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The Sacraments of Hospitality ˜ 215
As a child, I was known as the community troublemaker and, depending on
whom you ask, I still am.
Every afternoon I would come home from school, peel off my polyester
Catholic school uniform, and jump into the rattiest pair of shorts I could find.
After running around the house, terrorizing the thirty other folks who lived
there, we would all gather for dinner. The tradition was, and still is, that before
we sat down to eat there was a time to reflect on the day, to get volunteers to do
dishes, to make announcements, and to lift up prayer concerns. For years, the
five minutes that this ritual took seemed like hours—my tummy was so empty,
and in my four-year-old head I saw no reason for this foolishness, going on and
on like that.
But after I made it through what seemed like an hourlong supper circle, we
would sit down and eat—my favorite part of the day. It was not until the last
years of my life at home that I began to realize what a profound effect that eating
and sharing time at table had had on me. For it was around those tables that
I gathered with many people whom I loved and with whom I shared my life.
The table was where I had heard many stories—stories of life and death, abuse,
pain and liberative healing, alcoholism, and drug abuse, and the stories of sobriety
and faith, struggle and strength. Around those tables I realized how different
I was from the people I went to school with, and that I was in school
made me different from so many of the people with whom I ate.
Coming to understand what was happening every day at dinner was challenging.
No longer was dinner just filling my empty belly with food, but it became
a much more political act. I realized that there is soulful transformation
when bread is broken in the company of strangers. This transformation has
come with the realization that it is the sharing of experience that leads to deeper
understanding.
In her song “Overlap,” Ani DiFranco, a contemporary folksinger, writes: “I
know there is strength in the differences between us, I know there is comfort
where we overlap.” It is truly in the strength created by distances and the comfort
within overlapping places that transformation occurs; with the embrace of
difference, learning and teaching occurs. That we may be students and teachers
at the same time is a life-giving event.
At my dinner table, I began to understand what Christine Pohl was talking
about when she said, “Shared meals are central to sustaining the life of a community
and to expressing welcome to strangers.” At the dinner table at the Open
Door, I am the stranger. As a full-time student, I am living a life of educated
privilege and at the same time eating with people broken by the domination system
that formal and especially private education perpetuates. Thus, as I welcome
strangers to the table, I am, in turn, welcomed by the stranger.
At these tables we can begin to understand the dialectical nature of being