He overturned the tables

Yesterday we had a meeting, just three of us: me, Gwen and Lisa. Now given my acknowledged meetings phobia you might be surprised by this. But it was a different kind of meeting. There was cake and as you can see by the photograph, it was chocolate cake.
We sat around the table and ate the cake and talked, remembering the bible as we went, remembering those with and for whom we worked, telling stories of families and friends both near and far away, cataloguing our prayerful concerns and our priorities for action. We were three women and some might have called us wise.
We were re-setting the table. On the day when we remembered the table up-setter who said ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’ we were resetting a perfectly ordinary table to be the centre of such a revolution.
In my remembered bible this is a week of tables, from those upset to those reset. Just as the stuff slips off of one table so it is placed more carefully on another. Of course we can, and do, become obsessed with furniture. I once heard of a church that had to have a secret ballot to move a lectern six inches. It could be one of those church myths but I don’t think it is.
You see this table re-setting is not about the actual table but about what goes on around it and where it takes us. It’s more about who is invited to the table and the sharing that happens there. This week I have been reading Lavinia Byrne’s book The Journey is my Home (2000, Hodder and Stoughton) in which she tells her own faith story. I used to know her when she was ‘Cybernun’ at the CCBI but we’ve not been in touch since then. I wanted to tell her how much the book had helped me to ‘re-set the table’ this week, so I’m telling this blog in the hope it goes into cyberspace somewhere.
Later this week, I will take a journey to meet a new community, the Lay Community of St Benedict, who have invited me to reset the table with them. I’m looking forward to it and I’m hoping there will be cake.