Come to the Table

for my new sisters

Photo by Nils Stahl on Unsplash

I’ve broken my own rule and let over a week go by without posting. Those ten days of radio silence did not go to waste but were rich with nourishment for more writing.

I spent a chunk of that time—Thursday evening through Sunday afternoon—with Tres Dias, and found it to be every bit as transformative and wonderful as I’d been told.

Tres Dias is seventy-two hours spent cloistered with fellow Christians seeking a closer walk with God. Our three days at Mt. Alvernia Retreat Center in Wappingers Falls, NY included fifteen talks, daily worship, continuous prayer, lay-led ministry, discussion, and countless delightful and deeply meaningful surprises aimed at demonstrating God’s love for us. Tres Dias exists to create servant leaders with grateful hearts. From where I sit, they are doing excellent work to this end.

People feel compelled to keep mum on specific details of the experience, and that mystery can be nerve-wracking for some prospective participants. There are sound reasons for confidentiality. We hear accounts of changed lives that include personal stories which are tender, vulnerable, and deserving of protection. It is sacred sharing. These stories are like the delicate and tiny eggs I’ve just discovered in a bird’s nest built into my hanging flower baskets. I’ll water the begonias more carefully now, just as I’ll protect the stories.

The other reason to refrain from sharing particulars is that the weekend is brimming with beautiful surprises also worthy of protection. Our cups truly runneth over. We were asked to keep these things quiet. I’ve just discovered, however, an article on the Tres Dias blog insisting there are no secrets and being quite forthcoming about things I was asked not to disclose.

You are free to browse the website where you can find these answers. But if you think there is even a remote possibility you may one day attend a Tres Dias weekend, I’d advise against it, and instead recommend allowing yourself to be surprised. Choices I made to surrender to the unknown resulted in a much richer experience for me. I went in whole hog—leaving my cellphone at home, and not anticipating but instead showing up with a willingness to participate fully.

I walked away with more than I could have imagined.

Today, day 4 of what we call “the fourth day,” my heart is softer. Throughout each day my new friends, new sisters (and a couple of brothers) come to mind. I give thanks for them—

for A, who would break out into Bay City Rollers karaoke at every opportunity, and just as easily into joyful tears,

for N, the sweetest, gentlest lady, who happens to be a retired state trouper,

for T, who would stare at us until we stopped talking, and then break the ice with some hilarious utterance,

for J, patient and longsuffering while any mention of her name made the entire room erupt in song,

for H, the world’s best hugger,

for D, the former disc jockey who befriended a serial killer through prison ministry

for W, with flowers in her hair,

for T and B, who can keep time with a bell like nobody else,

for L, a young lawyer who buys Laffy Taffy by the pound and spent six weeks learning to play guitar for our benefit,

for Al, always finding the symbolic meaning lurking behind and beneath,

for AM, an artist in her choices of clothing, jewelry, and kind words

for K, who broke a rule worth breaking to help one of us heal,

for S, who brought her all even though she was itching to get outside for a hike.

for L, who is my parents’ age, utterly adorable, and a role model of courage.

…and that’s just a start.

But it’s not just love for these new sisters that is blowing me away. It’s love for every single person I can think of or encounter. It’s a rainbow-refracting waterfall of love all around me, gushing from heaven to and through everyone.

In My Bright Abyss, Christian Wiman writes,

In any love—a mother’s for her child, a husband’s for his wife, a friend’s for a friend—there is an excess energy that always wants to be in motion. Moreover, it seems to move not simply from one person to another but through them, toward something else. (“All I know now / is the more he loved me the more I loved the world.”—Spencer Reece) This is why we can be so baffled and overwhelmed by such love (and I don’t mean merely when we fall in love; in fact, I’m talking more of other, more durable relationships): it wants to be more than it is; it cried out inside of us to make it more than it is. And what it is crying out for, finally, is its essence and origin: God. …as long as we can live in this sacred space of receiving and releasing, and can learn to speak and be love’s fluency, then the greater love that is God brings a continuous and enlarging air into our existence. We feel love leave us in unthreatening ways. We feel it reenter us at once more truly and more strange, like a simple kiss that has a bite of starlight to it.

God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. —1 John 1:16b

There are over one hundred Tres Dias communities worldwide. Our group of forty-five participants represented thirty church congregations.

