00:00:10 Cindy Holmes

Welcome. I’m Cindy Holmes. And this is Around the Table, a podcast where we bring forward conversations about shared meals, dialogue, spirituality, and social justice. Around the Table is a research project and a podcast. In this podcast series, we share our conversations with community leaders from across Turtle Island who have organized intentional dinner dialogue to support community well-being and advance social justice, anti-racism, and decolonization. Today’s episode is being recorded on the un-ceded ancestral and traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples.

On today’s episode of Around the Table, I’m in conversation with Lennon Flowers, executive director of the Dinner Party Labs, and Reverend Jennifer Bailey, executive director of the Faith Matters Network, where we talk about two innovative dinner dialogue initiatives that have deeply inspired me, The Dinner Party and The People’s Supper.

This is part one of a two-part episode and next time in Part 2 we’ll be hearing more about The People’s Supper from K Scarry, the director of partnerships for The Dinner Party Labs.

00:01:29 Cindy Holmes

So to just give you a bit of background, that dinner party labs takes the experiences and subjects that are hardest to talk about and uses them as the starting point to help people make connections, build trust and form relationships that matter.

00:01:44 Cindy Holmes

Its flagship program, The Dinner Party, is a platform where 20, 30 and early 40 somethings who’ve experienced a major loss can connect to one another.

00:01:55 Cindy Holmes

They train a network of peer hosts, connecting them to 12 to 15 folks nearby who share a similar age and loss experience.

00:02:05 Cindy Holmes

The People’s Supper began as a collaborative project led by Lennon and Jennifer in the wake of the 2016 US election to cultivate connection and community among people of different identities and perspectives, through shared meals and dialogue.

00:02:22 Cindy Holmes

The People’s Supper creates tools, resources, and storytelling content that folks can apply and adapt to their own communities and offers trainins,g one-on-one, coaching and partnerships.

00:02:36 Cindy Holmes

Lennon Flowers is co-founder and executive director of The Dinner Party Labs. She is an Ashoka Fellow whose work has been featured on On Being with Krista Tippett, NPR’s Morning Edition, CNN, CBS This Morning, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many other publications.

00:02:56 Cindy Holmes

Reverend Jennifer Bailey is an ordained minister, public theologian, and a leader in the Multi Faith Movement for Justice. She’s the founder and executive director of the Faith Matters Network and co-founder of the People Supper. She’s also the author of the book To my Beloveds: Letters on Faith, Race, Loss and Radical Hope by Chalice Press.

00:03:17 Cindy Holmes

Reverend Bailey is ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and you can follow her on Instagram at revjenbailey.

00:03:25 Cindy Holmes

Welcome. So happy to have you both here with us. And I wonder if you could start today by introducing yourselves, maybe telling us a little bit about yourselves and where you’re joining from.

00:03:38 Lennon Flowers

Hi, thank you so much for having us. My name is Lennon. I’m calling in from Green Colorado, population 400 and many thousands of elk in rural Colorado. I’m the co-founder and executive director of The Dinner Party Labs, alongside my very dear friend Jen, one of the co-founders of The People’s Supper.

00:03:59 Lennon Flowers

So it’s great to be here with you today.

00:04:01 Jennifer Bailey

Thank you so much for having us. My name is Jen Bailey. I’m calling from Nashville, TN, where I am the founder and Executive Director of Faith Matters Network and co-founder of the People’s Supper with my good friend Lennon who I get to talk to you today, which is always a gift and joy.

00:04:17 Cindy Holmes

Well, it’s so great to have you both here. The People’s Supper has been such a source of inspiration for us in developing this project Around the Table and I’m wondering, I know we’re going to talk about all the different pieces of how The People’s Supper started and how it’s evolved and where it’s going.

00:04:36 Cindy Holmes

But what central part of what we’re interested in is how this act of sharing food Around the Table and gathering Around the Table can contribute to a sense of belonging for people so curious to know if you could each maybe share about a time when you were Around the Table having food with others and felt a sense of belonging.

00:04:59 Lennon Flowers

This might be a little bit of a cheat but I was actually was able to participate in a people’s supper last Friday, which was really wonderful the first time that I’ve been at a people’s supper. Gosh, where I’ve participated at a people’s supper, not facilitated a people’s supper in.

00:05:17 Cindy Holmes

Right.

00:05:18 Lennon Flowers

Probably years, which is really wonderful. It’s a beautiful intergenerational gathering across state lines. Talk about the future of food, and it was just a really deep and tender space with folks very vulnerable and sharing about their own stories are on faith journeys.

00:05:40 Lennon Flowers

Where some of the tender points have been in their encounters with religion growing up in their adolescence, but also really sweet visions of hope for the future and what faith and their communities might be able to offer, and to that great unknown that is the future. And so I left that space feeling like wow, oh, this thing like works. I don’t want to say that it I’ve never believed that it worked, but I think I was just really deeply moved and touched to be able to participate. And really we couldn’t get myself to the core values that have undergone that work for a long time.

