Our Roundtable Experience

Over the past six years about a dozen people have gathered every month for a time of prayer, song, conversation and communion at our Methodist church in Waynesville, North Carolina. We call it Roundtable Worship. It arose as an effort to express in a worship format the work of mediation and conflict transformation at the heart of reconciliation. Through it we wanted to embody this work of reconciliation in a symbolic form as well as strengthen us for this work. In this little book I want to describe this worship activity and reflect on why we do it.

A.  We Gather at the Table

The small round table is placed at the center of the sanctuary and we circle chairs around it. A candle is placed on the table along with a plate with bread and a pitcher of juice to its side. It is late winter. A sprig of early forsythia, its buds about to burst, lies beside a feather. The bloom is earth’s sign to us in this season, the feather our symbol for the table’s reconciling conversation. People begin to take their seats around it.

With these objects and actions we make some powerful statements. We are not sitting before an altar. We are gathered at table. We are not facing a pulpit above us but a table before us. We are not seated at a stage to see a show but at a table facing others ready for a meal and conversation. It is a moment calling for participation, a moment with its own anxiety and its own promise.

It is a round table. In our own time the round table has become a symbol of conversation and negotiation in the collapse of empires, tyrannies and dictatorships. As early as the 1930s, E. Stanley Jones was convening roundtables to bridge divisions among India’s religious groups, while Mahatma Gandhi was participating in Roundtables to begin the process of liberating India from British imperial rule. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, taking the East German regime with it, people gathered at roundtables to debate their democratic future. Since then, roundtable discussions have pervaded not only the media but also local community building efforts around the world.

“Roundtable” is not merely a description of a physical table but of a process in which all have equal voice. It takes place in a circular process of speaking and listening that accords respect and dignity to all participants. It is a conversation focused on the interests that unite as well as divide us, not the personalities that give them voice. It is a conversation led by hope for reconciliation and negotiation of a new future together.

We place a candle on the table to remind us that there is a spirit of wisdom and illumination presiding at the table. This is a table where we declare the Spirit of Christ is to preside. When we light the candle at the table’s center we are saying that we seek a conversation in the light of Jesus’s ministry and the long line of people before and after him who have walked this path and kept the light alive. In saying that “Christ” presides, we mean that there is a governing authority who has been, is, and will be in our midst to inspire and guide our conversations.

Finally, in saying “Christ presides at this table” we are saying that our coming to the table is an act of faith. It is a faithful trust that new understandings and new possibilities of reconciliation will emerge in our gathering. But because “Christ” appears in the process, indeed, that Christ is here “in the Spirit,” we realize that each of us is responsible to act in accord with that spirit. It requires a discipline in each one of us to listen with a desire for understanding, to speak from the heart rather than from our defenses, and to search for a way ahead that builds community. We affirm this “Christ,” this “anointed one,” as the center of a peace-building spirit that presides through persuasion rather than conquering by coercion. The presidency of Christ is, like Jeremiah’s covenant, “written in our hearts,” but it is realized in the crossroads of communal conversation. While we have different thoughts and feelings about the term “Christ,” we join together in an effort to let this kind of spirit take root in our hearts and actions.

Indeed, this setting of the table as a signature act of the divine life goes back to the Wisdom literature that underlies the idea of “the Christ.” A passage from Proverbs that also reappears in the Gospels gives vivid expression to this character of the Holy One:

Wisdom has built her house,
she has hewn her seven pillars.
She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine,
she has also set her table.
She has sent out her servant-girls, she calls
from the highest places in the town,
“You that are simple, turn in here!”
To those without sense she says,
“Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Lay aside immaturity, and live,
and walk in the way of insight.”

Proverbs 9:1-6

With the bread, drink, and flowering branch we establish our grounding in this earth and its fruits. Our conversation in rooted in the earth’s indispensable nurture and beauty. Without the kind of awe experienced in the face of earth’s intricate beauty and enormous power we lose our inspiration for living. We forget our finite place within the whole, the place of our vocation. We forget the geography of our faith.

