10 minute read

"Home Cooked Fridays"

Next Article
Introduction

Introduction

by Mary Ann Corbett

As the day was drawing to a close, the Twelve approached [Jesus] and said, “Dismiss the crowd so that they can go to the surrounding villages and farms and find lodging and provisions; for we are in a deserted place here.” He said to them, “Give them some food yourselves.” They replied, “Five loaves and two fish are all we have, unless we ourselves go and buy food for all these people.” Now the men there numbered about five thousand. Then he said to his disciples, “Have them sit down in groups of about fifty.” They did so and made them all sit down. Then taking the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, he said the blessing over them, broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd. They all ate and were satisfied. And when the leftover fragments were picked up, they filled twelve wicker baskets.

– Luke 9:12-17

For a few years, All Saints’ Episcopal Church had a ministry called Home Cooked Fridays (hereinafter, “HCF”) that offered a free multi-course dinner every Friday afternoon. Just like in a nice restaurant, food and drinks were brought to the guests, empty plates were bussed, and tables had cloth napkins and tablecloths and bouquets of fresh flowers. Volunteers ranging from college students to working adults to retired persons prepared the food and served the guests.

We typically served between ninety and 110 folks. The guests were mostly men, mostly hard-core homeless, mostly regulars. Some would come in alone, eat alone, and leave alone. Many others came in looking for their buddies, with whom they enjoyed loud discussions about sports or politics. Some would look for a favorite volunteer to whom they could pour out the troubles of their week. In the summer, sweaty, exhausted guests would collapse into their chairs while they reveled in the air conditioning and guzzled down large glasses of iced tea. Some guests wolfed down their meals voraciously, but most took their time and visibly relaxed as the meal progressed. By the end, many guests leaned back in their chairs and held out their coffee mugs for refills. Then they would reluctantly trickle out to face the harsh world after the brief respite.

HCF was not heavy on religion. There was no preaching. Grace was offered at the beginning of the meal, often led by a guest, but the background music during dinner was secular—often tunes requested by guests. Nonetheless, in the center of the dining room was a small table set for Jesus—not in case He came, but because we knew He would be there, so long as there was a guest sitting in the dining room and until the last volunteers closed and locked the kitchen door on their way out. Indeed, the whole meal, from prep to serving to eating to cleaning up, felt like an earthly version of the Heavenly Banquet.

Then, in March 2020, Covid shut us down abruptly, leaving a void.

In the months since, I have reflected on what Home Cooked Fridays revealed about love-based community. I’m struck by the realization that the HCF community always danced along a continuum with consistency at one end and flexibility at the other. For our guests, they could rely on a good meal in pleasant surroundings every Friday. The core of regular volunteers was reassuring to our guests and allowed relationships to develop. Consistency also made it possible to plan and execute the logistics of feeding a large crowd and to maintain the contacts in the larger community that provided donations of food and drink. There were also some non-negotiables: no fighting, no drugs, no violating health codes.

On the other hand, we aimed to please our guests and make them feel welcome. We accommodated special dietary requests. Tables for one were available for the unsociable. Guests with dogs could be served at picnic tables outside, along with their pets. And while HCF followed a set routine, once we opened, folks could come and go as they pleased, until the kitchen was shut down and cleaned up. It wasn’t only our guests who needed flexibility. The core of regular volunteers was supplemented by college students earning service hours. During exams and school breaks, the ranks of the student volunteers thinned out, and some of us would then lean on family members to help. Nonetheless, there always seemed to be enough people in the kitchen and out on the floor to make sure every guest was tended to.

HCF also helped me see the importance of participation and ownership. (As Jesus said, “Give them some food yourselves.”) Whenever a volunteer would ask the head of the ministry how something should be handled, she would respond, “What do YOU think we should do?” Whenever guests offered to scrape off plates or stuck around to help us put the tables away, the help was gratefully accepted. One guest frequently took some of the flowers with her to share with friends, her way of extending the blessing of HCF.