00:06:20 Jennifer Bailey

I love that. It’s actually been a while since I sat down at a people’s supper. So I’m a little jealous, but yeah. You know, it’s interesting. When the experience that comes to mind for me and actually isn’t at all related to work is my Thanksgiving table. So for the last 13 years, I have lived in a six bedroom group house. In Los Angeles that did with a bunch of other people who started as 20 somethings and then became 30 somethings and some of us 40 somethings and you know and I remember some of our early Thanksgivings. My mom died was in college and in the aftermath of her death, it wasn’t, I think you know, as is surprising for a lot of people who haven’t experienced, you know, major loss. You don’t just lose a person. You lose everything that attended that person, right. For me. It was the loss of home as a physical place. It was the loss of of there’s no longer any causal force in gathering over holidays. And so, you know, I realized quite quickly that it was going to have something there was a year, I think, in which my brother, there were a couple of years in which we just like, skipped holidays all together. There was the year in which, like my brother and I went out to the sushi in San Francisco on Christmas Eve and kind of like called it after quite quickly. But I realized that the re-creation of meaning around that day and the creation of family and togetherness, you know, was going to be on me. And so there was a moment and I think it was 2014 or 2015, several years after having moved into that house. But one of my roommates was in a bad bike accident and couldn’t fly home as a result.

And so all of us stayed. And what was striking, as opposed to, like, the way in which I had approached Thanksgiving, because it had always been the source of dread when all of my friends and you know, like my chosen family, went to go back to their actual families, you know, and I cobbled together as many seats as I could. We probably had, you know, a table of 13. And I think because there was a preciousness to both the fear that we had carried, you know, around his well-being in those moments and the relief you know on the other side.

That it was a real treasure and from that point forward, you know, gathering some grown from 13 to at last count 26. And we had even during the pandemic, you know like gathered in a backyard multiple tables, you know, at a distance just to be able to have some form of contact. And that’s a really organic conversation, you know and I am like a mediocre cook are my very best days and so never are my contributions to a Thanksgiving table. The things that people are talking about afterwards, that it, you know, ends up being a 12 hour day of cooking in the kitchen of people coming in and out in a real a sense of of ever expanding joy for a lot of people, especially early on who didn’t have other tables that they could go to and that sense that we could create a sense of belonging for ourselves, that we each belonged for was really palpable.

00:09:12 Cindy Holmes

It’s really great to hear both of you talk about these different experiences, and it seems significant to me this theme around creating the space and Jen was talking about vulnerability and also hope and then also what you’re describing this piece about chosen families and the responsibility we carry to try and create spaces where you can come together and gather and feel a sense of belonging.

The people’s supper has been exploring this in so many different ways and I wonder if you can tell us a bit about that origin story of how you started The People’s Supper. And yeah, when was that? Why did it start?

00:09:53 Jennifer Bailey

If memory serves me correctly, I think that The People’s Supper started on I-40 West. I was driving between Nashville to Little Rock AR, where I did a big project and the day after the 2016 presidential election. And I remember calling Lennon and being like what are we gonna do? And from there, along with our friend Emily May sort of thinking about what it could look like to hold space for people using some of the brilliance and genius that The Dinner Party had really innovated in the years prior to start to have a different sort of conversation.

And what’s interesting is I feel like that was a thread Lennon from conversations that had even pre election thinking about the vitriol of that election cycle and some of the experiences and triggering around harassment that people were feeling and wanting to work together on that. I think we just didn’t realize what we were in for.

00:10:54 Lennon Flowers

Thank God, you know, I think literally do you do you think that are worth doing with any idea of how hard it’s going to be? Because otherwise you can back up before you begin. And I’m so grateful that we didn’t know. And I’m so grateful for the chutzpah in that moment. I think so many of us were feeling it and just like we have to do something and not dissimilar from our responses to grief right, is that action and a to-do list can feel like both are coping strategy right and the means of metabolizing you know what a grief experience I mean for us in the immediate aftermath of that election it was. And so this kind of question anchoring question was, hey, it feels like there’s a lot that needs healing right now. And what might the role of the table be in helping to supply some of those spaces and not just among people who were sharing very visceral sense of fear and of grief in that moment, but also an awareness that it wasn’t working to argue our way out of this right and that part of what was illuminating with that election was just fractures that had long been present, right, and the presence of a set of filter bubbles that all of us had found ourselves in that made, you know, as a reader of the New York Times, that particular outcome that day, you know, a real shock and awareness that we needed to be in a different kind of level of conversation and relationship with one another, and that this wasn’t just an act of advocacy or you know what happened in the ballot box, right that there was, you know, an issue that was really cultural.

