[July 2004 journal entry]
I prepared the following metaphorical interpretation of the empty chair at a table as metaphor to be read at a conference after the reading of a Fernando Pessoa poem about a vulnerable child. Note my adaptation of Dietrich’s ‘seeing from below’ paragraph.
Thank you for reading Pessoa’s poem so eloquently that you have brought this child and so many with her into our midst. Where might they be seated? Perhaps the empty chairs at our tables? I have been asked to comment briefly on the metaphorical force of the empty chair. The physician with whom I have worked most closely over the past ten years is a 43-year-old family physician. He leads a not-for-profit community health center that exists to make comprehensive primary care -– including obstetrics -– accessible for the uninsured population in three poverty-ridden counties in the Appalachia Mountains of East Tennessee. He and I speak together often about the reasons we have for many years assigned symbolic value to an empty chair at the tables –- personal and professional tables -– at which we sit in conversation with others. The empty chair keeps us mindful of the many individuals -– some living, some deceased –- who have healed and enriched our lives. The empty chair also sits as a reminder of those individuals whose life stories we know to be far more fragile than our own, whose lives unfold on the margins. We consider it an experience of unparalleled value to be learning to see from the perspective of the barred, the badly treated, the powerless, the scoffed, the lonely, the forgotten, the ignored, the disgraced. Why ‘unparalleled value’? Because seeing these sufferers in our mind’s eye sitting in the empty chair forces us to rethink what it means to be strong and what it means to be weak; it radically alters our view of greatness, humaneness, justice, empathy, peace. My physician colleague and I –- both with advantages and privileges flowing easily/plentifully to us –- have vowed to hold each other accountable to speak in table conversations in ways that honor and respect those for whom life is hard. It takes courage to say “yes” to individuals represented in Pessoa’s child, to reach out to them with a genuine “welcome” into our conversations. ‘Jesus’ was persecuted and killed because of the table he was trying to set and the individuals he welcomed to his table. To be with them is perhaps as close as we come in this life to the presence of ‘God’.
