Commensality and Radical Hospitality: Axis of the Table

[from an Easter address]

I find Jesus’s life, as demythologized and revivified by thoughtful scholar/theologians, compelling. For example, I’ve long had my eyes open to the phenomenon of food and eating, but Jesus scholars have made me particularly aware of the significance of the phenomenon of with whom we eat.

Our culture is obsessed with food and eating. I believe it’s a matter of mass marketing and consumerism, including branding and conspicuous consumption; of an agricultural policy that feeds the phenomenon of super-sized soft drinks and other corn sweetener laced foods; of our general desire to be entertained, hence a food channel and a plethora of cooking shows; of body image, including a fear of growing old and basic insecurities of self; and of a cultural lack of meaning, resulting in an existential emptiness wanting to be filled.  We are the land of the morbidly obese and of the morbidly thin.

In my naturally analytical way, I’m continually monitoring my world to understand food and eating, as well as to examine my own ways.  I’ve become particularly aware of what is known as commensality:  “fellowship at table; the act or practice of eating at the same table.”
 
Contemporary Jesus scholars have highlighted Jesus’s radical hospitality. He invited the outcast or second-class persons of his day, women, tax-collectors, sinners, Samatarians, and such, to eat with him.  Scholars argue that this was how Jesus demonstrated as well as implemented his notion of the Kingdom of God—that it was egalitarian most of all, with the implicit notion that all were worthy of being provided for.

I always associate commensality, fellowship at the table, with companion, a word that literally means with bread.  Our companions are those with whom we frequently share food.  At a table where relationships are central, food might not be such a toxic obsession for so many.  And you will not so much become the food you eat, as you become the people with whom you eat.

I recommend that you consider commensality and companionship in your own life—what your table signifies.

 Today, many of you will have a foursquare  Easter dinner—a formal sit down with traditional foods and a circle of family or friends.  Savor your companions even more than you savor your food.

Think about how you might build on the fellowship of the table in your most intimate life to create, sustain, and deepen your relationships.  Much has been made regarding the decline of the family dinner hour.  Is there any more apt situation for connecting to spouse, children, and friends?

And when you are more detached—in a philosophial mood—consider those in our society who do not have a place at your personal table and at our common table.  Hold in your mind the multitude who are also literally hungry in a land of excess calories. 

Jesus’s example is clear.  He enjoyed his food and drink, to such an extent that his detractors called him a glutton and drunkard.  He provided, as in the stories of the loaves and fishes and the wedding feast when he changed water to wine.  He hosted and even served at the dinner table.  Most of all, he did not discriminate, but invited everyone, especially the marginalized and outcast, to eat with him.

The Kingdom he proclaimed had its axis at the dinner table.  That place, which is many tables, yet also one table, is the beginning and the end of society.

Teaching the World to Die

Emerson's Grave:
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

[I've just submitted an essay to Kindle Singles on Unitarian attitudes on death and dying that converge in a contemporary Unitarian Universalist sensibility.  Here's my conclusion--my take on UUism's understanding of the overarching reality of mortality.]

Death and Dying Among Contemporary Unitarian Universalists

Unitarians had an abiding interest in reforming American deathways.  They significantly influenced, intellectually and practically, how the greater culture deals with the overarching reality of the human condition: mortality and death.  Unitarian innovations and reforms cited in this essay served to domesticate death in the name of the universal human condition; challenged traditions and the supernaturalisms that supported those traditions; resisted the commercialization of death by a funeral industry; and lifted up the dignity and worth of the deceased through artful and meaningful “celebrations of life.”

 

There is a palpable Unitarian Universalist way for meeting death, though that way is not prescribed.  Remember, Unitarian Universalism is non-creedal, as well as progressive. Its ethos has continually encouraged the proving of all things while holding on to that which is good.  This search for truth has been tempered, humanized, by love. To seek the truth in love is an enduring mantra.  That notion of love has many dimensions, ranging from love of self and others like one’s self to a love of Life and its often inscrutable ways.

Here are markers of Unitarian Universalism’s contemporary, convergent attitudes and understandings regarding death.

Death should not be invisible.  Death is a hard reality both to accept within one’s own mortality and to experience through a beloved. The American culture has devised strategies of denial. Yet death is a pathway to living fully, even joyfully, in the moment.  The ancient philosophers, the Stoics in particular, counseled memento mori to be regularly reminded that living is dying, not obsessively, but now and again to give living context and perspective. 

Think of Unitarian Universalist ways in terms of the domestication of death, coming to a certain intimacy with death through a variety of attitudes, behaviors, and strategies: memento mori, including contemplation of mortality in a garden cemetery or similar setting, not sequestering the aged or dying, leaving the body in a natural (unembalmed) state, tangibly commemorating the deceased, and through subsequent years remembering.

