Talking Tuesday: All Around Our Table

I have an online acquaintance who is a priest's wife and blessed with many children.  She often writes little reflections about their lives, and her most recent reflection about her dining room table really resonated with me.  I share it here with her permission:

Pani's Corner

All Around Our Table

At our house, because there are so many of us, our dining room table is enormous. Not all families are blessed to have a table to eat on—much less one that fits their family. We have a double blessing in the form of a beautiful, long table that seats exactly ten. The problem is that the table is so long and so wide that we have had trouble finding a home with a large enough dining room to accommodate it. I knew I had found the right house when not only was there room for all of us, but it had room for The Table. There remained only one problem—no lights. The room is designed to be a living room, so there are no chandeliers or even a ceiling light, and we do not have an abundance of lamps. I have one floor lamp, and up until recently this has meant eating early or it will be too dark to eat together. Inspiration hit when I saw a mismatched collection of candlesticks online on a long table at a wedding. I went down to the thrift store and bought eight candlesticks.

When the candles are lit and spaced apart, it is still too dark to see, but when we put them together in a tight group they cast enough light for us to eat by. This is the Christian life. When we take up the fatalist's cry of Carpe diem! or worse You Only Live Once! we are like that lone lamp or candlestick in a big room. It may as well be a cave for all we can see. One light burning alone illumines nothing save what is immediately in front of it, and the temptation is to give in to our limited senses and say, "See? There is nothing more than me. You live, you die, that's it." But when we join our lives to Christ and to each other, as we are called to do—because no Christian can be a Christian alone—then we will illumine an entire room, a neighborhood, a city, a nation, the world! The Christian lives for that one eternal day that is past this plane of existence and is also called to be present now, but instead of saying, "What's the point?" or "May as well have a little fun while you are here, because that's it!" we are called to go make disciples, be a light unto the nations. We are saved together. Seize the Light, be love, and receive Christ!

~Pani Svetlana Lauren Birthisel, May 28, 2015

We bought our kitchen table from an antique store near the seminary that my husband attended during our second year of marriage.  We'd buried Philip a few months before, we hoped for a large family, and we were getting ready to move to the city to begin our lives in our current house.  I think I was very newly pregnant with Piglet, but maybe didn't know it yet.  My mom had come sometime that spring to keep me company, and we found the table while browsing around. The owner told us it had been in the household of an Amish farmer who had added to the table as his family grew.  It had 10 leaves and seated anywhere from 4 to 22 people.  Each leaf is different, clearly made at different times from different woods, and with differing levels of expertise.  The table has a fifth leg in the middle to support the weight as the table grows. 

The table had been neglected for some time when we bought it, and had clearly been out in the barn for a while as some of the marks on the table top showed the outlines of tools and machinery, rather than kitchen implements and normal scarring.  Still, we bought it, hoping our family would also grow.  Our kitchen arrangement can only accommodate a max of four leaves in the table (our normal amount is three, for the comfort of the family meals) and it is tight getting around the table at the best of times.  It is scarred and well loved, squeaky and uneven (one side is significantly higher than the other, and the leaves are all warped now).  But it suits our family, and we can easily make shift to get another family around its edges.  We've often hosted another family of five with three children roughly the same age as our older three, and it is crowded but wonderful.  It is the gathering place of our home.

It also happens to be a superb hiding place for the little ones.