In seeing these elements of grain and grape severed from their origins we also recognize our deep estrangement from this earth, its creatures, its harmonies, its abundance and its finitude. We are reminded that the table beckons us to reconciliation with the earth as well as to each other. The two webs of human and ecological reconciliation are tied ineluctably to each other. These two pathways of reconciliation are the biggest challenges of our lives. The Cherokee people, near whom we live and whose wisdom and struggle have influenced my later years, have the word “duyukta” – a right relationship of harmony among things – that seems to get at this complex shape of reconciliation. Perhaps shalom and salaam convey roughly the same thing. It is a peace grounded in right relationships among all earthly beings.

The feather – also an artifact of Cherokee culture – is a powerful symbol of right relationship in conversation. It is light and transient, yet as it is passed from person to person, it gives them authority to speak and to the others a profound call to listen. In our own experience the feather – which could be any “talking piece” – does more than anything else to reconnect our tongues to our hearts, discipline our impulsive chatter, and open our ears to non-anxious reception of the truths emerging from the other. It is a form of Christ’s presiding in the spirit.

B. We Respond to the Call

Our voices come together first in an exchange of call and response.  Beginning with a call of some kind is an ancient action in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic life. It is an interruption of our normal round of activities. It breaks into our labors and our self-interested busyness. By using the call and response form we establish that this is a call to dialogue and conversation. It is a mutual acknowledgement of a movement from life-as-usual to life-at-table. To give you an idea of this dialogue, here is one call to the table we have used:

From violent streets and shouting words

You lead us to your home of peace.

From ruined hopes and darkened roads

You lead us to your lighted path.

From the desert of our self-concern

You lead us to oases of your peace.

To your table you invite us, enemy and friend,

From your hand we take the bread of life.

All: We come to your table, we come to your peace.

“The Call” can take many forms – as a word from afar, as a voice within, as a deep recognition coming into consciousness. In the ancient Greek-speaking church, “call,” that is, klesis, was the root of ekklesia, the “assembly.” This is the name the church took for itself as a gathering of those called out from their ordinary life into a new Way. In our case this call is a call to table, to a life lived together in sharing of the earth’s abundance and in conversation with others.

The call to table is also a call to each one of us to come out of our fearful silence and find the courage (that is, the “heart) to speak what we know.  Much of our speech flows from our anxiety and fear. It may sound commanding and dominating or it may sound like a croaking whisper of subservience. Both flow from fear in myriad ways. The media of our time only amplify this fear. They do not mitigate it. The spirit of the table begins to permeate our senses like aroma from a banquet table. It provides a setting for a kind of grace that frees us from our fear. Little wonder that Luke begins his story of Jesus’s life with the angel’s declaration “Fear not.”

The grace of the table is not merely a balm for fear. It is an act of moving out of isolation and silence into conviviality. Conviviality is “living together.” The table symbolizes the essence of living together on this earth in a human way. The call is not an individualistic call but a call into a certain kind of relationship. The form of call for the roundtable is already a participation in the mutuality of call and response that is at the heart of movement into conviviality, a movement into communion and conversation.

Finally, the very word “call” always implies a movement forward, but a movement that never quite reaches its goal. Our actions at table only begin a process in our lives. They set a goal, a telos, a direction. They give shape to our deepest hopes in a tangible way. They let us taste the meal yet to come. They let us sense the purposes of the Creator who is always re-creating us and our universe.

C. We Confirm God’s Presence

Traditionally, the “invocation” is a request for God’s presence in our midst. At Roundtable, we come to the table because we have already heard the call of the special power present at table. God is there before we come. It’s not our table, but God’s table.

Many times after our gathering I have heard people say something like “I came without big expectations, but something stirred in the gathering and the conversation that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.” This is a confirmation of the holy power present in the simple act of eating and conversing at a table that honors our equal dignity. It is the power of the circle process undergirding all created things. In the words of the legendary Black Elk of the Oglala Sioux:

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greater power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing and always come back again to where they were. The life of a person is a circle from childhood to childhood. And so it is in everything where power moves. (Black Elk Speaks [2008], pp. 155-56)

In this same passage Black Elk recounts how his nation had power as long as they lived in circular arrangements, but when the White man forced them into boxes they lost their power and young men took much longer to mature.

