Hi All,

Sorry for the lateness of the blurb, but sometimes when Tim Plett is away, things go awry, as is the case this week. Tim’s absence, however, means that we get to hear from Judi! Here’s what to expect:

Sunday morning I’ll be talking about thoughts I have had about building community during a time of increasing polarization, and part of that examines the relationship between faith and science.

Don’t forget, we’re at our new location now, 171 McDermot Ave. in the East Exchange, downstairs from the VA Cafe. Street parking is free on Sunday and can be found on the surrounding streets. Make sure to read those loading zone signs carefully because they usually are not in effect on Sunday mornings.

As always, if you can and wish to, we appreciate any financial support you can offer. Donation options can be found here. Tax receipts are available for all donations over $10.

See you all on Sunday!

Tim (Penner)

Hey all – lots of content in this blurb so top up your beverage, get comfy, and read on…

This week marks the second gathering at our new address – 171 McDermot Avenue, the everyday home of VA Café and the weekly home of The Table. Our first visit last week solidly confirmed a couple of important features of VA Café. The meeting space has a good vibe and works well. It was an easy place to feel at home. And the coffee / other beverages – outstanding! At least, that’s what the connoisseurs in the community told me. If you are someone that tends to purchase coffee on a Sunday morning, please consider getting it at VA. It’s a simple way we can be kind to our hosts and enjoy fair trade, locally (as in, right inside the cafe) roasted coffee at the same time.

This Sunday is, of course, Father’s Day. We will not be convening a panel, at least not in the way we did for Mother’s Day. That said, we will be hearing from several different fathers, and be invited to consider and discuss what spiritual lessons or images their stories might evoke for us. I’m going to leave the details as a surprise.

Here’s how to find us: When you come up the stairs into the cafe, get your coffee then keep going straight ahead down the stairs and to the event space on the lower level. We’ll be there.

We are now meeting in-person every week with the exception of the summer long weekends. This week is an alt.Sunday, so expect the unexpected, and (this week at least) you can anticipate being part of the conversation. We’ll livestream as usual here. Just FYI – a good portion of what we’ll do this week will be interactive, so if you are joining online and can participate by posting to the Facebook group, please do so. We’ll also podcast an edited version early the following week. You can find that here.

Also, a reminder that you can find ways to respond online to our need for additional financial support here.

I’ll see you on Sunday.

Peace,

Since we’re speaking of exploring, let me begin with something both exciting and necessary –  info about our new venue!

This Sunday (June 11th) will be our first gathering at VA Cafe, 171 McDermot Avenue! You can find a link to the location on Google Maps. We will meet at our usual time (10:45 a.m.). Our plan is to livestream and you can find that stream here. We will also record and podcast, and you will be able to find that here, along with our full podcast archive.

As mentioned in the subject line, this is a Full Circle Sunday – Kids Table, Community Time, Music, Talky Bit. If you are not able to be there in person but would like us all to be aware of something going on in your life, please post to the group and we’ll check that space as part of our gathering. In the Talky Bit, we’ll consider how what we’re doing at The Table is actually so ancient that it pre-dates being “human”, as we tend to understand that at this point in history.

How to find our space inside the building: When you come in the front doors (we’ll put a sign out on the sidewalk to mark the entry), walk up the stairs, straight ahead through the cafe space to the back of the building,then down the stairs to the event space. I’ll put a sign beside the entry to that space as well just for reassurance.

Other Important Info About VA Cafe (and our finances): We are guests at VA because of the generosity of the owner / operators, Dylan and Rebecca. They are offering the space to us on a donation basis, which is both very kind and hugely important given the fragile nature of our finances. We’ve been managing month to month, but just barely, and this will certainly help.

So, two things arising from this reality:

I’m very excited to welcome everyone to our new home at VA Cafe! I’ll see you on Sunday.

Hey folks – it’s an in-person Sunday at 170 Scott, starting at 10:45 a.m. We will have music, Community Time, and…the Parent Panel!  All five of our panelists from the first Parent Panel are able to be present for the second portion (no small feat – a huge shout-out to Jane, Shereen, Karen, Theresa and Roanna for making it work!), so we can pick up where we left off and get beyond the surface-scratching I was lamenting about.