But my biggest takeaway from HCF is this: the needs of everyone must be served in some way if the community is to be sustainable. Everyone— guests and volunteers—must get a need met, or they won’t keep coming back. The needs of the HCF guests were obvious: to be fed, to feel welcomed and wanted, to get out of the heat or cold or rain, to connect with friends, to relax. But the ministry couldn’t have functioned for long if it wasn’t also meeting the needs of the volunteers. Besides service hours, the students enjoyed a break from their studies, encouragement from the older volunteers, and the chance to be useful to others. For the older volunteers, it was a chance to be around young people, the pleasure of serving a good meal to appreciative guests, the friendships that developed. For some, there was the need to serve and to experience the Body of Christ in a very concrete way. I often teasingly warned volunteers on their first visit to HCF to watch out: HCF was highly addictive—and it was! In the words of the Gospel passage, “They all ate and were satisfied.” Not only the guests, but the volunteers left satisfied.

Which leads me to the issues of bandwidth, scarcity, and abundance in community that are raised in Luke’s story. The story starts with a statement of need; the disciples tell Jesus to break up the community so that people can scour the neighboring area for food and drink. Jesus doesn’t want the community to break up, so he challenges the disciples to feed them themselves. They respond with a claim of limited bandwidth: “Five loaves and two fish are all we have, unless we ourselves go out and buy for them,” the impossibility of the latter proposition being obvious since the men alone number five thousand. What if Jesus had said, “You’re right. We can’t feed all these people. Let’s send them off to fend for themselves and hope they come back tomorrow”? The crowd would have left dissatisfied with the lack of hospitality. Some might have found food in the surrounding towns. Others would have just gone home. How many would have come back to hear what else Jesus had to say?

But Jesus has faith in the power of the community to organize itself so people’s needs can be met. He tells the disciples to organize the crowd of over five thousand into groups of fifty. They do, which strikes me as a bit of a miracle itself in an age before megaphones, microphones, or social media. The people do their part by cooperating with the disciples and participating in the organizational structure. Then Jesus relies on the Spirit to multiply the loaves and fish so that not only is there enough food for everyone present, but there is food leftover. In other words, an apparent lack of bandwidth to meet the needs of the people in the community is overcome by a combination of structure, participation, and grace. And the community holds together.

By way of contrast, I have been involved for the past five years in a local group trying to create an intentional community of people with and without intellectual disabilities. The group has met with very limited success. In our achievement-oriented society, it is not obvious to most people that they might have needs that could be met by folks who are intellectually disabled. But what has really surprised me is that we have also struggled to attract people with intellectual disabilities and their families. The needs our community might meet are many: friendship with nonpaid and non-family individuals, fellowship with people in similar situations, development of personal interests, integration into the larger community, a team to tackle issues like employment or housing. And yet, some individuals and families feel they lack the bandwidth to engage. Others want to jump right to creating housing for their loved ones, thereby skipping participation in the community structures like regular meetings, social interactions, and spiritual practices that create community and allow room for grace to move. As the leader of this group for two years, I have felt very frustrated by our inability to engage members.

Obviously, I still haven’t figured out the recipe for the secret sauce of successful community. I think the basic ingredients are satisfaction, structures, participation, and room for grace. But the amounts, timing, and how to blend them all to create a community still mystify me. Structure seems the least elusive of the four, but thinking of the HCF dance up and down the continuum of consistency and flexibility, even that is something of an art. I am reminded of how my mother and grandmother cooked, and how I cook now after more than forty years in the kitchen: no recipes, just knowledge of ingredients and an intuitive sense of amounts, timing, and how things are supposed to look. Maybe the Spirit is the intuitive sense in the community secret sauce.

Mary Ann Corbett is a retired public school teacher. She is a happy member of All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, where she currently serves on the Racial Reconciliation Action Group and the Carolyn T. Smith Loaves and Fishes Ministry.

This article is from: