My Journey into the Trinity

The Church’s frequent reference to the “table of the Lord”, being the table of the Sacrament of Holy Communion, had always been, for me, a comforting image before it was fully understood. The dining room table had always been a favored place for family activities but during the days of the Depression, especially in our Terre Haute days, it was even more so. Close proximity to the gas range in the kitchen or the coal stove in our North 12th Street home was made necessary to keep warm and save fuel. An electric cord was brought down from the chandelier above the table and a lamp was set in the middle. We spent every evening around the table. When Dad came from Medora for a visit, he was there at the table. My Brothers Bill and Walter were not present on most of these occasions. They were coping with the Depression in their own way. The gaps of their absence and Dad’s forced absence with the drug store business brought realism to our table. But the grace of our being together filled and healed the gaps. So it was a table of life—my mother reading or mending and darning; my self and Brother Ivan and Sister Mary Ellen studying, reading or playing a board game; and all of us eating and drinking a snack. Often we chose a book to read together, taking turns as the reader. It had the familial feeling of grace covering the sense of brokenness. We started the table practice at the beginning of the Great Depression in the 1930’s and continued through my high school years in Medora. Conversation about the church was heard in these times but mostly as past. Our relation to the church was fractured by the Depression. It was renewed in our new life in Medora but not in the same family way as in Terre Haute. The intensity was gone, except for my self. I did not judge this contrast in the family except to acknowledge it as a fact. I knew that my parents were very pleased with my church activities. That was enough. The day of departure for college is vague but knowing how I and my parents reacted, the event can be “seen”. Dad had to leave the house to open the drug store. It was mostly a longer than usual clasp of the hand with a look that embraced. He simply reminded me that a cardboard box had been mailed with other belongings. That was the way of most men, then. With Mom, it was a kiss and a lingering hand on my shoulder. Then with my canvas-covered-laundry-mailer-valise in hand, I was out the door and on the main highway out of town. We lived then just on the last sharp bend of the road out of town. Mom would watch me go, as I turned to thumb everything that rolled. As view of me became smaller, Mom would still stand, looking and holding her hand to her cheek, and wondering about her youngest son going to college. I would be a mix of emotions, looking forward to college and its adventures-to-be and looking back to home and a tinge of homesickness, already. In the perspective of my journey in this account, I was between the influences of my family and the influences of my developing life. Walking away from one would not lose it and walking toward the other would not gain it. One was forever a part of me and the other would have to be earned by me, to take its forever place in who I am.