At roundtable we enter once again into the power of this circle of life. And so at this point we simply “affirm” this presence and this power. We draw out words that seek to align ourselves with this power. We seek to depart from the usual, “boxed in” relationships of our work, family, and community, and live into a deeper relationship more in tune with the circle process at the heart of creation.

The relationship patterns at the heart of creation find human expression in words of dialogue. We started with dialogue and here we confirm its depth and power. For this communion in conversation to continue we also need to affirm trust in its power to guide us toward reconciliation rather than alienation and destruction. We acknowledge that there is a spirit that “presides” here at table. It does not impose its will apart from ours, but calls, persuades, and loves us into participation at this table.

In this dialogue we bring together the awesome creative power of atoms, solar systems, and galaxies with the “personal” interaction of conversation and prayer. This is what we mean by a “personal God,” not some supernatural being floating in the sky, but the source and initiator of a circle process of continual re-creation among actors of ultimate worth and dignity engaged in transformative conversation.

In using the language of “presidency” and “presiding” we enter our contemporary political world, just as kingship and fatherhood reflect past political orders. In using this language we try to get at the way in which the manner of Jesus’s presence evoked people’s participation, provided a way of seeing and doing, and, in forgiving sin, released them to start over and over again in their struggle to live out God’s purpose in their lives. In this spirit we try to link power, authority and service. I will come back to this motif when I talk about the work of the steward at table.

Finally, to confirm that the Spirit of Jesus is presiding at this table in this particular way is to say that each one of us is called to share in this work of the circle. This is not an activity in which one or two people are putting on a show, but one in which all are called to participate in a process. No one person is representing Christ, the church, or the divine power. It is the circle of people as such that re-presents this power.  This is a sacred responsibility, if you will, and we often don’t feel up to it, but we gather in the hope and trust that this power will be made manifest in the formation of the circle.

D. We Remember

Important meals are times of remembering. Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthdays and anniversaries are times of stories that give us a sense of place and time. They remind us of where we fit into a larger drama of family, community, church, nation, and perhaps the universe itself.

Food is not merely an occasion for memory. It is a powerful vehicle of memory. Taste, like smell, is one of the deepest forms of memory, reaching back to unremembered childhood. Whenever I taste of peanut butter and grape jelly, I can almost feel the cold milk that went along with it. I am taken back to our kitchen. It is after school and I am eating it before going out to play basketball or softball with my friends. When I am with others in a church setting the taste of wheat bread and grape takes me back thousands of years, to a crowded room of fearful followers of a courageous Rabbi. Because of the deep memory contained in taste, we do not eat at this table simply to strengthen our bodies, but to enter a door into a special drama that orients our lives.

The drama these food memories take us into is one of alienation and reconciliation. That is the whole point of the roundtable. Without memory there can be no reconciliation. But mere memory can also wall us into a circle of fear and retribution. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission discovered over and over again how important it was to enable victimized and traumatized people to tell the truth they knew. They also discovered how elusive an accurate memory is. They struggled with the problem of verifying the claims of people who testified, especially if they were accused of crimes and inhumane actions. At many points they had to deal with the realization that we would never know exactly what happened, what blood had seeped into the earth unacknowledged and unclaimed.

We must never give up the struggle to remember. Eating and conversing in circle is a powerful way to walk the road of memory. Remembering is a collective act. It joins personal and social life. Our action of remembering at roundtable usually takes the form of a statement that we say together. Here is one example.

Jesus walked through walls of fear,
Called to children in the shadows.
Ate with unclean sinners, broke the laws of rank and power.
At his table all were equal in their gifts and in their loss.
To his banquet he invited friend and foe to share God’s feast.

At roundtable we draw on a collective memory of the original “way of the table” set in play by Jesus of Nazareth. In this way of the table memory must always contain an element of gratitude if it is to flower into reconciliation. To take part in a meal is to receive a good gift beyond our expectations. Many times, as with a returning soldier, worker, or invalid, it celebrates a return to abundance from a time of privation and danger. It is a time of remembering our peril and also the gracious power by which we have survived to eat and drink with friends and family once again. It is also a time of remembering those who are no longer present with us. They have been lost to violence, disease, and decay. We sense their loss more vividly and we remember the contribution they made to our own lives. They, too, help nurture our life’s renewal. Memory is the pedestal of gratitude.

