Communion Carpentry
William Johnson Everett
Copyright 2001 Christian Century Foundation. Reproduced by permission from the January 17, 2001, issue, pp. 6-7, of the Christian Century. Subscriptions: $49/year from P.O. Box 378, Mt. Morris, IL 61054. 1-800-208-4097.
After thirty years of teaching Christian ethics I felt a deep need to build a communion table for my seminary's chapel. The words of ethics had to find expression in the wood of a table. For many years we ethicists had assumed that people could work off of a spiritual capital derived from worship, but it was clear to me that this capital had been spent long ago. The energies of action had to have a fresh start and a fresh form. But the fresh forms of worship had to go beyond nostalgia for medieval monarchies or mesmerization by homiletical celebrities. The heart, soul, and mind of Christian ethics demanded physical symbolic form congruent with our deepest ethical convictions and aspirations.
I had always loved to work with wood, but the claims of household and occupation
had long reduced this urge to home repairs and construction of odd bookcases.
A few years ago I started assembling a workshop in the basement of our retirement
home in the southern Applachians. The hardwood forests all around us beckoned
to me as I came to know the extraordinary woodcraft of the people in the region.
The table took shape in my mind as I studied the importance of the roundtable
experiences in Poland and the former East Germany a decade ago. The roundtable
embodied the hopes of new democratic aspirations for a just constitutional order.
It symbolized the revolutionary move from authoritarian regimes to democratic
republics. However, when I looked around the churches where I usually worship,
teach, and preach I found only rectangles of catalog-copy wood products. Some
were shoved up under neo-gothic canopies to become altars where flowers are
sacrificed in weekly memorials. Others hid in the corners of the sanctuary,
waiting for their infrequent use, when our senior sisters lovingly clothed them
in the shadows of uplifted pulpits. At best they were utilitarian pedestals
for communion ware, at worst, a bulky memento of longings for "high church"
cultic ostentation.
I know that Jesus probably didn't even have a table at his last meal. Some say
it wasn't even a Passover Seder, but I couldn't be bothered with the fodder
of academic dispute at this point. I longed to see and touch a table that would
speak of Jesus's presence, presiding at the meal and at the councils of our
struggles for a new order of justice. Somehow the table should combine nurture
and counsel, the communal and political.
As these images and ideas gestated I also became increasingly aware of the need
to balance my work in words with work in wood. Wordcraft had to be better balanced
with woodcraft. My tendons, muscles, and the not so gentle prodding of sciatica
all told me I was too doubled up at desk and keyboard. I needed a dialogue of
hands and wood. I had to go beyond the paper to the wood itself.
Bolstered by the inspirations of countless magazines and Norm Abrams' New Yankee
Workshop, I set about the task of design and assembly. I knew a slowly dying
black cherry on our lot would offer some of its falling corpus for the cause,
but it wouldn't cure in time. Between a friend with a portable sawmill and a
visit to a nearby hardwood yard I got the maple and cherry for top and base.
As I set about planing, jointing, gluing and sanding the pieces I entered into
an argument with the wood. Though dead it was still breathing with the world
around it. As the three maple panels took shape a woodworking friend noticed
a slight droop at one end. The wood was under tension now and humidity made
it writhe in unanticipated ways. Would the wood resist my efforts, even defeat
them? Would I be able to accommodate its struggle?
As I worked the wood I thought about Jesus and Joseph. What kind of argument
did their wood have with them? Had they started with clear designs and tried
to force the wood to obey them? Or did they have a rough idea and then negotiate
the outcome with the stock before them? Was Jesus "building" a kingdom
or negotiating it? Did his experience with wood and the work of his father shape
the way he handled the rotten, broken, twisted, and grainy materials of his
ministry? Some day I want to ask my woodworking friends what kind of a guy they
think he was.
While I sanded the maple smooth, moving back and forth from grit to grit, I
realized how much of woodworking is a matter of touch and feel. The fingers
know things eyes can never see - the little bumps, grains, distortions, and
glassy plains. The dialogue of touch became an effort to coax the wood's beauty
out of it. In working wood, eyes alone are not enough, and ears are long ago
left way behind.
I knew from the beginning that it was not enough to build a simple round table.
It would be a double gateleg table. Partly this was a tribute to the simple
elegance of this classic piece of furniture, redolent of dining rooms, entry
halls, and living rooms. I wanted the wooden hinges of knuckled wood for the
swinging legs. But it was also a way to make a transition from rectangle to
circle possible for people whose ritual habits cannot in an instant escape DaVinci's
Last Supper. First one dropleaf and then another would slowly have to rise up
to support a new relationship among the members of the assembly gathered around
the table.
I also knew that the center would hold an inlaid mosaic piece by my wife Sylvia,
a resident artist at our school. Its glass tiles would gleam and sparkle with
rainbow colors, a Pentecostal dove, and flames of fire. A fish would swim miraculously
in the heavenly waters. The new covenant in the Spirit would be at the center.
The maple grains would laugh around it. The dropleaves would have inlays of
walnut and holly. A mandorla in black walnut would embrace the white holly of
the cross. On the other leaf the intertwined circles of Trinity would hold a
holly shell to symbolize the baptism into the assembly of this new covenant.
Even a leg which is a gate would symbolize entry into a new life, where judgment
"at the gate," as the Bible says, would be the "making right"
of participation at the table.
As the table reached completion and I pondered how to finish it I realized how
it would argue with the pulpits of the churches I have known. It would not allow
itself to be hidden or displaced. Would its argument with the pulpit and altar
be an either-or? Would it only aggravate the dichotomy of "word and table"?
I began to see that the table of nurture and counsel was asking for a "word
at table." It was asking that we stop the barrage of words from
authorities high and lifted up. It was asking for a word at table that is part
of a conversation, even an argument, a path to genuine reconciliation in the
midst of often competing diversities. But even then I realized that the roundtable,
simply by being there, was inviting us into a very different architecture, a
very different choreography in worship, a very different way of understanding
the work of communion which takes place at the table. Maybe the word at roundtable
might help reconcile the divisions between Protestant Word and Catholic Sacrament,
even as it might help bridge the gap between the assembly at worship and the
assemblies of our world.
Now the table is in place. Miraculously, the droop in one of the leaves is gone.
The wood is breathing now in different lungs. The hinges work a different tension
in its body. Its conversation with the people has begun. What will people do
with it? What will it work among them? I don't know. I do know that we need
to listen to the wood and let it touch us as we gather round it.
The table, with matching lectern, now occupies the Chapel at Andover Newton Theological School.