For a Christian and an American citizen distressed over the deepening divisions all around us, I found this encouraging. The potential for bridge-building was hard to miss.

And so it was not surprising to learn that Tres Dias grew out of such a need.

Tres Dias traces its ancestry through Cursillo, which had its beginnings amid the turmoil and destruction of civil warfare and of the Second World War, which left Spain with empty churches and a sense of aimlessness and diminished dreams.

The women on this weekend may not agree on every fine point of theology or doctrine, but we share the essentials of the Christian faith. In fact, our group is diverse in every way you can imagine. As a whole, we have little in common besides Jesus.

Last summer I wrote this little poem:

Before All Things

In Him 
firstborn song
A singular voice
synchronized hearts
beating in the choir.

All things 
are re-cast
in a sacred light
beloved dust—
who we truly are.

Hold together 
Festive throng,
our robes sparkling white,
find our way home
following the star. 

For months I’d been chewing on a sermon by Andrew Chappell of First Methodist Church in my hometown of Newnan, GA. Preaching on the first chapter of Colossians, he asked what Paul meant by “in him all things hold together.”

The poem grew from this question, which I still love to ponder.

Here are some glimpses into what I was thinking:

1. Firstborn song: I learned of Jesus in my youth, in church, where I also learned to sing, in every sense of the word.

2. A singular voice: that of the Lord, leading and holding the choir together as we follow that voice.

3. Synchronized hearts: I met my dear friend Alan singing in a choir. He is a scientist and told me once, with great excitement, that choral singing can synchronize heartbeats.

   Other scientists agree.

   This phenomenon points to the unifying power of joining voices in song, and why I support the work of groups like Young People’s Chorus of New York City, and the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, who harness this power to bridge divides.

   We did plenty of singing together during this weekend. Even if I didn’t know the songs, even if some veered perilously close to what my opera friend Emily Pulley calls “Jesus-is-my-boyfriend music,” I loved every moment.

4. Re-cast / in a sacred light: Wiman again:

Turning inward turned me outward too, to a world made radiant by my ability to believe in it.

and through him to reconcile to himself all things - Col 1:20 a

5. Festive throng - Psalm 42:4: These things I remember as I pour out my soul: how I used to go to the house of God under the protection of the Mighty One with shouts of joy and praise among the festive throng.

6. Beloved dust / who we truly are - In the movie Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams plays an English teacher at a boys’ boarding school. As his pimpled students gaze at faded photographs of their predecessors, he tells them those boys are all fertilizing daisies now. We have to face the reality that our bodies are just part of the earth.

Dust you are and to dust you shall return. -Genesis 3:19

And yet we are made in the image of God. We are beloved. That was my biggest takeaway from the weekend, something I’d been taught my entire life but was shown through an outpouring over three days how very TRUE it is. And it is true of every one of us—the nonverbal residents at my sister’s group home, the snobbish couple at the cocktail party, the conjoined twins, the angry guy tailgating me in his pickup truck, the child who dies on the table, the transgender person, the slaves, crack addicts, mobsters, abusers, bullies. Every one of us. Made in the image of God.

Mind-blowing.

And we can change. Every one of us.

Because we are loved so.

Leading up to this weekend I’d been immersing myself in the writings of Frederick Buechner. Here’s how he describes the gospel in the end of his book Telling the Truth:

…the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have.

At Mt. Alvernia there was an opportunity to choose from some used books. I found something pretty great, a book I didn’t know existed, with a special autograph that made me grin:

It reads, "for Malcolm-- Everything you always wanted to know about me but were afraid to ask. -Freddy." No idea who Malcolm is, but glad I inherited his book.

I can still hear the beautiful voice of my new friend J singing this song “Come to the Table.” It astonishes me that the same message is conveyed in such different ways by contemporary Christian musicians and priest/poet George Herbert, four centuries apart.

Love

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
	Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
	From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
	If I lack’d anything.

‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here.’
	Love said, ‘You shall be he.’
‘I, the unkind, ungrateful?’ Ah, my dear,
	I cannot look on Thee.
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
	‘Who made the eyes but I?’

‘Truth, Lord; But I have marr’d them: let my shame
	Go where it doth deserve.’
‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘Who bore the blame?’
	‘My dear, then I will serve.’
‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’

	So I did sit down and eat.

In case you can’t help yourself (but remember how you felt on Christmas morning when you didn’t look): https://www.tresdias.org/tres-dias-faq/