E. We Give Thanks

The expression of gratitude has always been so central to the table that it gave rise to one of the words we associate with this Christian rite – Eucharist, from the Greek word for “thankful.” Literally it means “good grace” or “good charism.” It shares a common root with the Hindu and Buddhist notion of karma. Indeed, we still call table blessings “grace” in many traditions. Simply put, it is an acknowledgement of our dependency on powers outside our grasp and knowledge. It is one of the most fundamental expressions of an acceptance of what is outside our power into our deepest inner self – the self of need.

Gratitude is a door into other dimensions of the work of reconciliation. It leads to openness, for it is itself an expression of being open to the support we need. This openness extends not only to hospitality for the stranger, but also to hearing and listening deeply to the stranger. We admit the stranger not only to our table but also into our consciousness. Gratitude is also a recognition of our dependence, what the philosophers might call our “contingency.” We are always cradled in the arms of others, not merely at our birth but all along in life until we die. Gratitude and thanks are therefore always a sign of being in relationship. It is the mark of being vulnerable to the action of another. It is a vulnerability that requires that we trust another for our life. This may be why Meister Eckhart, the medieval mystic, said that if we had only one prayer to say, it should be “thanks.” Here is one example from our gathering:

O Holy Source of Life and Light,

With beauty you invite us to the day, with beauty you release us to the night. From dark, dank soil fruit and flowers grow. In saddening tears the oceans find the formula of life. On cross and weeping women’s faces we receive the leadership of love. Now at this table, bounty of your earth renews our bodies, minds, and spirits — the leadership of grace. Be here. Be now. Be here in word and nurture, leading us to peace. Be in our voices as we sing our thanks.

“Thank you, God, Holy One. Thank you, God Creator, thank you, God.

“Thank you, God, Holy One. Thank you, God Redeemer, thank you, God.

“Thank you, God, Holy One. Thank you, God, Great Spirit , thank you, God.”

As the door to reconciliation this act of gratitude is indeed what makes this a holy time – a time that plumbs the depths of the creative life that is our origin and sustaining home.

F. We Eat and Drink

We then have a simple time of sharing from the bread and juice at the table. We often speak of it as God’s nurture from God’s abundance. Indeed, as we move from this act into our conversation, people often take seconds from the table. This, too, is an acknowledgement of God’s abundance. It participates in the generosity of a man who could offer bread to another man who was about to betray him. This kind of open generosity, it seems to me, can only flow from a deep sense of sufficiency rooted in God’s abundance. Thus, we don’t eat as if we would never see another meal. We do not eat without serving the neighbor first. We do not eat in haste, ignoring those around us. How different is this act from the fast food culture all around us!

Some people would recognize in this act the traditional Moravian love feast or agape meal. Indeed, it is tapping into the same sensibility, just as our conversation is kin to the Quaker meeting. The table – and its conversation — has not been forgotten in Christian tradition, but its meaning has changed dramatically and varies drastically among Christians. Most of Western Latin tradition has seen in this meal a drama of sacrifice and has construed reconciliation in terms of this sacrifice. The meal became a ritual shaped by penance and the satisfaction of a retributive God. It was a reward for the worthy. Clearly this is not what this meal is. This meal seeks the path of reconciliation in the celebration of God’s abundance rather than the overcoming of our unworthiness. It puts the emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit in the roundtable call to conversation. It finds the grace of God’s forgiveness in the power of the circle to bring us to a new level of understanding and relationship. The grace of God’s nurture leads us into the grace of a holy conversation.

G. The Conversation

It is hard to speak of a good meal if it does not have good conversation. Sometimes meals lead into conversations that escalate into arguments and fights, leaving food undigested and rejected. Sometimes the conversation leads past traditional defenses into deeper layers that bond people together for a lifetime. The opportunity for conversation can arouse our anxieties as well as our hopes as we sit down with relatives, strangers, or even old adversaries. The same universe of possibilities confronts us at this roundtable, but here we enter into a form of conversation in which we publically acknowledge that we have stepped into a conversation governed by the spirit and the circle wisdom of Jesus.

