Let’s Eat Together

Family tables are meant to nurture, from cradle to grave, from infancy to Alzheimer’s, to be centers of feeding and being fed. Our presence is required not only in periods of eager anticipation, vigorous work, and joyful accomplishments, but also in the midst of angry quarrels and hard-won resolutions, through seasons of grief and depression, frustration and diminishment. They are meant to be places where we grow up, from milk to pablum to solid food that has to be bitten, chomped, and chewed. Daily bread, broken and shared, is a tie that binds – for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, for all seasons. Daily bread, broken and shared, makes us members of one another. 

– Marilyn McCord Adams

From Sanctuary’s earliest days, sitting around a table has been central to the shape of our lives together both physically and symbolically. In the earliest days, before Sanctuary was established, there was just a small group of people making food together and sitting down to eat. Some of these people were experiencing poverty or houselessness and others were not, but the regular practice of eating together bound them to each other in friendship and mutual care.

While we have found ways to be together and share food outdoors, we have deeply missed the experience of our indoor meals. Now, after almost three years of serving and eating outside, we are preparing to move our community dinners back inside our building for the New Year!

Everybody needs to eat, and eating together with a group of people is a way of sharing our lives, as well as sharing our basic dependence on God, the earth, and each other. Thus, while different beliefs and customs about meals abound, some form of eating together has always been a powerful experience throughout history and across cultures. The sharing of food is essential to the meeting of basic physical and social needs, and communal practices related to food and eating embody what any group thinks is important. Whom we sit around a table with is a sign of who matters to us. And, in the broader society, who has access to the most delicious and nutritious food is a sign of who matters to us collectively.

In the Bible, many stories in Jesus’ life happen around a table. Yet meals with Jesus always challenged the social norms of his day in terms of who was welcomed at the table and who was to be honoured. Those who were usually outsiders were invited in; those who were usually at the bottom in terms of social or moral standing were raised up; and those who were used to being served were asked to serve others. Eating together after the manner of Jesus should not highlight social divisions but transgress them, moving us toward new ways of being together. The God that Jesus reveals to us is not interested in the things that divide us and keep us in our own bubbles, spending time mostly with people who are just like us.

At Sanctuary, our meals have always brought together a rather unusual combination of people from different backgrounds and life experiences. Eating together draws us closer and opens up new possibilities for relationships and making memories. Janice, a good friend and long-time member of our community, describes it this way:

“Getting to know the people who are sitting around you is a really important thing for me at Sanctuary. I even recall sitting with some of the people who are no longer around and discovering what a joy it was to get to know them. But it didn’t start off that way. Ten years ago, or whenever it was I came to Sanctuary, I was apprehensive, because there were a lot of people I didn’t know, people who were different than me, and sometimes there was yelling or things got rough. But now, for a person like myself who doesn’t have family, it’s become like family to me. It’s something I treasure.”

Our family-style dinners are not prim and proper. They are often loud, messy, and sometimes involve conflict. However, they offer a glimpse of the strange new world God is calling us into, a world in which all are welcomed to the table and all are transformed by the experience.  In eating together with people we might not naturally share a table with, we can become attentive to the ways hunger separates us – some of us do not have enough while others have excess – as well as the ways hunger shows us what we have in common – our bodiliness and our brokenness, our need for connection, our vulnerability and susceptibility to grief and loss, our shared journey toward the grave. Together we depend on grace. Together we long for redemption and healing. 

Let’s eat!