Calling

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April 11, 2009

The Promise of the Kitchen Table for Exploring Vocation

What is the role of family when nurturing the sense of vocation with its members? What are the practices, home rituals, and stories that help a person to draw contours of his or her vocational destiny? Reflecting back on the years of my own vocational formation, I recall a large oak table at my aunt’s living room where my family gathered on Sundays. We gathered for a table fellowship which included food but also stories from the family history, the life of community, politics, jokes, etc. It was in this context of table fellowship that a family narrative had been passed on to me and other youth in my family. I learned early on that my family had a history of intellectual leadership and pastoral service in the community, and this narrative shaped my sense of vocation around the values of emancipation, justice, and leadership.

The values of emancipation, justice, and leadership led me to change some of the personal trajectories of my life. As a young adult, I found myself standing at the intersection between committing my life to marriage and my husband-to-be or studying further. Slovak culture values family life highly, in particular the role of a woman to raise children and nurture family life. This idealized vision of family life is sadly interwoven with patriarchal agendas such as submissiveness of a wife to her husband, permitting woman abuse and a silencing of women’s voices, or stifling a woman’s desire for further education. I was caught between the cultural (and to some extent family) expectations to take on a traditional woman’s role or to pursue the values of emancipation. I decided for the latter, strongly encouraged by the voices and nurturing spirit of my mother and aunt. Their beliefs and commitment to emancipatory values impacted my vocational path in a significant way.

When nurturing youth in their vocational identity, families can play a pivotal role in securing spaces and routines for cultivating the sense of calling with its members. By calling I do not mean the call to ordained ministry exclusively; rather, I use the term to connote a person’s need to discern what God in Christ calls him or her to do. This process of discernment, which occurs in response to God’s Word, requires specific physical and spiritual moorings. In other words, it needs to be embodied in the spaces and the practices that both reflect upon the Word and the divine presence and reenact it. Our congregations are homes to sacraments and spiritual practices through which the believers experience the divine Presence, and our homes integrate these with the homemaking rhythms such as having a family meal together.

In my work on nurturing call within a family setting, I emphasize the importance of family dinners and table talk. Table fellowship speaks to, even contradicts, the paradigm of nurture that dominates the contemporary American society, and which I call the professionalization of nurture. This paradigm is driven by the survival mindset which lifts up the values of competition, accumulation of wealth, succeeding, etc. Survival forces adults to create a matrix of social engagement in which the entry point into a relationship as well as managing that relationship is mediated by impersonal and professionalized ways of human interaction. Formation and socialization of the children and youth become the concern of experts who conduct the discourse and guide the interactions. From technology-driven, virtual communities to professional curricula of teachers, coaches, therapists, youth ministers or errand specialists, the families outsource nurture and care of their young.

Responding to the professionalization of nurture, table fellowship lays the groundwork for the embodied experience of care, belonging, and sharing a story. It serves as an imminent means of grounding people in the reality of communion and intimate relationships. As Jesus Christ fulfilled God’s promises through his own flesh, a corporeality of love becomes a means with which to nurture our youth into intimacy and unity with God.

Fashioning a vocational identity with youth requires that we adults help develop the sense of rootedness with them, the sense of ground from which they can draw their habits of heart and life orientation. Instrumental to this process is a table talk that functions as the ground for family conversations. It is through these that the family stories are told, vocational themes identified, and patterns of divine guidance detected. The goal of table talk is to teach youth to tell a story in a way that frames their life experiences with patterns of God’s grace, direction, lesson, purpose, and challenge. That is to say, the vocational identity of youth is part of their narrative identity—their storied self—by which a youth learns to organize his or her life coherently and infuse it with meaning and purpose. At kitchen tables, families have the opportunity to create the identity that is based in the story of grace by sharing their life experiences in conversation with the Scripture.

The natural rhythm of table talk acts as a practice through which a youth can be prepared to construe a story-telling circle. The story-telling circle consists of three movements:

1. Owning and naming one’s own experience;
2. Engaging one’s experience with the world; and
3. Placing one’s experience in the conversation with the narratives of Scripture.

Going through the steps of the circle generates a guiding interpretative framework. Without it, dramas of the adolescent life can easily be experienced at the level of intense feelings, hurt, or broken relationships instead of the opportunity for reflection and charting a response to, let’s say, a situation when a schoolmate bullies me.

By having a communal meal, families carry the Eucharistic table into their households, and nurture their children and youth in the memory, image, and experience of divine care and love. The Eucharistic blueprint with its themes of deliverance, liberation, journey, wrestling, and trusting in God gives families and their youth a narrative compass to journey through their own lives in submission to and discernment of God’s will.

In conclusion, I argue that the vocational identity of youth is formed in the space of the family dinner table and discerned through the practice of table-talk or story-telling circle. Growing in the vocational sense of one’s life then becomes the matter of homemaking rhythms that echo the liturgical life-sustaining sacraments and practices.

¹ This article summarizes the key ideas from my book on spiritual formation of youth that will be published with the Pilgrim Press in 2010.