Why we gather at the table

“We gather around the table not to escape the world’s problems, but to escape the world’s answers.”

This is a my perhaps faulty memory of a quote from this morning’s sermon, of an unnamed Episcopal bishop. I wish I had the exact quote and knew whose it is.

But as I have come to expect from wise spiritual leadership, it is helpful, and I look to this type of insight precisely because it doesn’t follow the usual discussion. Instead of arguing about whether it is an escape, it says there is another solution. It presumes that there are other answers, and this is a way to look for them, to ask different questions.

Merely an appetizer, a foretaste of the feast to come.