What if a crowded table isn’t one where every chair is occupied?  What if it is one where every empty chair is still loved?

I sat with that thought for a long while.  Because every chair tells a story.  One belongs to a friend who moved away.  Another to grandparents who are now with Christ.  Another waits for children who have grown and begun setting tables of their own.  Another will sit empty for a season while we make a home in another country.  And yet none of those people have truly left the table.  They still arrive in stories, in recipes, in inside jokes, in prayers; in the way someone reaches for the salt exactly the way their father did.

Love has a remarkable habit of refusing to stay behind.  It crosses oceans.  It crosses years.  It crosses even death itself.

Perhaps that is why every Divine Liturgy feels so mysteriously full.  Around Christ’s Table, the boundaries we cling to begin to fade. Heaven and earth draw near. The saints, the departed faithful, the struggling, the rejoicing, the ones nearby and the ones far away—we are all gathered by the same Lord, nourished by the same Life. Communion has never been measured by geography.  Perhaps our little dining room tables are only practicing for that one.

So, dear friends, we’re leaving for Honduras.  But I no longer think we’re leaving our table behind.  If anything, I think we’re carrying it with us.  Not the oak beneath my elbows.  That will remain exactly where God has planted it for now.  I mean the truer table.  The one built from shared meals, ordinary Tuesdays, long conversations, forgiveness freely given, prayers faithfully offered.  When we sit down to eat in Honduras, you’ll be there.  In the stories we’ll tell.  In the names we’ll continue to pray.  In the recipes that taste like home.  In the empty chairs that are not really empty at all.  Because I am beginning to think that crowded tables have very little to do with chairs.  Perhaps they are simply places where love has learned to remain.

And love, by the mercy of God, has never been very good at saying goodbye.

P.S. If you’ve never listened to Crowded Table by The Highwomen, I’d love to leave it with you. The frame above our dining room window borrowed its words from that beautiful song, and I have a feeling I’ll never hear it quite the same way again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPfI8zBWub4