There are still a couple of details pending, but it is a real possibility that this will be our last morning together at that venue. It’s been a good home, and I’m glad we get to leave it filled with the echoes of a group conversation about the exploration of beliefs – the very thing we exist to do.

Next week (June 4th) we will be in the great outdoors at the Kapabamayak Achaak Healing Forest. This is how the keepers of the space describe its mission:

Kapabamayak Achaak Healing Forest honors Indigenous children lost to or affected by the residential school system, and offers a place for learning and teaching about all injustices from colonialism and racism, past and present. The sharing of our collective stories is a pathway to understanding All Our Relations.

You can learn more and get a look at the space here. The forest is located in St John’s Park, near the corner of Fowler St and Anderson Ave – across from St John’s Cathedral. Here’s the location on Google:

Hey folks – This week is an “Online Exclusive” Sunday. We’ll gather on our Facebook page here at 10:45 a.m.  If you have anything you want to share with the community (it seems like several of us are dealing with the challenges of providing care for aging parents these days, for instance), please post it to our Facebook page (same link as above) so I can share it on Sunday morning. We’ll go from that to the Talky Bit, which will also be recorded and podcast later in the week. You can always find the podcasts here.

We continue our efforts to raise the necessary funds to operate and welcome any and all contributions. Gifts are eligible for a donation receipt. Information about ways to donate online or to set up a regular auto withdrawal can be found here. Options include Paypal, etransfer and good old fashioned cheques. If you have any questions pertaining to this part of our life together, please don’t hesitate to ask. Transparency is a high value for us, and we welcome your inquiry.

Next Sunday (May 28th) is a Full Circle Sunday. I’ll send out more info about that in the blurb next week.

The week after that (June 4th) is an alt.Sunday. As usual, we have something completely different lined up. We’re planning to meet at the Kapabamayak Achaak Healing Forest that morning. This is how the keepers of this space describe its mission:

Kapabamayak Achaak Healing Forest honors Indigenous children lost to or affected by the residential school system, and offers a place for learning and teaching about all injustices from colonialism and racism, past and present. The sharing of our collective stories is a pathway to understanding All Our Relations.

I would encourage you to mark this date and attend if possible. It might also be an excellent occasion to invite someone who is unfamiliar with The Table. I’ll send out more info in upcoming blurbs.

In the meantime, I’ll see you on Sunday!

Tim Plett

Kapabamayak Achaak Healing Forest honours Indigenous

It feels to me as though there are some particular dates that are especially fraught. I would like to blame it all on marketing, but that’s probably an oversimplification. Maybe it’s a more complex phenomenon that occurs at the very busy and poorly signed intersection of marketing, relationships, history and wishful thinking – a place just waiting for an epic pile up to happen. Mother’s Day strikes me as just such a date. I would like to tell you that I’ve figured out exactly how to navigate that intersection and I’m eager to share the magic, but both reasonable scepticism and the witness of actual people that know me would quickly reveal that to be untrue. So, instead of that, I will have the honor of inviting a panel of people who travel in this space to share some of what it feels like to do so.

This Sunday (an in-person, Full Circle Sunday at 170 Scott Street) will bring us music, Community Time, Kids Table (something special brewing there too, but I can’t say anything more or there will be consequences), and a Talky Bit. The Talky Bit will feature “The Parent Panel – Mother’s Day Edition” – a conversation with several people in our community whose lives include parenting, and in particular an experience of being “moms”. We’ll be exploring what it’s like to navigate the dynamics of influencing / being present to the formation of the beliefs of your kids while simultaneously exploring your own.

An important acknowledgement and caveat – for many people, Mother’s Day is just plain difficult. There are lots of possible reasons for that, of course. For what it’s worth, we’ll do our best together to traverse this ground in as safe and sensitive a manner as we can. Celebration and grief use the same emotional muscles, and my hope is that we can live productively together in the tension of that, celebrating what is joyful while also naming and grieving what is not. We will livestream this conversation, and (if possible) also produce a podcast version of it for those who are unable or who choose not to attend in person.

We’ll get underway at 10:45 a.m. and wrap up around 12:00 noon, just in case you are trying to coordinate this with other plans.

