"Food is at the heart of human culture. It is a part of all our lives. We each eat every day and hopefully more than once a day. It is a part of our material life as day six creatures yet it also opens us up to the Sacred... Our food ways reflect our relationships: with the earth, with each other and with God."
The Upper Room Project meets the first Monday of each month (6-8:30pm) to engage with spirituality and justice as struggled with and fought for by the Prophets and Jesus. We meet in the S Bar (Shop 18, Village Walk, O’Sullivan Road, Glen Waverley ) with gallery space, discussion corners, opportunity for practical response and pondering space.We hope the upper room will be There will be food, wine and friends plus
Please bring your friends - all are welcome
This would appear to be a version of Table Church being operated under the banner of the Uniting Church of Australia. Here is their standard invitation blurb.
Central to the emergence of the Seeds Covenant has been the spirituality of the table. It is the gathered meal that often unites our efforts in knowing the word, growing home and going to engage the problems of our world. Some queries from our covenant point to the table.How regularly will we come together around a common meal?
Who will be invited and made to feel welcome at the meal?
How will our meal reflect the Eucharist as practiced through history?
How will our meal reflect peace, justice and joy by making reconciling connections with God, others and the earth?
What practical processes and symbolic rituals around production and consumption of our food will shape the spirit of the meal and build a sense of home? (Who’s cooking and who’s doing the dishes? How and why?)
The following is an attempt to make our spirituality of the table more explicit and to make some of the words and processes we have found helpful more accessible. To celebrate and share different food traditions that exist among our Seedy Mobs and to inspire new production and consumption.
Some of the values of these meals take their cues from the “Slow Food” Movement which arose in Italy as a response to the negative impact of multinational food companies and is spreading around the world – slowly!
Slow Food opposes the standardisation of taste, protects cultural identity tied to food and seeks to safeguard processing techniques inherited from tradition. It involves valuing time to prepare, eat and build community through food.
It is sometimes critiqued as being an elite pursuit, however Jesus himself would often seek out the best feed in town! Far from extravagant eating, Slow Food is about the celebration of the connections that food can make with sustainable production and local food traditions that are often lost in our economy.
Slow Food has helped reframe our understanding of what it means to be “church” because If we read the gospels without getting hungry we aren’t really paying attention. The how, what, where and with whom Jesus eats is a central point of gospel conflict and ”understanding about the loaves” (Mark 6:52) is presented as essential to understanding Jesus’ ministry of recon-ciliation.
This ministry is symbolised in the offer of wilderness bread and of his body and blood in the Eucharist. Our prayer is that like the followers at Emmaus, it would be in the offer of hospitality to strangers, and at the breaking of bread that our eyes will be opened and that Christ may be made known among us.
Marcus Curnow
The table of Jesus is your place of gathering
Here you are welcomed, wanted, loved
Here there is a place set for you
So come all you who thirst,
All you who hunger for the bread of life
All you whose souls cry out for healing
Come all you who are weary
All you who are bowed down with worry
All you who ache with the tiredness of living
Come all you poor
All you who are without food or refuge
All you who go hungry in a fat land
Come all you who are lost
All you who search for meaning but cannot find it
All you who have no place of belonging
Jesus invites you
Draw near with faith
Receive the body of our Lord Jesus Christ which he gave for you and his blood which he shed for you
Eat and drink in remembrance that Christ died for you and feed on him in your hearts by faith with thanksgiving
From the 'Breakout' Liturgy by Grace.
"Most conversations about new forms of church or christian community are about rethinking the table at which the disciples sit. True confession… this project doesn’t emerge from any interest in that table, or even really in the disciples. I think the really interesting stuff of the gospels is the other stories - the tables Jesus went to where the disciples weren’t invited, or where they were so absent no-one thought to mention their presence - the afternoons at Mary and Martha’s, the nameless person’s house where Jesus met the syro-phonoecian woman, dinner at Levi’s house, dinner with Peter’s mother, the ‘water into wine’ wedding table… I think they’re the fun tables."
If you want to experience the soul of Spain, you need to sit at her table. Throughout the week, the people of Spain devote a lot of their leisure time visiting with one another over food. In traditional Spain, families have their main meal together during the noontime siesta. Later in the late afternoon, they gather at a café with their neighbours over delicious plates of jamón, manchego and olives. Often, the tapas bar is the same one they have gone to year after year – perhaps since they accompanied their parents as little children playing under the table.
Don Harris
The custom of asking a blessing on the food before eating is an ancient one, and there are prayers for every style and mood. Here is just one from this website - Table Graces/Blessings at which a huge variety have been collected by Bass Mitchell.(http://www.homiliesbyemail.com)
