It Started At A Table

His daughter asked him at supper, with her fork still in her hand, and he heard himself answer in a voice that was not his.

She was fifteen. She had asked whether he actually believed it, all of it, or whether it was just something the family did, and she had asked it lightly, the way you ask a thing you have been working up to for weeks.

And what came out of him was a paragraph.

It was a good paragraph. It was accurate. It had the shape of something said from the front of a room, and he could hear that while it was happening, and he could not stop, and she nodded and went back to her food, and the moment closed like a door.

Later he sat in the kitchen after everybody had gone up and worked out what had actually happened, and it was this.

He had never once said anything true about God in that room.

He had said a great deal in the building. He was known there. He read at the front twice a year and he was on the list for chairs and he had prayed out loud with men in a side room and meant every word. Thirty years of it. And every single sentence had happened between a car park and a car park.

So when his own daughter asked him at his own table, the only voice available to him was the building voice, because it was the only one that had ever been used on the subject.

He said afterwards, quietly, to nobody, that he had a Sunday self and a kitchen self and they had never been introduced.

You know this house.

Maybe you can pray at the front and cannot pray over a saucepan. Maybe you can talk about it in a group with a study guide open and go completely silent at your mother's table. Maybe you live alone and the flat has simply never heard you, and you say your prayers in your head in a room where nobody would have minded if you said them out loud.

You have been given a faith with a postcode.

And nobody did that to you on purpose. There is no villain in this. It is just what happens when everything you were ever handed came to you inside one kind of room, and the kitchen was never mentioned, so the kitchen stayed quiet.

Where the first rooms were

Here is a fact about the beginning of all this that ought to be more comfortable than it is.

For a long while there were no buildings.

Not few. None. There was nowhere to go on a Sunday morning that had been built for the purpose, and the whole thing lived, spread, taught, sang and held together inside ordinary houses belonging to ordinary families, and the piece of furniture at the center of it was a table with food on it.

Day by day, breaking bread from house to house, they shared food with glad and sincere hearts, praising God.Acts 2:46

You have a table that was never the second best room, and the first years of this happened at one exactly like it. That is what the verse describes, breaking bread from house to house, day by day (Acts 2:46), and it is the Holy Spirit who had fallen on those people days earlier and then filled a series of ordinary dining rooms, which tells you what He thinks a kitchen is for.

Read the ordinary words in that line. Bread. House. Food. Day by day, which is not a service, it is a week.

Glad and sincere. That is the register, and it is not the register of a lecture. It is what a room sounds like when the people in it are fond of each other and the meal is good and somebody has said something true.

And notice what is not there. There is no order of service in that verse. No qualification, no rota, no correct form, no doorway anybody had to be cleared through. Just a house, and a table, and a family, and God talked about in the middle of it while the food went round.

This is the part I want to hand you carefully, because it would be easy to turn it into another instruction and I am not going to.

Nothing on this page will tell you what to do at your table. Not a practice, not a form, not a day, not a set of words, not a thing to say before the food. Those are yours and your household's and they are not this site's business, and anybody who arrives at your kitchen with a required pattern has just rebuilt the very thing that made your kitchen quiet in the first place.

The point is smaller and it will hold more weight.

Your table is allowed.

It was never the overflow of the real thing. It was the original room. The building came later and the building is a gift, and none of this is an argument against it; that is where the family gathers and it is good and you should keep going. But you have been living as though the true version happens there and a lesser version happens at home, and the actual history of the whole thing runs precisely the other way.

You have not been sitting at the second table. You have been sitting at the first one with your mouth closed.