In conversation we bridge the gap between “word” and “table.” We are not involved in separate events of “Word” from a preacher and “Sacrament” from a priest. Here we have “word at table.” The kind of word that is in conversation at table is not a one-way communication, but one side of the process of relationship-building through speaking and listening. It invites us all to do both. In this circle of conversation we walk the path of reconciliation.

In this circle conversation we rehearse once again the fundamentals of any circle process – speaking from the heart, listening deeply, and seeking points of common ground to find a way together to a better place. In a regular gathering at roundtable we usually do not come to transform a particular conflict in our short time together, any more than a traditional Mass actually re-sacrifices Jesus. Transformation of a particular conflict might indeed happen, but that is not our primary intent. We come to engage in a process that plants these reconciling dispositions and behaviors ever deeper into our lives. We come together to make these kinds of actions visible and public, so they might call us and others into this kind of response to the conflicts that fill our lives.

The Readings

Every conversation, knowingly or not, draws on earlier discourse, just as every conflict has antecedents and causes in earlier conflicts. Language itself is a vast repository of meanings, as any wordsmith will tell you. In the roundtable we begin the conversation with readings, usually one from Scripture and sometimes one from another source, that remind us of a benchmark discourse to open up our way into the focus for the day. The “word” in the reading invites our words from our experience today. We then enter into the circle of conversation that includes these founding voices.

Sometimes we ask someone in our community to visit with us to talk about their experiences in connection with some aspect of the work of reconciliation. We have had conversations on domestic violence, community mediation, prisoner and victim rehabilitation, immigration issues and many more over the years. This requires advance preparation to enable the guest to fit into our worship framework rather than to revert to a kind of public presentation to an audience. Here we have to confront “boundary problems” between our worship experience and our community involvements, especially in light of the many exclusionary practices of worship and communion that have been practiced in the churches. It is important that guests understand the nature and purpose of the roundtable gathering ahead of time so that they feel genuinely invited and comfortable in their participation.

The Talking Piece

The process of circle conversation depends on the “talking piece” and the steward. The feather usually serves as our talking piece. Others use stones, bowls, cloth, or a Bible. As it is passed from person to person it gives to the holder authority to speak and to the others the obligation to listen, indeed to listen deeply. As someone struggles to find words to share their experience I am reminded of the old Spiritual’s lines: “Sometimes I feel like a feather in the air…a long way from home.” The feather asks us to speak concisely and briefly from the heart. This is not an easy discipline. Words for some are a defensive wall to ward off attack. They cannot speak enough of them. For others they are a mist they cannot organize. Or they are the preferred means of domination. Bringing our inner life to speech is not merely something we learn as children, but a life-long task with ever-new challenges. For some, a song, a piece of art, a dance, the tones of a flute or the beating of a drum may express more than words. These expressions, too, must be invited into the circle of conversation. The talking piece, as one of our members points out, is to help us “talk peace.”

Even harder is the feather’s call to listen. While others speak is not a time for preparing our own response. We can take a time of silence in the passing of the feather to compose our own thought. The feather is an invitation to see how the other is feeling like a feather in the air. It is a time to be hearing tone, pace, and breathing as well as seeing body, gesture, and expression. It is a time for compassion – co-suffering – as well as co-celebration. We can then give expression to our own thoughts and feelings, knowing that others are also listening this way.

The Steward

If anyone is called to represent the governing spirit of Jesus at the table it is the steward. While each person must take responsibility for speaking and listening, we assign one person to guide the conversation and to mark its beginning and end. The steward serves the circle process. The steward is responsible for calling us back to the basic covenant that governs the circle. The steward does this in several ways.

The steward begins the conversation with a statement about our focus and a question designed to open our inquiry. Through consultation in advance the steward clarifies a focus that seems to bring together the dominant concerns of the members of the gathering. She or he then formulates a question to elicit understandings from the participants. The steward may also explain elements of the circle process to those who are participating for the first time.

