Table Fellowship at Phil’s Place (Part One)
On Martin Luther King Day 2015, CAIN’s guests and volunteers at Phil’s Place were asked to participate in “The Paper Plate Project” , sponsored by Cincinnati’s FreeStore Foodbank and the Ohio Association of Foodbanks.
We passed out paper plates and sharpies and asked people to write a “message about hunger and poverty”.
We asked, “Why do you care about ending hunger and poverty in Ohio? What brought you to your local foodbank, food pantry, soup kitchen, or shelter— either as a guest or as a volunteer? What would you say to others to encourage them to take part in the fight against hunger?”
Below: One of 35 paper plates created by a CAIN guest on Martin Luther King Day 2015.
“What brought me [to Phil’s Place] is to find a way to keep my family fed and to have another way to meet [families like mine], to help where I can and teach my grandkids how they are not alone in life.”
I have spent the last weeks asking myself why I was at Phil’s that day. What follows is the Part One (oftwo) of my answer.
I went to my first community meal almost 15 years ago to finda homeless man who'd gone missing. Charles had a major mental illness and, unless the weather was frigid, he routinely declined my invitations to stay for the night at the small town shelter where I worked. Months had passed without word and, finally, a friend called me with news that Charles was at the church, manning the front door as others came and went from the meal. I headed over, and he agreed to talk over dinner. For the next months, that was our routine: he'd make himself visible to mutual friends and I'd get the call. We'd catch up and share resources; every once in a blue moon, the weather was bad enough that he'd take me up on the shelter and he'd leave to check himself in for the night.
I was still his social worker. And, while we stood together in line week after week, brushing snow off of the other's back and sharing leftovers, our relationship was transformed.
Over free hot meals in an isolated corner of the church hall, we became friends. We spoke and laughed our relief at being together again: I was glad he was still alive, and he was glad someone worried that he was sleeping in a tent in the snowy woods. True, Charles’s cold and isolated tent was his choice among the options available to him. But, over dinner, I came to understand in a new way that the tent was not what my friend truly wanted for himself: he wanted - he needed - a home of his own because solitude helped him manage his mental illness.
Even after Charles moved on, I continued to walk down to the church hall for that meal once a week. I went for the table fellowship into which Charles had initiated me. By turning to greet me that first day as a brother faces a worried sister come looking for him and his company, by joining me at table, my beautiful, wounded neighbor taught me what true Christian table fellowship is.
At table with Charles, I re-discovered the root of my lost (Catholic) Christian faith. When I put away my day-planner and accepted hospitality from my friend and the community gathered to feed us on those cold winter nights, my faith tradition became real to me for the first time in decades.
At table with Charles, I learned again what Jesus taught us through and by his life:
“Justice and friendship belong together. For the Christian, concerns about justice can never be abstract and disembodied. Our efforts must be grounded in the wisdom that comes from living alongside those whose lives have been overlooked or undervalued by the larger society”. 1
As we two friends broke bread in the corner of a great church hall, my heart began to burn within me, and I began my journey to Phil’s Place ... and to a recognition of the hunger, real physical hunger, with which so many of my neighbors live.
1. Welcoming the Stranger by Christine Pohl. Sojourners, July-August 1999: What hospitality teaches us about justice.
vaporwave
tangentwithtanner
theartofmadeline
areudirty
pixelskylines
snowghoul