Come, One and All, to the Feast!

“Come, one and all, the greatest and the least. Come, one and all, to the feast!”

The echoes of this chorus resounded around DeBartolo 101, one of the largest lecture halls on the Notre Dame campus, every Thursday for four weeks during the summer of 2015. As part of Notre Dame Vision, the Catholic conference for high school students I worked at last summer, three musicals based on parables from the Gospels are performed. This particular song comes from a musical based on the parable of the Great Banquet, where a rich man and his wife open their home to people from the streets for a beautiful feast: a wonderful example of love and hospitality.

This past Thursday, I had the privilege of witnessing the parable of the Great Banquet in action here in London. St. Patrick’s Parish, located in a neighborhood called Soho, hosts a program called Open House every Tuesday and Thursday evening. Since 2003, St. Patrick’s has invited “one and all,” the homeless and vulnerable community from the surrounding area, into their parish hall for a banquet of warm, nutritious comfort food. Guests at Open House range from fifty to seventy people each week twice a week. They are greeted in prayer, hospitality, and love. I had the opportunity to serve food to the guests at Open House this week with eight other Notre Dame students as an optional part of our orientation activities in London.

The musical adaption of the parable of the Great Banquet from this summer brought the Biblical story to life for me. The rich man and his wife are generous, grateful people who wish to share their wealth with their friends, but the people they invite to the banquet find numerous reasons to turn down their invitation. Saddened but still excited to host the banquet and to share their gifts, the couple throws open their doors to anyone and everyone from the streets – “Come, one and all,” they sing. “The greatest and the least…come, one and all, to the feast!”

'"Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.' And the slave said, 'Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.' Then the master said to the slave, 'Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled."'

(Luke 14: 22-23)

The Open House crew at St. Patrick’s exuded this spirit of hospitality from the moment I and the other Notre Dame students showed up to offer our time. They welcomed us into their parish family, and invited us to show the guests of Open House hospitality alongside them. And in the same way that the guests who did show up to the banquet in the parable truly wanted to be there, so did the guests at Open House. They seemed grateful to have a warm place to rest in close company with others, and were excited to dine on nutritious rice and chicken and to sip on hot coffee and tea. Many saved seats for their family members and friends as they trickled in before the meal. An aura of gratitude filled the place: we all joined together for that meal as one family within this special parish.

Everyone, in both the parable and in my lived experience at St. Patrick’s Open House, had responded to a call: some to invite, some to attend, some to serve. All had humbly accepted these calls and were grateful to be there for a few hours of shared time. No matter which form of call the people who gathered in the room had responded to, whether a call to serve or an invitation to be served, we were all there to share in community, to gather around food, to treasure communal respite from the cold streets outside. I was full of gratitude both for the hospitality St. Patrick’s showed me and for the opportunity to interact with and offer care to the guests attending Open House.

Near the end of the night, we all sat down together – hosts and guests – to share prayer intentions and to sing a few hymns. One of the songs referred to wandering: we asked Mary to intercede for “us wanderers.” It occurred to me that everyone there was a wanderer in our own way. Many of the guests attending Open House are in between homes and jobs, wandering. Many of those who had come to serve were in the midst of transition, and had wandered there from all over the world: London, the States, Germany, Australia, Scotland. I am certainly wandering this semester: I am extremely fortunate to consider the UK and Europe my classroom.

In the musical portrayal of the parable of the Great Banquet, there is a moment when the rich man and his wife, their servants, and all the guests they have invited to their table from far and wide join together in song and dance. This moment was made manifest to me during the Open House as we sang the prayerful hymn about wandering. We each offered our wandering selves to God in hope and in the trust that He answers us,

“Come, one and all, the greatest and the least. Come, one and all, to the feast!”

Photo by Maggie Duncan