In a “normal” year, this is the time in the United States in which extended families and friends gather to feast, to give thanks for their blessings, and to initiate holiday festivities.
While some families will maintain their customs this year, many will be forced to concede to the pandemic and either forego or significantly modify their traditions. Still others will be reminded of their estrangement from family and begin an annual period of stress and sadness. All of these exigencies display the season’s intense emotional and psychological impact, for good or ill.
In 2019, a quartet of American female singer-songwriters—Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, Natalie Hemby, and Amanda Shires—formed the erstwhile group, The Highwomen, to produce an eponymous album featuring a lovely song, “Crowded Table,” that beautifully captures this complexity. (And they admirably reflect the legacy of 1980s group, The Highwaymen, comprised of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson.)
Written by Hemby, Carlile, and Lori McKenna, “Crowded Table” uses a variety of metaphors to describe the broad and deep sentiments that attend human relationships: fear, loneliness, alienation, longing, and ultimately hope, hospitality and reconciliation. And it brilliantly captures Catholic virtues of solidarity, prudence, and hospitality.
The song begins in the second person, assuring a hurt, sad, depressed, or disoriented person that the narrator is present for her:
You can hold my hand/When you need to let go
I can be your mountain/When you’re feeling valley low
I can be your streetlight/Showing you the way home
You can hold my hand/When you need to let go
The doctrine of solidarity calls us to be present and available for the other who suffers, to shoulder his burdens, to lift him up, to show him the way.
But just as importantly, the virtues that comprise solidarity tell the sufferer that that there is no shame in reaching out for the hand to hold or asking for the light to guide. Before succor can be given to the wayfarer, he must be morally prepared to receive it.
This is a skill, of course, that must be learned before the moment of crisis, and it points up the importance of moral education, acquired in a community of faith.
In other words,
If we want a garden/We’re gonna have to sow the seed
Plant a little happiness/Let the roots run deep/
Because
If it’s love that we give/Then it’s love that we reap
If we want a garden/We’re gonna have to sow the seed
Prudence, the form of the cardinal virtues, is in part the moral skill of planning beforehand to prepare for what we cannot yet see ahead.
It is the development of the ability to apply the other virtues to contingencies that we cannot predict, tragedies that we cannot foresee, pain that we would prefer to avoid. “Prudence is the quality of clear-sightedness,” explains Joseph Pieper. “The prudent man approaches each decision with his eyes open, in the full light of knowledge and faith.”
Too often, we seem to use notions of prudence to suspend or set aside the other virtues, or to act as though they have exceptions in real life. Prudence, however, is the virtue of anticipation, not avoidance: the practice of practice; of planting; of pruning: of tending the virtues so that we can harvest them in the moment of crisis. Perhaps chief among those virtues is hospitality—even, nay especially, to those who are alienated or estranged.
The door is always open/Your picture’s on my wall
Everyone’s a little broken/And everyone belongs
Yeah, everyone belongs
Everyone knows this person. Everyone is this person. Participants in the fall of our original parents, we are all (at least) a little broken—we alienate and are estranged; we injured and are damaged; we sow confusion and reap disorder. The season of Thanksgiving, Advent, and Christmas magnify the hurt that we might have suffered or caused. They call us to be willing to reconcile and to be reconciled; to undo the harm we might have caused, and to forgive those who have harmed us.
This is precisely why the essence of Christian virtue is to welcome the alienated, the injured, and the confused. They belong at the table because they are us. Then, we may join the chorus that holds the song together:
I want a house with a crowded table
And a place by the fire for everyone
Let us take on the world while we’re young and able
And bring us back together when the day is done.
And bring us back together when the day is done.
Kenneth Craycraft is a licensed attorney and the James J. Gardner Family Chair of Moral Theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and School of Theology, the seminary for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. He holds the Ph.D. in theology from Boston College, and the J.D. from Duke University School of Law.
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