The steward also has the responsibility of holding participants to the circle’s covenant. Occasionally, the steward will have to remind a speaker that the circle requires greater brevity. This takes tact. Sometimes a hand gesture will do. Sometimes this can be a gesture to pass the feather, or a short phrase of reminder about the covenant of brevity. Perhaps it is a reminder that others need to speak.             The steward also needs to give permission to people to remain silent and listening. Listening is something everyone is called to do. Speaking must follow from the promptings of the heart. The steward needs to stay tuned to this dynamic of participation. The challenge here, for the steward and for all of us, is how to identify in our inner self our “prayer,” our contribution, our offering for the table. The steward is one who is charged with safeguarding this process for the good of the whole.

When the feather has completed its round the steward can decide whether to ask another question to follow up on the first or to lay the feather on the table and invite conversation on the points that have been raised. At times the steward may summarize the contributions of the participants in order to emphasize that they have been heard and to help others confirm or revise what they thought they heard.

Finally, when the steward senses a point of closure, she or he signals a time for enlarging the circle of conversation in words of prayer to the listening God. Just as the conversation begins with records of founding conversations and stories, so it leads now to a wider plane that acknowledges the underlying “dia-logic” of the universe.

H. Prayers: The Wider Conversation

The roundtable places dialogue at the center of the work of reconciliation. We assume that reconciliation is at the heart of Jesus’s ministry and God’s purposes. It is the bedrock reality of the universe. What we call “prayer” is our effort to align ourselves with this dialogical character of reality and of God’s purposes. In doing this, however, we are aware that this action has often been reduced to magical efforts at manipulation of this reality. So much prayer seems to simply be a replication of our infantile need for parental security. It is solely a petition for action beyond the laws by which we are normally bound. Many of us cannot enter into this action because it is often presented within an unbelievable theology or theory of the universe. It is simply “talking to the ceiling” or to Santa Claus.

With all of these reservations and limitations we still engage in a form of this ancient practice to affirm that there are dimensions of dialogue outside our knowledge and field of trust. It is an act of openness and trust toward a deeper, more mysterious dialogue that sustains the universe and its trajectory toward reconciliation. It is an opening of our table conversation to the widest reaches of our circles of existence. We still use words to affirm that this dialogue is a genuinely human dialogue, even though reaching beyond the bounds of human experience.

Like the circle steward, the prayer leader gathers up concerns that have been registered at table and directs them toward the Holy One who hears and remembers all. She or he then asks for other prayers – of thanks, of petition, of intercession – and we respond with words appropriate to our focus for that day. Sometimes there is a silent time of listening for our inner voices. There is a silence that offers openings beyond our words.

The prayer leader then leads us in a “hope prayer” rooted in the form that Jesus taught his disciples. Here we have tried to experiment with contemporary expressions of Jesus’s ancient formula, commonly called the “Lord’s Prayer.” In its form of address to the Holy One, its political and social metaphors, and in its tone it seeks to embody the grounded hope this prayer form expressed in the early church. Here is our present wording for this prayer.

O Source of Life, You alone are holy.

Come and govern us in perfect peace.

Give us today all the food that we need.

Release us from sin as we release our enemies.

Save us in the trials of judgment.

Liberate us all from evil powers.

For in you is our justice,

Our constitution, and our peace. AMEN.

This language is both familiar (“give us today…) and jarring (“For in you is our justice, our constitution…”). Like its original form, it is rooted in daily experience as well as in idealized political order. It is a longing for God’s liberation and justice as well as a hope for our own capacity for forgiveness and humility. It opens up an attitude toward the future that can prepare us for God’s work of reconciliation. The earliest Christian gatherings at table concluded with the Aramaic phrase “maranatha” – Our Lord, come” – giving voice to the hope and expectancy generated in the table experience. This “Hope Prayer” shares in that tradition and connects it directly to the form that Jesus introduced to his followers.

The traditional formulation of this prayer is incomplete in one regard important to our contemporary understanding of the full work of reconciliation – our reconciliation with God’s earth. Although this is implied in a full understanding of God’s shalom, it is not yet explicit, either in Jesus’s formulation or in our present expressions. This is still a challenge we have only begun to address.

