open homes and shared tables

Somewhere I learned that it is better to be invincible, to skip meals and stay up late and pray only on Sundays. I found it hard to be served by those I thought I ought to serve, and harder still to draw close to anyone for fear my humanity may show.
Slowly, this place is unbuilding those walls and softening my soul. This poem is a prayer, a letter, a stepping stone to a place of rest.

i do not always want to stand so far away from you

as though the charge carried in proximity would be a sort of poison and perhaps

it would destroy what little left i know of myself
to be given over to such an involved association

but perhaps the self that is brought to death will have been 
the only barrier to building life

---

forgive me

for the length of an arm often feels presumptuous

and the disruptions across the distance of a shout ruffle something
invasive and intimate

so if one hand stays in contact with another for a moment past utility

and the relaxation overwhelms the recoil

please, remind me that i once said
whispering hope i barely understood

that i do not
that is, i do not always
want to stand so far
away from
you

The power of open homes and shared tables overwhelms our carefully cultivated reticence. In sharing a home, meals, and prayer together as a volunteer community, we are immediately immersed in the most human, frail, and intimate aspects of each other’s lives. We are no longer simply the entertaining friends or the dependable coworkers, but real people who need to rest from work in order to eat, to pause from conversational agility in order to rest in shared silence, to step off the pedestal of self-sufficiency in order to pray to the one whose hands are stronger. We share these moments of restoration and delight in a fundamental humanity, nurturing a family of surprising resilience and fierce loyalty.

Our elderly participants invite us into a similar intimacy. It is difficult to admit that the home you take pride in providing is beyond your capacity to fix, and even more so to invite a stranger into the parts that are most in need of repair. I am honored when we are invited to dine with the people we are serving. In their invitation to enter their homes as a guest and not simply a worker, to rest a while, be nurtured by their food, and be uplifted by their prayers, we are sharing in their life as they offer it to us, not as we tell them it should be. They are allowing themselves to be seen, we are allowing ourselves time away from haste and production, and we are all able to be more human and more aware of God dwelling richly among us and in each other.