On Thanksgiving morning, someone brings the folding chair upstairs.
It catches on the banister. It always catches on the banister. In the kitchen, onions soften in butter, somebody opens the oven unnecessarily, and plates emerge from the cupboard that holds the things we apparently save for people we love.
You can hear a household making room.
And perhaps, beneath that lovely commotion, you can hear yourself worrying.
Who will mention the election? Can those two sit together? Has anyone heard whether he’s coming? Somewhere, a person driving toward this house is rehearsing an argument. Somewhere else, someone is considering an excuse.
I wonder whether what frightens us most is not the conversation we might have, but the Thanksgiving we might eventually have without someone.
The chair is still here.
I would like it to stay occupied.
I wish I could claim that my concern for family always outruns my appetite for a well-placed correction. It does not. I know the pleasure of assembling an argument while someone else is talking. I know how a man can lower his voice and imagine this makes him charitable, although what he has actually done is become quietly insufferable.
Sometimes I want to win. Sometimes I call this defending the truth, and sometimes it is. But sometimes I just want everyone to notice that I am right.
An uncomfortable thing to carry into grace.
Then someone we love says something we find genuinely troubling, and the discomfort deepens. These are not always quarrels about tax rates. They concern unborn children, racial injustice, immigrants, poverty, religious liberty. Actual lives. Actual suffering. Nobody should have to pretend these questions are small.
But when did disagreement give us permission to withdraw affection?
How did an opinion come to swallow the person who held it? The person who drove through the night when we needed help, who sat beside a hospital bed, who remembers us before we became so certain?
Those memories cannot settle a moral question. They ought to keep us from reducing a human being to one.
At the center of Christian life stands an inconvenient fact: the person across the table bears the image of God.
Even now. Even while saying that.
Their dignity does not depend on voting correctly. Neither does mine, which is a mercy worth considering before I begin assigning seats in the kingdom.
James tells us to be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger. I find the order revealing. Hearing comes first, before I polish my answer or decide what sort of person could believe such a thing. Hearing requires me to remain available to something I do not yet know.
Perhaps fear lies beneath the certainty. Perhaps an old humiliation. Perhaps a concern I share, expressed in language I dislike.
Listening does not require me to surrender judgment. It requires me to postpone the pleasure of delivering it.
Caryll Houselander once experienced, among the passengers of a crowded London Underground train, an extraordinary awareness of Christ in the people around her. Later she had to seek through faith what she had briefly perceived so vividly. I think of that crowded carriage, where nobody had selected agreeable companions. The person who irritates me may be where Christ is asking to be loved.
Madeleine Delbrêl lived among communist neighbors in Ivry, outside Paris, remaining Catholic while working beside people whose convictions differed profoundly from hers. She understood that the Gospel belonged in the streets where people actually lived. Their disagreement did not relieve her of the work of being their neighbor.
Élisabeth Leseur practiced her faith while married to an atheist. She prayed and loved without possessing the power to make her husband believe. After her death, her writings helped draw him toward the faith. Her life reminds me how little I know about what another soul may be receiving, resisting, or quietly carrying.
God has never appointed me manager of another person’s conversion.
This does not make cruelty harmless. Some people approach Thanksgiving carrying wounds the rest of the family would rather not acknowledge. Some have been demeaned, threatened, abused. They need safety, not an appeal to family loyalty that sends them back into harm.
Forgiveness does not automatically restore trust. A necessary boundary can be an act of care. And Catholic charity cannot make every political commitment morally acceptable.
Still, I need to examine what I am protecting when I withdraw. My conscience? Someone’s safety? Or the satisfaction of making a person feel my absence?
There is a difference. Usually I know it if I become quiet enough.
In the parable of the prodigal son, I am troubled by the older brother because I understand him. He has worked. He has stayed. Now music comes from the house, and he cannot go in.
The father comes out to him.
I linger over that small journey. A father leaving the celebration to stand beside a son who cannot yet bear it. No guarantee that the son will soften. Only the patient work of refusing to let him become merely his grievance.
Paul asks us to pursue peace insofar as it depends upon us. That qualification matters. I cannot reconcile a whole family by determination. I can answer for the way I speak.
Perhaps I ask a sincere question. Perhaps I let one sarcastic remark die without descendants.
Perhaps I say, “I still believe what I said. I’m sorry for how I said it.”
Or simply, “I love you. I don’t want to lose you over the way we have this conversation.”
Such words take courage. So does tenderness when we have good reasons to be angry.
Jesus ate with people who had not finished becoming faithful. Our Thanksgiving dinner is not the Eucharist, but surely receiving Christ’s self-gift should teach us something about receiving one another. Gratitude asks us to notice what has been given before deciding what needs correction.
The person waiting for the potatoes is a person, still unfinished, like me.
So the chairs gather. Someone says grace. Nobody changes parties. Someone reaches for the bread, and someone tells the old joke badly, which is now part of the joke.
Across the table, a parent’s hands look older.
One day there will be fewer places to set. I wonder how much comfort our victories will offer when we would give anything for one more conversation, even a difficult one.
For now, there is time to speak honestly, listen humbly, apologize precisely. Where reconciliation is safe and possible, there is time to welcome someone home.
Let the extra chair be our quiet act of faith that we can tell the truth and still make room for one another.
