Sunday Lunch at My Mothers

It goes in the middle, between the bread and the dish with the peppers in it, and it has gone in the middle of that table every Sunday of Eduardo's life including the Sundays he was not born for.

Two o'clock. His mother's house. Eleven people if everybody comes and there are usually nine. His brother, his brother's wife, the kids, an uncle who is not really an uncle, the neighbor from downstairs who has eaten there every Sunday since her husband died.

Nobody at that table has a problem. That is the thing he wants understood. This is not a house where anything went wrong. They pour one at two o'clock and there is still half of it left when they clear at four, and his mother has never in her life had two.

And he sits in the same chair he has sat in since he was nine, with the bottle at his elbow, for two hours, every single week, for the rest of his life.

He has thought about not going. He got as far as inventing a shift once and then could not do it. His mother is seventy six. There are a limited number of these lunches left and he knows the number is not large, and the idea of spending any of them somewhere else because of a bottle makes him angry in a way he cannot direct at anybody.

So he goes. And for the first twenty minutes his whole body is somewhere between his own hands and that bottle, and then it settles, and then it is just lunch. Every week. Twenty minutes of that, and then lunch.

You know that table. It might be a Sunday, a holiday, a birthday that comes round. Nothing is wrong with the people. Nothing is wrong with the house. The thing simply sits there, every time, in the same place, and you sit down next to it because the people you love are around it.

You are commanded into that room and you were not merely encouraged toward it, and the command came with company attached. God told Joshua be strong and of a good courage, and then gave the reason: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that reason operative at a table with peppers on it at two o'clock on a Sunday.

Be strong and of a good courage

Let me name the weight, because it is not a dramatic one and that is exactly why it grinds.

This is not a battle. A battle you could get up for. This is a recurring twenty minutes, once a week, forever, in a room full of people you love who are doing nothing wrong. There is no villain in it. There is nobody to be angry at. And the absence of a villain is what makes it so tiring, because everything in you wants to have somewhere to put the difficulty and there is nowhere to put it.

So here is what God says to a man about to walk into something he had watched somebody else do for forty years.

Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.Joshua 1:9

Have not I commanded thee. It is a command, not a suggestion and not a compliment. And that matters more than it sounds, because you can only be commanded to do something that is possible. Nobody is commanded to be seven feet tall. So courage here is being treated as a thing that can be obeyed into, not a feeling that has to arrive first.

You are able to obey a command about courage, and you were never told to wait for the feeling to show up first. That is what stands written in Joshua 1, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an order given to a general workable by a man in the same chair he has sat in since he was nine.

Now the reason clause, because everything hangs on it. For the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest. The courage is not commanded on the grounds that Joshua is capable. It is commanded on the grounds of who is coming with him. God never once says you are strong. He says I am with you, therefore be strong, and those are two completely different foundations.

You are strong on the grounds of who is at that table with you, and you were never being asked to supply the strength from your own account. Scripture gives the presence as the reason, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it a present tense in a dining room with nine people in it.

And whithersoever thou goest. Wherever. Not to the good places. Not to the ones you chose. Any room your feet take you into, including one you have sat in every Sunday of your life, including one where the difficult thing has a fixed position on the table between the bread and the peppers.

You have His company in the room you did not choose, and you have it in the recurring one and not only in the dramatic one. The written word says whithersoever, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that word wide enough to include a Sunday lunch.

And the plain things, said here as everywhere on this site. You owe nobody at that table an explanation, not your brother, not the uncle who is not really an uncle. Nobody there needs to move the bottle for you and you do not have to ask them to. And if the friend who knows, the doctor, the counselor, the room where people sit in a circle is what makes two o'clock possible, use it. That is God's kindness with a face on it, and reaching for it is not a smaller faith. And you may get up and go into the kitchen at any point in the two hours. That is allowed and always was.