Death should be conditioned by Nature.  This might be literal, that is, interring the body or cremation remains in a garden cemetery or similar natural setting.  Cremation allows many options, including scattering at a meaningful site or several sites.  Unitarian Universalist churches may have a carefully designed cremation garden or more informally include the ashes in a planting, the tree or shrub serving as a living memorial.  Furthermore, death should be construed as part and parcel of Nature’s cycles of Life continuing through the generations—a natural phenomenon.  Being natural, death is right and fitting in Nature’s scheme.  Nature inspires a richer living through acceptance of mortality’s place in the Web of Life.

Death of a loved one, friend, or member of a community should be observed in an artfully crafted funeral or memorial service. In this service a formal eulogy or a series of individual remembrances speak with loving truth of the life that the deceased chose to live, the influences that played on her or him through the years, how she or he shaped our common world, and what of that person endures in us. With a dignified service and the promise to remember, the deceased have has a blessed assurance that in death and repose there might be a peace said to pass understanding.

Unitarian Universalist ministers should be, and generally are, well-prepared to plan and conduct funeral and memorial services, entrusted by their congregations and a larger community to navigate the complexities of end of life concerns and rituals.  This includes grief counseling skills.  A Unitarian Universalist minister seeks to subtly express transcendent meanings, such as the continuing influence of love that the deceased brought into the world—a love that endures and is passed on through the generations.

The funeral and memorial service should address the varied grief that the family and gathered community are experiencing. This includes a continuing promise to remain steadfast for those who grieve, acknowledging that grief is an extended process, unique to each person who grieves.

Death should be planned for.  This planning has certain aspects.  Every individual should leave instructions about final wishes.  This includes the practical and existential, what is often included in a Living Will, regarding the parameters of medical procedures to take or not to take in one’s final days. A Living Will often designates a trusted person to have Power of Attorney for Health Care, charged to make ultimate decisions.  Such a directive often is accompanied by a designation of the same or other person to have a fiscal Power of Attorney.  Of course, a legally drawn will alleviates hindrances and complications of the deceased’s estate.  Valuable, too, are instructions regarding final rites; this includes disposition of the body, burial or scattering. Instructions might include memorialization, such as cemetery plot and monument, but also designated charities for contributions in the deceased’s memory. It is good to memorialize in tangible forms; and for those who survive, it is good to visit memorials, respecting and remembering. Also important are directives for the funeral or memorial service: music, readings, participants, officiant, location, and the like, again in consultation with family and clergy.

It is good to do such planning in conversation with family and perhaps clergy.  This models how to confront death, honestly and compassionately, letting genuine feeling have its full day. Such planning has benefits when death does come and the grief it brings in its wake.  

Such planning addresses considerations around consumer concerns regarding funeral providers.  A valuable resource is the not-for-profit  Funeral Consumers Alliance (FCA) successor to the memorial society movement’s national organization.  The FCA declares: “We are the only 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting a consumer's right to choose a meaningful, dignified, affordable funeral. We offer education and advocacy to consumers nationwide and are not affiliated with the funeral industry.” The FCA website has many valuable resources to inform and guide.

Typically, after a house and car, a funeral is a person’s third greatest life expenditure.  End of life arrangements should not be undertaken during duress, when circumstances are pressing and emotions are vulnerable to compliance techniques.  All involved should counsel together about desired arrangements before death comes.

Hospice care, often at home, has become an increasing choice for Unitarian Universalists.  This fits earlier considerations regarding the domestication of death.

An emerging option among Unitarian Universalists is green burial, allowing the unembalmed body, often in a simple shroud, to decompose naturally in a natural setting.  This reflects scruples about cremation’s effects on the environment, particularly the energy required to fire the crematorium.  Green burial also looks to the body’s constituent parts leaching back into Nature.  (In advocating for a rural cemetery in the early nineteenth century, Unitarians cited a dramatic example of Nature’s embrace of the body.  When the body of Major John Andre was exhumed in 1821, his skull was held and pierced by roots of a peach tree. For those advocates of the taking death into the countryside, this offered a romantic and compelling example.)  Today, green burial resonates to the Unitarian Universalist seventh principle: “respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are all a part.”

There is no doubt that the first principle of Unitarian Universalism, “the inherent worth and dignity of every person,” summarizes, as well informs this liberal religion’s attitudes regarding its deathways.  Through two centuries Unitarian Universalists have increasingly emphasized the personal and universally human, especially above traditional dogma and theology.  

Unitarian Universalist reforms and innovations around death and dying emphasize essential human dignity.  Unitarian Universalists find the human condition transcendent and sacred.

As the author intoned in In Memoriam:

A human life is sacred.
It is sacred in its being born.
It is sacred in its living.
And it is sacred in its dying.