I’ll see you Sunday.

In a rare quirk of the calendar, this Sunday (May 7th) will be a second consecutive alt.Sunday. Last Sunday was our first ever “Table Top Sunday” – all games, almost all the time, except we also tucked in our AGM. Not typical, granted, but the most delightful context I’ve ever encountered for a business meeting.

We’ll take the majority of our time together for what promises to be a very intriguing exploration led by Misty, in part addressing the subject line of this email. Here is Misty’s description of what she has planned:

There is a largely unsubstantiated theory that Jesus travelled to India between the time he was 13 and 33. Whatever the case, when Jesus was alive, yoga had already existed for at least 2500 years. As I have been studying yoga, I have noticed that the teachings are actually really similar to Christianity.

This week I will share some of my learnings. Then we will do a short yoga offering. Yoga is much more than the physical practice, so I’m not going to ask anyone to stand on one leg, on your head, or do any other weird movements. We will spend some time breathing together. We will spend some time in self reflection and we will do a short physical practice from our chairs. As always everything is an invitation not a requirement. You don’t need to bring anything. We won’t be getting on the floor. I hope to see you all on Sunday.

Doesn’t that sound intriguing?! I do hope you can join us in person at 170 Scott (The Rainbow Resource Centre), but for those who can’t we will be livestreaming the morning here starting at 10:45 a.m.

Next Sunday will be a Full Circle gathering, complete with Kids Table, Music, Community Time and a “normal?” Talky Bit.

Finally, I don’t want this message to become invisible because of repetition but would be remiss if I didn’t let you know that our need for donation income remains urgent. If you are able to give, now would be an excellent time to do so. As always, thanks for whatever ways you are part of making a space where we can all explore what we believe, together.

I’ll see you on Sunday.

OK…let’s get this over with. Errors first. Mea Culpa, and all that. (Did you know that in a religious context, “mea culpa” – which is basically latin for “through my fault”  and comes from a Catholic prayer of confession – may be accompanied by beating upon your breast? I didn’t either, and I’m not planning on doing so, but it felt like a curiously middle ages detail). Also, no juicy scandal…I just got a date wrong. As follows:

This Sunday (April 23rd) is a Full Circle Sunday. A normal one, with music and Community Time and Kids Table and a Talky Bit. It is NOT the alt.Sunday during which we will play games, eat snacks, and have the world’s shortest AGM. That would be next Sunday, April 30th. Sorry for any confusion caused, and my particular apologies to any game enthusiasts who must now curb their enthusiasm for an additional week. Same for any AGM enthusiasts. You know who you are.

For starters, a reminder that this is an Online Exclusive Sunday. We’ll still start at 10:45 a.m. but only online.  Our virtual location will be our Facebook page. There will also be a podcast version of this Talky Bit posted early the following week here.

In the Talky Bit this week I’ll be exploring various understandings of what it is that keeps us “looking for a sign”, and how considering that topic might also begin to equip us to parse the difference between religious beliefs and religious identity. Sounds simple, right? 

That’s it for now. I’ll see you online on Sunday.

Peace,

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The following podcast is the edited version of a conversation between Judi and Misty, two thoughtful people who are part of the community at The Table. It took place at one of our in-person Sunday morning gatherings. In the interest of having The Table be a safer place in which to share our own thoughts and experiences, this podcast does not include all of the preamble nor the lively discussion that followed. To share those experiences, you have to be in the room. That said, our hope is that this podcast will encourage you to continue to explore what you believe, and perhaps (if you are able) to drop by sometime. You can find information about our in-person gatherings on our website <thetablewinnipeg.com>.

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Hey folks – please read this blurb right to the end. All the info (even if it doesn’t fit on the screen of your phone) matters.

This week is a Full Circle Sunday. There will be music, Kids Table, and a unique Talky Bit (see below re: The Judi and Misty Show). That will all happen at 170 Scott starting at 10:45 a.m. Just a small detail FYI – there won’t be any sandwich board signs put out this week, but don’t let that throw you off. It’s an in-person Sunday. Period. We’ll also livestream the morning.

Here’s some more about the Talky Bit from Misty: