The Sunday Table With One Chair

Curtis does a proper Sunday dinner. That is the thing you have to understand before anything else, because if you do not, you will get this wrong in the first paragraph.

Not a plate of something. A dinner. Meat in on time, three vegetables, roast potatoes done properly which means par-boiled first, and gravy in a jug rather than out of a pan, because a jug is what she used and it is not going to stop being a jug now.

He is sixty-four. It has been six years in November.

He lays the table. Cloth, the good mats, salt and pepper, jug. One place setting, at the end, where he has always sat.

And that is not sad in the way people assume it is when they hear it, and if you have started feeling sorry for him you have missed it. It is discipline, and it is love, and it is a man refusing to let something good collapse into a sandwich, and it has kept him upright through a stretch that has finished better men.

It is also six years of eating alone every Sunday.

There is a lunch in the village hall on the second Sunday of the month. Long tables, thirty or so people, everybody brings something, two dollars if you can and nothing if you cannot. It has been going eleven years and the woman who runs it has invited him personally three times.

He has never been.

And he has a sentence for it, and the sentence has done six years of work.

I would not want to take a place from somebody who needs it.

He has said it to her twice. He has said it in his own head about a hundred times, in November particularly, and every time he says it he feels the small settling that a true and modest sentence gives you.

This Sunday he is at the counter mashing the squash and he says it out loud, to nobody, in an empty kitchen, in his own voice.

And he hears it.

Because he is sixty-four and alone and cooking a full dinner for one person at a table with one chair at it, and the sentence he has been using for six years is a sentence about not taking a place from somebody who needs it.

You have that sentence. Yours is worded differently and yours is also true, which is what makes it work. But you know it, and you know how long you have been saying it, and you have probably never once heard it out loud in an empty room.

God setteth, and the solitary is the object

Psalm 68 is a marching psalm, mostly about God going out in front of His people, and in the middle of the noise there is a verse about domestic arrangements.

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains.Psalm 68:6

God setteth.

That is the verb and it is His, and it is in the present tense, and it is active. He is not described as encouraging the solitary to seek company, or as providing opportunities, or as making it possible if they will take the step.

He sets them. It is a placing word, the same kind of word you would use about putting a chair where you want it.

You are the object of that verb, and the setting is God's own action, and it is already in the present tense. That is the written word and not my opinion of your Sunday, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from a marching psalm and lays it on a kitchen counter with a pan of swede going cold.

And the word He uses for the destination is not company. It is families.

He does not say God gives the solitary somebody to talk to. He says He sets them in a household, which is a much larger claim, and which involves a table and a routine and people who expect you.

Read the verse before it

Now go back one verse, because the sequence is doing something and it decides how you hear the whole thing.

A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation.

That comes first. Before any mention of setting anybody anywhere, God names Himself in relation to exactly the people this psalm is about, and He does it with the two most domestic words available: a father, and the one who takes the widow's side.

So the placing in verse six is not charity being organized by a committee. It comes out of who He says He is in verse five.

This is yours, and the placing comes out of His own name for Himself, and it is already settled. Psalm 68 puts father of the fatherless in front of setteth the solitary, and the same Spirit who inspired that psalm is the one making it a present fact in a man at a counter with a dish towel over his shoulder.

Now let me guard this properly, because there are two ditches here and I have seen men in both.

I am not telling you the answer is to go to more things. This site does not make attendance the answer and I am not going to start. There are people reading this who have no hall, no lunch, no village and nobody within forty miles, and none of what I have said gets smaller for them. God setteth the solitary in families is a sentence about what God does, not a sentence about your calendar.

And I am not telling you the Sunday dinner is wrong. It is not wrong. It is one of the better things any man does in that village and it should carry on.

What I am telling you is that your sentence is not humility, however true it sounds and however modest it feels when you say it. Look at who is saying it. A man on his own with one chair at his table has produced a reason for not taking a place, on the grounds that somebody might need it more, and there is nobody in that hall who would agree with him and he has never given any of them the chance to say so.