A table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. Gertrude Stein
Welcome
Our communities of spirit are only real because …we both give and get. Those words by
Elizabeth Nguyen are at the heart of what I want to talk about today, the day when your
Guest at Your Table drive begins. It’s a project I didn’t know about and have enormously
enjoyed learning about online and it is an honour and a pleasure to be here on this day. It’s
a kind of special pleasure because coming to the table, both to eat together and at other
times to talk and be nourished by words, has been a big part of my spiritual and creative life
for a long time, tables big and small have been part of my practice you might say in life and
art – and that’s in part because a table is always more than just a table, it is also a symbol, a
metaphor, one of the deepest – from shabbat candle lighting with bread and wine to the
Christian eucharist and Islam where a guest is a blessing, from camp fires to festive featss –
tables make the world go round. A Guest at Your Table combines care for the world, keeping
an imaginary guest in the form of a donation box for the project, and inviting guests virtually
to speak about their projects for justice.
Sermon
I want today to reflect on ‘table service’ in my own Unitarian experience, keeping in mind as I do that phrase of Eliz Nguyen’s reflection that communities of spirit are only real because we both give and take. Only real – that’s a big reflection and her story, the one from which I took her words, says more. In a sermon that is published on the UUA worship web she talks of feeling tired and cold on a Sunday night, missing the bus to choir and feeling ambivalent about waiting for the next one. I could just go home or I could press on she thinks and then ‘I give myself a little pep talk’, she says and reminds herself that she is allowed to show up late in need of a song. And when she arrives there is hot tea and ‘fat dates and ‘and there’s broccoli soup.’ ‘We sing “Amazing Grace” “The wonders of accepting love have made me whole and real.” What I love about her story is that she flips it – instead of telling herself that others need her, she says that she needs what they have – it’s her who needs care and kindness of community and in connecting the two she realizes that it’s this toggling between giving and receiving that marks spiritual community – we come from a place of vulnerability, of not knowing, of being cold and fed up – and oddly, that, at times can be the gift we bring.
So let me tell you about SimpleGifts. Around 2012 a bunch of UK Unitarians planted a project in the basement of a large almost empty former Unitarian mission Bethnal Green in London’s East End. They called it SimpleGifts. Bethnal Green is a historically poor neighbourhood – the product of waves of immigration, casual labour, poor wages, overcrowding, & heavily bombed in the blitz. It’s still very mixed – Bengali, Irish Catholic, Caribbean, working class white and new younger people – among them, now, young artists. In 2013 I was among the Unitarians invited to come and hear what was happening at SimpleGifts – after school clubs and kids’ football and English lessons and central to it all – a weekly lunch. That Saturday we were also fed at a long trestle table in the huge dusty and unkempt old worship space with curries donated by a local Bengali restaurant. I was fascinated by the place and interested in the people hosting the day – Ann Howell who some of you met at EUU and Rob Gregson a UU minister then living in London. So I joined them as a volunteer. For the next six years I spent Thursdays with them cooking and serving lunch for between 20 and 50 people as I went through a change of career, trained as a minister and then led a congregation. In that time it was those Thursday lunches that gave me nourishment – as well as extending my own cooking repertoire. Simple Gifts was an unusual charity – Ann and Rob managed it but our lunch programme was run by volunteers, a variety of people who had mainly been referred by social prescribers or doctors – for mental health reasons, or to gain work experience before returning to work. There were, homeless people of all ages, living in hostels, there were Bengali women who
spoke very little English, there were ex addicts and young women who had been abused and there were lots of visitors – local groups of mostly young Muslim women who came to us for an occasional social and conversational English day . These were the volunteers – so it wasn’t just the community around us that was very mixed, but the but the volunteers themselves.
I don’t think any of were ever sure how we managed to cook lunch it really was a feeding of the 5000 every week – a tiny kitchen, with utensils that we donated and that were always being stolen between one week and the next – and a tiny food budget – but one of the things that made SG work was that Rob and Ann practiced by nature or design a kind of leadership that actually involved not knowing – a sort of open and benign chaos – we never knew what we going to cook until Thursday morning when we had to have it on the table around 12.30 – or who was going to do it – which meant that whoever turned up had to take over and we had to pop out to the local supermarket or the many Bengali market stall in the street – everything had to be Halal – and get something.
Somehow it never failed – I have cooked with teen mothers in hijabs who had known how to manage a kitchen since they were knee high and just rolled up their sleeves. We once took in a football team of teenage boys from South America who lived in the hall three days because they had been scammed by sports producer – they all cooked. It was absolutely not ideal and we had to look past the drug dealing on the street the squabbles the differences – but I learned that when you just let things be, the most unlikely people had gifts to bring. And needs, huge needs – I’ve accompanied young people with rotten teeth and no English to dentists. People had broken families, children taken away from them, there were young Asian men with mental health issues and lots of scared and lonely and poor people – but to lay a table together and get a meal ready and eat it together and then breathe in afterwards and talk about recipes – as they say, priceless.
One particular Thursday Ann had also invited local women’s groups meeting for conversational English to create a simple spa day for one another and cook and have lunch. In addition, we had our usual community lunch and our children’s after school club. We must have had 80 people at one point. One of our volunteers, who had a good few
problems herself, spent the entire morning squeezing the metaphorical loaves and fishes out of the fridge to feed the 5000, and from 11 a.m. women younger and older, from Pakistan, South America, Poland, Austria, Portugal, west Africa, Turkey, Bengal, the UK, Italy and Cyprus — just to name a few nationalities, gathered to give each other facials, thread eyebrows, henna hands and to interview each other about the issues in their communities that matter — this week, housing. And we danced, as women together, to Arabic pop and South American salsa. Women prayed in the office. They breastfed happily on the couch, they laid their little ones down to sleep on coats. And in the other room ladle upon ladle of halal shepherd’s pie got served and washed up among stories and painting and reading to kids. Twice on that day a woman asked me to pray for her. Women’s loneliness was and is very real. And so is men’s. I watched a man who was a regular for lunch, and who spoke little English sit at that huge table set for many people, and just rest, just relax, just eat. That’s it — that’s pretty much being a holy place. It’s a blessing, just washing up together at times.
The blessing is to learn from the people we serve. And to be served by them, by one another in turn. Not to give because we have more or we know how to do it, or we should know, but to receive because others have so much to give to us and giving is part of receiving. And learning to receive, well that really is a spiritual practice. Learning not to be bossy, not to be right, to overlook dirt and mess, to let others do it their way, to know it is you who needs the soup and to accept it from the hands of … well just to accept it.
Pablo Neruda The Great Tablecloth (trans Alistair Reid)
Let us sit down soon to eat
with all those who haven’t eaten:
let us spread great tablecloths,
put salt in the lakes of the world,
set up planetary bakeries,
tables with strawberries in snow,
and a plate like the moon itself
from which we all can eat.
For now I ask no more
Than the justice of eating.