For us youngsters, it was just a chair with a lift-up tray to catch the spoonfuls of food that did not quite make it to our tiny mouths. But for our mother this was a dining table for her young family, the place where she fed her flock.

As we grew up, each of us in turn took our place around a more proper table where we learned to wait our turn, say “please” and “thank you” as we passed the dishes of food on to one another. In some unique and simple way we were being taught the meaning of personal service, waiting on each other with patience.

How else could all this have happened except at a table where food was served and shared. It is a habit we all take for granted because it happens so consistently, so unobtrusively. We sit and eat but we do not often ask the meaning of what we are doing.

But on certain occasions sitting and eating does involve a special meaning: A birthday party for a six-year-old at Chuckie Cheese, a dinner for teenage couples at a fancy restaurant before the senior prom, a quiet personal meal a couple shares on their twenty fifth wedding anniversary, a celebration for grandparents on their seventy fifth.

Most folks would agree, of course, that all of these examples are more than meals. The food and drink, even the table is only the setting to celebrate something more important, a life-event, a human occasion, a setting for memories, toasts and cheers.

Yes, it could all be done while sitting around the living room in soft comfortable reclining chairs, but it would not be the same. In truly, authentic meals there is always something that transcends the actions of eating and drinking, something indescribable.

Meals, for the most part, of course, take place in homes or restaurants. But, odd as it may seem, holy places, churches, temples and synagogues have also become “dining rooms”, locations where our religious histories are celebrated occasions when we come together to be spiritually nourished on word, bread and wine.( It’s always bread and wine!).

Most Christian churches follow the custom and ritual of Jewish history: They gather, they listen to a proclamation of their spiritual traditions, they reflect on it. Then a table is set, bread and wine, those ancient, primordial natural elements are brought forth. A designated leader praises God for the produce of the earth and the fruit of the vine. Then a Eucharistic prayer is spoken over the elements, a formal and never changing anaphora, asking God to receive them back as a sign of human thanks.

All that having been said and done, the gathered community is invited to come and eat and drink with grateful hearts.

All this seems to be such a simple set of words and gestures, but ones that also contain sacred and ancient meaning.

For most Christians the doing and saying of all this has meaning precisely because we have a religious history that begins with Jesus of Nazareth, who himself was a man deeply immersed in his own Jewish history and sacred rites.

These were so important to him that on the night before he died, on the night of Passover, he chose to celebrate the Passover meal itself with his disciples one last time. The gospels tell us it was a sacred meal with all the elements we expect to find in the sacred meals we celebrate today: A recalling of our Christian history, a giving thanks for bread and wine and fellowship, then the sharing of bread and cup and, finally, the invitation to give thanks once more, go out and be God to the world.

Why do we do all this, Sunday after Sunday? We do it because of Jesus explicit words: “When you do this, do it in memory of me.”

And so we have been doing it for well over two thousand years without interruption. We gather faithfully on the Lord’s Day to remember Jesus and to be nourished on word, bread and wine.

Finally, what seems so significant and mysterious in all this, the liturgy, the peoples’ work, is that it all depends on the recognition and meaning of some very elemental, human realities: The need for people to gather and remember their sacred heritage, the invitation to break these open again and again and then to sit at table and remember the One who died for us so that we can continue to be nourished and grow spiritually.

So, it occurs to me that life is ultimately about simple things and simple actions which in themselves contain deep meaning. Perhaps to understand it all, we need to think about that highchair again and all those times since then that we have been seated with others to reflect on life’s meaning.

The scriptures: Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14b-16a; 1 Corinthians 10:16-17; John 6:51-58