In
The Table (DLT 2019) I wrote this:
It’s a table for meeting. It’s a table for
talking around. It’s a table for laughing. Most of all it’s a table for eating.
It’s a level table. Maybe it’s not a round table. Maybe it’s a square table, so
that people can look directly at one another as they sit there. Can look each
other in the eye as they sit there, beside the poor man who made it.
And
this:
At the table you sit close beside the poor
carpenter Jesus, who has invited you and made room for you there. You are very
close, you and he, sitting side by side and gazing in the same direction. If he
were more distant from you, then you might turn and see him.
But he is close to you, closer to you than you
think, closer indeed than you are to yourself. So you can turn as quickly as
you like but you cannot see him with the eyes of your body. Since the day of
his ascension no one ever has.
Sitting
across from people, sitting beside God. It’s a profoundly social picture, which
is as it should be for the profoundly social people we are, and the profoundly
social God we know and worship.
I
came to faith as a student, feeling my way through a nervous breakdown and
through fear and anxiety, as my Mum fell ill with cancer and I was lost without
meaning and without faith. I was a Drama student at Birmingham University and I
was helped through my crisis by human contact and by an insight. The human
contact was with a lecturer in Drama, and two professors of Theology. The insight
came from a German/Jewish philosopher who was recommended by all three of them
as someone who understood what it really is to be human – to be profoundly
social, not to be alone.
The
philosopher’s name was Martin Buber. In his most famous book, I and Thou,
he speaks of relationship as the heart of what makes us human, and what makes
us people of the Spirit. ‘Spirit is not in the I, but between I and You … it
is solely by virtue of our power to relate that we are able to live in the
spirit.’
In
The Table I wrote more about Buber:
At my wedding service in 1976, Kate and I
included an additional reading; a selection of phrases from the Jewish
philosopher Martin Buber, whose writings among other things had led me to
Christ. The reading contained one of Buber’s most famous phrases, ‘All real
living is meeting’. It continued with words still more profound for me:
‘Feelings dwell in people, but people dwell in their love’. In asking for these
words at our wedding we wanted to remember where love rests, and where love
begins and ends, and whose love it is.
I’m
writing about Buber again here, in this time of Coronavirus, because his insight
that being human is being relational brought me to faith, and has formed my thinking
and praying for forty-seven years, this insight that I see in Scripture and in
the spirituality of the Church, this insight that lockdown cannot destroy.
We
are not alone at the table, even though no one outside our household can sit
across from us at this time. If we are alive, we are made for meeting; all real
living is meeting. And as Buber says in I and Thou, ‘…the lines of
relationship all intersect in the eternal You’ – that is in the living God
in whom we meet, and live, and move, and have our being.
This
short piece aims to proclaim that truth, in the face of loneliness and of
grief. I’m writing it on the afternoon of 15 April, which is a special day for
those of us who live in Liverpool. It’s the day when we remember the
Hillsborough tragedy, 31 years ago now, when 96 football fans were killed and
then blamed for their own deaths, and whose families had to struggle for
decades to establish the truth that they were not to blame.
All
through those decades the Liverpool anthem has remained the same: you’ll never
walk alone. At 3.06 p.m. today I stopped writing, and I sat quietly, and prayed
and remembered the 96 and their families, together with all those who were
there that day and who survived. And alongside those I also prayed for and
remembered the many people who have died, or will die, in this time of coronavirus,
and their families, and those who have survived. They too will never walk
alone. God is not alone, but is in relationship – with us and with them and
with all.
If
you sit at your own table alone today, I pray that you may know a deeper truth;
that this is not how things really are, or were meant to be. May you know that
the lines of relationship that hold you, and have held every one of the 96, and
every one in hospital with COVID-19 – that these lines of relationship
intersect in the eternal You. They intersect in the personal God, in our God
who is not a thing, not a force, not an notion; in the living God who made us
for relationship with one another, who sits beside us at the table and who
always will.
***
Each
day, we will post a short article by one of Darton, Longman and Todd’s amazing
authors, offering a personal reflection on our current situation in life.
Sometimes this will be written with reference to one of their books, and
sometimes about how they are living in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus and
our current world situation. We hope it will give you a taste of the depth and
diversity of DLT’s list – books for heart, mind and soul that aim to meet the
needs and interests of all.
Today’s
post is by Paul Bayes, author of The
Table: Prayer, Friendship, Justice. You
can buy an eBook copy of the book here, or a physical copy here.
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