Building the Lord's table

I’ve been reading a wonderful new book. A place of refuge by Tobias Jones describes the first few years in the life of the Windsor Hill Community. Jones, and his wife Francesca Lenzi bought a house and a piece of woodland in Somerset, an old quarry site, and lived there with their three young children.

Tobias Jones and his family (Photo credit - Sunday Times)

Into their home they welcomed people in need: around five at any one time, all colourfully described in Jones’s affectionately humorous prose, who stayed for a few days, or weeks, or months. Ex-cons and ex-soldiers; people with eating disorders and mental health issues; recovering alcoholics: all made their way down the lane into the woods, many (in the early days) self-referred.

Though not professional therapists, Tobias and Francesca are discerning listeners, encouraging people towards greater self-understanding. They offer companionship and support. Their guests help with cooking and washing up, and work on farm and woodland.

Mr Jones is utterly honest about their struggles, successes and apparent failures, and their sadness when people had to be asked to leave. This is a book to treasure, painful, funny at times, deeply thoughtful and moving. 

Christian faith, understated in the book, lies behind Windsor Hill Wood. It is not an explicitly Christian community, although there is grace before meals and an invitation to the guests to share times of quiet reflection in the makeshift chapel shaped like a Cinderella carriage.

In my own journey towards open-hearted welcoming of others, I am inspired by what I see of God’s loving acceptance in the love of Tobias Jones. His example speaks all the more powerfully in that he freely admits he loses it at times!

I love his affinity with nature, his open-eyed wonder at the turning of the seasons, his rich descriptive vocabulary. I love his sense of the wood as a healing, timeless refuge from the stresses of life: a place to find (in the words of a quotation he uses) ‘the peace of the ever-juvenile eternities of earth.’

I am slowly learning the implications of God’s universal presence, God self-expressing in the very fabric of creation, beckoning us.

But I’m like many of the Jones’s guests who filled their days at first with talk and restless busyness through fear of stillness. Often I neglect the discipline of building into each day’s rhythm time to rest in the peace of the eternities.

Reflecting on the addictive behaviours of some of his guests (the house rule was ‘no boozing, no using, no violence’ – to which was added later ‘no porn’) – Tobias Jones suggests that a spiritual malady lies beneath all addiction. I know that the cure for my own mild-ish OCD and need to micromanage is to entrust myself to God who accepts me and sustains me utterly. I recognise my need to do this more consistently and deeply, while smiling at my instinct to micromanage this entrusting too!

I noticed that some of Jones’s community members unconsciously adopted a role (counselling others, for example) to cover up their own needs. There was no healing for them until they accepted their vulnerability. I smile again, for I know I often hide my vulnerabilities behind my competencies, and I know too that there is no healing until I accept my weakness. ‘We just sit still in the woods,’ writes Jones, ‘and confess where we’re at.’ 

I loved the description of everyone helping build a huge wooden table for their eating area. A table is a symbol of community. Building a table together is a vivid symbol of building community. How can I, introvert that I am, nevertheless engage with other in table-building?

Tobias Jones models the kind of Christian I seek to be. He describes his longing to be ‘transparent’, so that the light (of God) shines through unimpeded by the clamour of his ego. Paradoxically, it’s in that prioritising of Another that we become most fully ourselves.

Chapel at the Windsor Hill Community (Photo credit - The Guardian)

And I loved his description of those times in chapel, when all the stress and mess of the day was squeezed out of the sponge and he and Francesca found ‘a source of peace and refreshment, far more than we needed for ourselves…  It meant we were receiving, and giving away, what wasn’t ours.’

‘Will God accept me?’ we wonder. ‘Is there a space for me?’  Come down the lane into the woods and see what a welcome awaits you!

But what about those whose pressing need is to find a table to sit at in their loneliness and pain? For all our talk of God’s love, we do not truly know that love until we are welcoming others with the same unconditional acceptance which has welcomed us.

Christ’s bread and wine make community possible. But supposing he asks us to join him in crafting the table?

(A place of refuge by Tobias Jones is published by Quercus. ISBN 9781848662483)

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 13th August 2015)