Come, Sit, Eat
Love After Love a poem by Derek Walcott
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The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes,peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
There is a beautiful line in Derek Walcott’s poem Love After Love:
“The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror…”
And then Walcott gives us this extraordinary invitation:
“Sit. Feast on your life.”
Those words invite us to consider something that is surprisingly difficult for many of us: receiving our own lives as a gift.
We are often much better at giving than receiving. We care for other people. We solve problems. We show up. We work. We create. We encourage. We carry responsibilities. We try to make things better for everyone around us.
And somewhere along the way, we can become strangers to ourselves.
We can become so focused on what needs to be done that we forget who we are.
So focused on being useful that we forget that we are beloved.
So focused on the next task, the next expectation, the next person who needs us, that we forget to stop and ask:
Who am I, really? And can I receive the person God created me to be?
Walcott describes that moment as coming home to the stranger who has loved you all your life — the self you may have ignored, criticized, or pushed aside.
There is something deeply intimate about that image.
It tells us that God has never been a stranger to us.
Before we knew how to love ourselves, God knew us.
Before we accomplished anything, God loved us.
Before anyone praised us or criticized us, before we succeeded or failed, before we became the person we thought we were supposed to become, we were already God’s beloved.
Sometimes it is to finally recognize who we have been all along.
Religious Masters repeatedly welcomed people back to themselves.
He sat with people others had rejected.
He ate with people others considered unworthy.
He looked at people and saw more than their failures, their reputations, their occupations, their mistakes.
He saw the beloved child of God underneath it all.
And perhaps that is part of what it means to come to this table week after week.
We don’t come because we have everything figured out.
We don’t come because we have earned our place.
We come because Spirit says:
Come. Sit. Eat.
Bring your whole life.
Bring the beautiful parts.
Bring the broken parts.
Bring the questions.
Bring the regrets.
Bring the things you are proud of and the things you wish nobody knew.
Bring the person you present to the world and the person you encounter alone in the mirror.
And Spirit says: Come. You are welcome here.
God does not love us because we have finally become perfect.
God loves us into becoming whole.
There is a difference.
We sometimes imagine that faith means God standing at a distance, waiting for us to get our lives together.
But the Spirit tells another story.
God comes looking for us.
God sits beside us.
God feeds us.
God calls us by name.
God keeps singing, even when we have forgotten the song.
And that brings us back to Walcott’s words:
“Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life…”
What would it mean for us to do that?
What would it mean to give our hearts back to ourselves — not in selfishness, but in gratitude?
To stop treating ourselves as projects that constantly need improvement and begin receiving ourselves as people already held in God’s love?
Perhaps it means forgiving ourselves.
Perhaps it means resting.
Perhaps it means putting down the impossible expectations we have carried for years.
Perhaps it means looking in the mirror and refusing to speak to ourselves with a cruelty we would never use toward someone we love.
Perhaps it means allowing ourselves to laugh again.
To create.
To sing.
To sit around a table with people we love.
To notice the ordinary miracles that have been happening all around us.
To feast on our lives.
Because our lives are not merely a collection of tasks to accomplish.
They are a gift.
This is especially important in a world that constantly tells us that our value comes from what we produce, what we achieve, what we own, how we look, or how many people need us.
The poem says something radically different:
Your worth is not something you manufacture. Your worth is something you receive.
You are beloved.
And when we finally begin to believe that something changes.
We become less desperate to prove ourselves.
We become more capable of loving others without needing them to complete us.
We become more willing to forgive.
More willing to let go.
More willing to say, “I don’t have to carry everything.”
And perhaps most importantly, we become able to recognize God not only in the extraordinary moments, but in the ordinary ones.
In the meal.
In the music.
In the person sitting beside us.
In the work of our hands.
In the laughter of a friend.
In the quiet at the end of the day.
In the face looking back at us from the mirror.
The table of Spirit is a place where strangers become friends, where the hungry are fed, where brokenness is not a disqualification, and where we are reminded again and again:
You belong.
So perhaps today the invitation is very simple.
Go home.
Not merely to your house.
Go home to yourself.
Look in the mirror and greet the person who has been with you through every season.
The younger you.
The tired you.
The hopeful you.
The grieving you.
The joyful you.
The imperfect you.
The you who has made mistakes.
The you who has loved fiercely.
The you who is still becoming.
And instead of turning away, say:
Sit here.
Eat.
You are welcome.
And then listen.
Listen for the song that has been playing underneath your life all along.
The song of grace.
The song of mercy.
The song of a God who has known you by heart.
Coming home to ourselves is rarely a dramatic event. More often, it happens quietly. It happens in moments when we stop running. It happens when we sit in silence long enough to hear our own hearts again. The world is very good at keeping us distracted. There is always one more notification, one more obligation, one more reason to postpone rest. We can spend years moving from one responsibility to the next without ever pausing to ask what God might be saying to us. Great Masters repeatedly withdrew from the crowds to pray. Again and again, the pattern is the same: step away, become still, listen. Perhaps that is because love is difficult to hear when everything is noisy. God's love is persistent, but it is rarely loud. It comes as a gentle reminder: You do not have to earn your place. You do not have to prove your worth. You are already loved. And when we begin to trust that truth, we discover a new freedom. We become less afraid of our imperfections. We become less anxious about how others see us. We become more grateful for the lives we have been given, rather than constantly wishing for different ones. Gratitude, after all, is another way of coming home. It is the practice of receiving today as a gift.
Not a perfect gift. Not an easy gift. But a sacred one.
And when you understand it, perhaps you will discover that the stranger you have been searching for was never really a stranger at all.
It was you.
And it was Spirit, waiting patiently to welcome you home.
So take down the old love letters.
Look at the photographs.
Remember the life you have actually lived — not the life you thought you were supposed to live.
Give thanks for it.
Give thanks for the people who have loved you.
Give thanks for the people you have loved.
Give thanks even for the difficult chapters, because they too have made you who you are.
And then, as Walcott says:
“Sit. Feast on your life.”
Because this life — this imperfect, beautiful, unfinished life — is still God’s gift.
Blessings
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