Martin Sheen’s performance in The Way always gives reason for reflection. The 2011 film follows Sheen’s character, Tom, along the poetic beauty of the pilgrim trail of Camino de Santiago de Compostela through the Basque Country.
Many of the story’s key moments occur around tables – office tables, patio tables, reception tables, dining tables, coffee tables, altar tables, a mortuary table. Sitting at an outdoors table, Tom learns a key lesson on his journey. His personal pain has been manifested until then through defensiveness and frustration. After too much wine, his insulting behaviour pushes things too far.
Tom discovers the importance of more humility and openness towards the diverse (somewhat irritating) trio who have befriended him along ‘the way’. It’s a turning point of self-awareness, a revelation. He starts showing greater kindness and respect to his companions - themselves carrying their own crosses. Tom becomes the better person that he always was.
If you pay attention at any table, you can usually learn something useful. Many of my life lessons happened at mummy and daddy’s kitchen table. One, in particular, remains unforgettable.
Life wasn’t easy for my parents in the ’80s. When I was 11 or 12, daddy was unemployed (and unemployable) because, ironically, he promoted fair employment. Mummy was fighting to put food on the table for seven of us. And our family’s rock, uncle Eamon, had been killed while on firefighter duty at Belfast International Airport.
Around this time, like any self-respecting sports fanatic, I would regularly try to read my football magazine at the small table with fold-up wings around which we all squeezed to eat meals.
One particular dinner time, after mummy’s repeated requests to desist, I spoke back. Firstly, I took the Lord’s name in vain - a crime enough in its own right. Then I added: “This isn’t a table at The Ritz, you know.” (The audience choked. The tumbleweed tumbled.)
Now, daddy’s anger mainly dialled upwards to drama and/or eruption – both of which were usually loud but shortlived, so they were manageable enough.
But you knew you’d really crossed the line whenever he dialled down to being measured. He bristled. His delivery was stacatto: “That’s right son. This isn’t a table at The Ritz. This table is a much more important place than that, and so are the people around it.”
That was all. I felt very small. Sometimes in the simplest moments come the biggest lessons. I’d hurt my parents by disrespecting their dignity. In later decades, witnessing birth and death through adult eyes, I understood their injury: I had taken them for granted.
Here were two stressed, struggling, wonderful, generous, imperfect, amazing people who were giving me limitless love, care, friendship and guidance. In return they got a gratuitous lack of gratitude. Okay, I was only being a smart-ass kid, but I got my wings well clipped – and rightly so.
In that experience I began to understand the contrasting value-base between concepts of morality and materialism. And it didn’t come through grand theology or theory, nor years of intensive training or instruction.
When you look today at society’s forest fire of destruction, inequality, negligence, brutality, greed, narcissism, individualism, and nastiness, you increasingly have to wonder what lessons are being taught around the kitchen tables of those people wielding social power.
It’s wrong to generalise. But our world is burning around us – horribly, constantly, literally. And those with significant power over material matters in our society must be vigorously challenged to take a different way - one signposted by genuine humanity and humility. That’s not soft politics; it’s hard as nails.
It’s vital that we improve public policy and progressive regulations, accountability frameworks and sustainable economics. But the base motivator must be greater humanity and compassion, humility and generosity, around the cabinet tables of government, council tables, committee tables, inquiry tables, boardroom tables, war-room tables, editorial tables, negotiations tables. Otherwise we’ll just keep getting it wrong. Disastrously so.
Perhaps the key is just to start small and try harder with each other as individuals, as we stumble imperfectly along our respective ‘ways’. Maybe then we’d have a slightly better chance of collectively fixing the bigger, systemic problems of powerful abuses in life and society.
Because if we can’t properly value ourselves and each other with some dignity and compassion, how can we expect to ever transform the scary, chaotic, messed-up society that today’s world is raising around us?
In the poet Philip Larkin’s words: …we should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.
