On The Table

This has been a really rough week for many members of our little community, with various kinds of loss or impending loss weighing us down. For some members, it's been a rough year, a rough couple of years, etc. Several of us have felt like we need some kind of group recognition of this, so this Sunday, we'll be sitting shiva, Common Table style. Put extremely simply, shiva is an Orthodox Jewish observance of mourning for the dead. This Sunday, we will link our Common experience of mourning with Psalm 77.

Here's what we mean:
Shiva is primarily about remembrance. This is one of the things that distinguishes it from other forms of mourning that focus primarily on the immediate loss. Shiva pulls the beauty of the past into the present. When you have a memory of the deceased, you must speak of the deceased. In this way, you honor that person and remember that this grief is not the whole story.

Psalm 77 does the same thing. It is a shiva for past times when God's goodness was readily apparent, when the question "why me?" was an expression of gratitude at God's abundant grace, not an expression of disillusionment at His current absence or even of His apparent curse. By engaging actively in the process of remembering what was beautiful, the ways in which God has blessed in the past, the hope of the Psalmist is restored.In the process of grieving, there is often a lot of regret... in a sense, we grieve the loss of our better selves. If we'd had more time, maybe we could have done this thing or that, changed things or made them better. One of our meditation points this Sunday will be the need to not only accept our losses, but to accept *ourselves* and our shortcomings.

We hope to see you this Sunday at 10am at Jammin Java for this group exercise in grieving, remembering, celebrating and forgiving... followed by burritos, because you can't have shiva without a lotta food.

Amy Moffitt