I. Commitments

Our roundtable, like all effective circle processes, is grounded in a covenantal relationship. Covenants are frameworks of mutual commitments that establish a bed of trust in which to live. Some of these are implicit. We only realize they are there when we break them. They are like a grammar for living. Others are explicit because we know there are alternative ways of living. These commitments we put into words. Here are the covenantal commitments guiding our worship at roundtable.

The Roundtable gatherings seek to provide an opportunity:

• for people to bring their concerns about their life and world to the table in a prayerful, structured conversation that respects a variety of points of view. Priority is given to public matters crying out for reconciliation. Exchange of concerns and perspectives can focus on a single topic, art piece or performance, scripture, or reading.
• for people to celebrate Christ’s presence at table with tangible symbols of the bountiful banquet still to come.
• for people to worship in a way that seeks to:

use gender-inclusive language respecting the equality of all people and the mystery of the Holy One who includes and transcends all gender distinctions and sexual orientations;

be circular and participatory, with shared leadership;

use silence, the arts, and symbols that go beyond the spoken word.

employ language and symbols for God’s just order drawn from our contemporary political and cultural world;

celebrate the wholeness and mystery of creation, especially our call to reconciliation with the Earth;

engage the challenges of justice, restoration, social service, and care for the earth.

These commitments are clearly aspirations, ideals, and goals to guide us. They are not minimal laws for participation. They do form a perspective, a set of reference points, for our planning, deliberations, and construction of our liturgies.

In addition, we share a set of commitments that shape the conversations into which we enter. They are the commitments underlying effective circle processes. Circle conversations rely on explicit covenants in order to pursue a path of conflict transformation and reconciliation. Each group needs to develop, adapt, and claim them for its own work. JustPeace has suggested this covenant for its circle groups and it is basically what we follow:

What is shared while in circle, stays in circle.

Personal information that is shared in circle is kept confidential except when safety would be compromised.

Speak with respect:

Speak only when you have the talking piece.

Speak only for yourself.

Be specific.

Speak in a way that encourages dialogue.

Be brief and to the point.

Listen with respect:

Listen for understanding.

Be open to be transformed.

Stay in circle.

Respect for the circle calls upon people to stay in circle

while the circle works to find resolution to the issues

raised.

Covenants need to be rehearsed, re-examined, and even revised. They are the fundamental constitutions of our common life. At each roundtable we are also revising and augmenting our own covenants for living. Under the impact of experience, of listening to others, of conversing with voices past and present as well as in an imagined future, we open ourselves to covenantal recommitments and revisions. As part of this ongoing process, at the conclusion of most of our gatherings we give voice to emerging common commitments. Here is one from a roundtable gathering focused on finding truth and God’s wisdom in the midst of fear-mongering political rhetoric.

Though bombs and bullets shake the earth,

We will speak Your words of peace.

Though lies confuse and half truths blind,

We will seek the fullness of Your Truth.

Though greed corrupt and fear constrain,

We will abound in Your love.

ALL: For in Your Wisdom is our Truth, in Your Purpose is our peace.

J. The Blessing and Sending

We close in a very familiar way – with blessing and sending. It is a blessing we say or sing together. Usually we sing this blessing, some of us using hand gestures to dramatize the meanings:

Go now in peace, blessing and blessed,

Grounded in God, healing and whole.

Go now in peace, blessing and blessed,

Grounded in God, filled with God’s love.

At the conclusion of the blessing song, we invite participants to extend a sign of peace to others around the circle.

Looking back over the entire sequence of our gathering we can see that this time of communion and conversation begins with gathering in memory and thanks, focuses in nurture and sharing from the heart, culminates in words of hope and commitment and is sealed by a blessing. This is a classic sequence in Christian worship, but it takes on a particular content in light of the way we understand God’s work of reconciliation, the intent of Jesus’s life and ministry, and our understanding of the world we live in.

With slight alterations this pattern has remained fairly stable. It serves to express our fundamental understanding of reconciliation. It also serves to form in us more deeply the dispositions, attitudes, perspectives, and understandings that we need in order to transform the conflicts distorting and destroying our lives and the life of this earth. With this picture in mind I hope we are ready to look at the challenges, difficulties, and possibilities we have discovered in living out this practice.