Thickening Communities II
How do we ‘thicken’ our communities? Basically the same way I think we solve everything: we eat together.
We experience the deepest communion with God and with each other when we come to God’s table. We’re made to be companions, literal ‘sharers of bread,’ friends in modern parlance, as God the host places a whole meal in our hands. He places it in our hands with the hands of someone else.
You could quibble there, either because it doesn’t feel like the deepest communion, or because your church practices buffet style communion and no one handed it to you (whether at an ‘altar’, or passed, or given to you at a place you went to collect it to take back to your seat). I’m going to move past both after a brief comment because they aren’t the point of this post. On the second, I think turning the Lord’s table into a buffet is a mistake that misses an element of the symbolic world being told as physical story: most modes of ‘delivery’ of the elements involve another person’s hands touching yours and that’s part of it. They’re ‘in loco Christi’ if you like.
On the first, there’s much that could be said about why it doesn’t feel like what our theologies claim that the Lord’s Supper is. I think even a cursory glance through the two thousand years of reflection on this means we have to assume the problem lies either in us (as modern folk) or our practice rather than the claim. It’s worthy of much careful reflection rather than glib comments. As an aside though, Pastors of charismatic congregations that have gone to celebrating weekly Communion comment that people intrinsically start to feel like it is a place of communion with God (with each other depends more on our practice, I think), because habit rewrites our stories.
If we buy all that, and we want to form communities, we should probably copy what God does. Which means we make friends at tables. We welcome folk over the threshold into our world with the smells wafting from the kitchen. They learn our world, the way of being in our household, as a set of ‘table manners’ whether literally or not. Eating together shows a way of life.
This can throw up stark differences. Natalie Williams, in her book Invisible Divides, describes her confusion at first eating in middle-classed households where the food had been placed in serving dishes in the middle of the table to share. This wasn’t a practice she’d encountered before and it provoked understandable anxieties because you want to do the right thing but haven’t a clue what you’re meant to do next. I’ve experienced this in the home of friends originally from other parts of the world; I suspect they have around my table too. I’m bemused, but there to partake and learn, even if at times it’s surprising. While most obvious around what we eat (where ‘don’t worry it’s not hot’ can be dangerous words), there are a number of differences in expectations and ‘manners’ that mean everyone feels a little awkward, but we also have a window to actually get to know each other. Culture is ‘commensal,’ which means it’s found around a table.
I’m being blasé about this in the way I write but being live to these dynamics is vital if we’re to successfully have people enter our lives. We do have to think about what we serve and how we go about things. Opening a bottle of wine for Sunday lunch with friends from cultures where Christians tend not to drink alcohol can make things very frosty. Though, to be fair, I’ve made the assumption with white middle-classed folk and then found they don’t drink either. It’s moderately awkward. Some cultural awareness is required, and some awareness that different cultures may exist where you didn’t realise is important too.
Even so, it’s as we sit and eat the same food together that we are joined to one another. Social Science studies have shown that those who eat the same food as you are generally trusted more. This is, I reckon, a latent thing in our psyche because the table is the place of making friends. When we’re united in eating, we’re united.
Eating together is also often a place of joy and warmth. To put it in the kind of language I use in my academic research: commensality leads to conviviality. Or, more precisely, it can lead to conviviality. I’m sure everyone reading has had a really wonderful meal where you eat and talk and laugh and feel like the deepest friends, and I’m sure that everyone has had difficult meals where the silences are interminable and the atmosphere is heavy like the sky before thunder. It’s the companion-making effect of eating together that throws the bad meals into sharp relief. They are, for whatever reason, distorted mirrors of the Lord’s Supper, breeding disharmony rather than communion.
Meals are dangerous things. They can make enemies into brothers. They can unearth strife we were managing to ignore. That’s exactly why they’re integral for thickening our communities.
Learning the Way of the Table
Living in late modernity—described as ‘unliveable’ by some—we cannot turn back the clock to times when villages had layered webs of communal life that provided the plausibility structures of the Christian ‘way.’ But we can make progress towards ways of living that will make it easier for us to live Christian lives together. It will probably take generations. It still starts now.
What do we do? Well, I don’t have a list of stories to tell you, really. Here in Birmingham, we have cultivated a group of people who understand that if the door’s open you come in, who walk into my house and put the kettle on and offer me a cup of tea. That’s a great barometer, actually, for when they’ve stopped being hosted and have to some degree joined the household. It can take a long time, and different people take different amounts of time. That’s just part of the journey. Everything worth having takes a long time. I think we’re a long way from what Christian communal life could look like, and that’s ok. We grow things slowly. I need my mind and way of being changed through the same communal interactions, around the table, as much as everyone else.
We have some people who come around regularly, for example on a particular day of the week, and eat with us. These routines started for various reasons but they’re part of our life now; they usually need to start through need. It’s increasingly not hosting. People come in and do our washing up (someone has to) or join in cooking.
A few weeks back, Helen was away with work, and it was the usual day a friend comes over. I was making a curry, went to the cupboard to get out some rice and there was only enough for one portion. Major shopping faux pas perhaps, but these things happen and it had been a long couple of weeks. I start to wrack my brain about what I could to accompany the curry instead (curry pasta anyone?) and wonder if I should pop to the shop, when my friend immediately said, ‘oh, I’ll just whip up some flatbreads.’ He quickly whipped up a dough and fried us a flatbread each to accompany our curry and tiny portion of rice. I mention this because it’s a sign that the friend in question is part of our household: he turned an ordinary meal into a little feast—an image of the Lord’s Supper—by providing bread where there was none.
Do you to need to get a flatbread-making friend? No. But that ease he has in our home has been developed over years of friendship and meals and treating him like a productive member of the household rather than a guest. When you start to ask people to pop the kettle on or load the dishwasher they start to feel like part of your home. Slowly, of course, stories that truly change us tend to do so slowly.
So, what’s the strategy? Do you need to get twelve people around your table to eat from the pot they dubbed ‘the cauldron’ and consume more garlic bread than you can fit in the oven? No. Though it doesn’t hurt. But if you have a home you can host in and some resources to cook with, decide to feed people. Sometimes it’ll be awkward. Often, they won’t reciprocate. That’s fine, you’re not looking for a return invite to a dinner party, you’re looking to welcome them into your lives. Try inviting some of the same people over frequently. See what happens.
Then, if you open the Bible at the table, and you do that a lot, it gets electric. We’ve managed to build something, table-sized, that I think is both special and deeply ordinary. I do wonder if all the good things are table sized. God’s kingdom certainly is.
The next trick is to ‘scale’ it up to a church. Or teach others to do the same. Or both. When I’ve managed that, I’ll write about it too.
Photo by Rumman Amin on Unsplash
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