And what does it look like, you know to humanize one another.

00:12:32 Lennon Flowers

And we drew upon the technology that we had available at the time, which is the technology that’s oldest in all the books and that of gathering around a table and a whole lot of Google spreadsheets to make it happen.

00:12:46 Cindy Holmes

So you mentioned the piece about The Dinner Party that was already happening at the time and that organization that you have been leading is responding to people’s experiences of grief as you’re describing and that The People’s Supper was coming out of that experience of grief. Do you want to tell us a little bit about The Dinner Party and then how that coalition built with a few others for The People’s Supper. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the Dinner Party??

00:13:10 Lennon Flowers

Yeah, sure. And I apologize to every listener for the volume of like, dinner this and people that and supper here and table. Wait, I know it gets convoluted quite quickly. The dinner party began actually similarly around the table.

In 2010, when a friend of mine who had lost her father invited me over for dinner, along with a handful of other folks who’d also lost parents. And there was no ambition in mind to ever do it. More than that, one time, you know? And I think we went in with kind of all of the reticence that one can imagine of, like, oh, God, I could really be watching Netflix or truly anything else. Do I want to do this. And instead, you know, what emerged? And it was, you know, speaking of some of the most transformative conversations in my life.

The conversation that took us until 2:00 in the morning and opened doors on reflections and experiences and things that I had never said out loud and the ability to witness that in another person and out of that grew a great group of friends. And so The Dinner Party, you know, as an organization kind of grew for a long time via word of mouth as we realized, slowly but surely, that we were a whole lot less alone than we thought we were and that there were others who were similarly in many different but you know, I think that there’s a lot of mythical belief sets around the notion of grief as anything that you know follows a linear set of stages that folks who had experienced lost decades before and years, months, weeks before right were in very different relationships to it. But I found their lives transformed in an ever-evolving way and wanted a space in which to talk about it. And so that’s really the work of the Dinner Party today, is connecting people with shared experiences. Now we do it both over tables and virtually, and the key there is not just in a onetime format that building relationships over time, you know, with people who share common affinities, whether that’s a shared loss experience, other identities, racial identities, LGBTQ.

Other pieces of themselves that intersect with their grief and loss experience.

And when I open up about the things that we otherwise don’t get talked about, but also want a space in which to celebrate the good days right and to hold one another through the bad and this recognition that it’s the subject matter that we are so good at avoiding, that is actually some of our most important subject matter to talk about. And so I think we had that you know understanding at the outset of the People’s Supper and thought quite naively frankly, but like ohh cool, this is a great experience you know to do grief cool. We’ll just do the same thing and turns out you know it’s a very different approach and set of questions, especially when you’re attempting to build bridges across difference, people who rightly sources of deep mistrust with one another have, the kinds of acuity in terms of the pain point that is collective in nature, right. And oftentimes the product of decades or centuries in our history, requires a different kind of unpacking and scaffolding, and if in The Dinner Party part of our goal is to find you your grief bestie, we recognize that like that might not be the goal of every people’s supper, right,and yet the ability to find spaces in which we can get curious about our own stories.

Curious about one another’s reset. Some of our projections and assumptions both about self and the folks that were sitting down with and use that to build a little bit more trust in order to have other conversations that enable us to work and live differently has been really the kind of investigatory territory that we’ve set with within the people’s supper sense. But yeah, fundamentally the basics of how do we talk about the things that we don’t talk about and why does that matter?

You know, fundamentally to everything else that we care about part of that shared history.

00:16:41 Cindy Holmes

Jen, do you want to say anything about the history of The People’s Supper as it grew out of this work with The Dinner Party and about the focus of The People’s Supper, I think you’ve talked a bit about that coming out of that election and you had a particular vision at that point that was going to be a particular number of dinners over a particular amount of time. And then it’s evolved.

Why people come and what the focus is may be similar and also shifting over that time.

Jennifer Bailey

Yeah, we were supposed to be done in April of 2017, so people’s supper started as a project originally called 100 days, 100 dinners, which was really intended to span the first 100 days President Trump’s administration, because there’s a lot of talk in American political culture about the 1st 100 days setting the sort of tone and agenda for one presidential administration.

And then it kept going.

Uh, partially because I think there was a hunger and demand for the conversations that I think partially because folks were deeply interested in continuing to explore what has become a much more common conversation around what it means to bridge and heal divides within our communities and my observation, as I’ve seen The People’s Supper evolve from within that first year, doing a thousand suppers individually in people’s homes, right, to a real methodology and way of being how people are incorporating into the fabric of how they do community work, whether that be within city government agencies or over several years ago there was a church in Brooklyn that used The People’s Supper as a way of gathering around Eucharist as a post communion moment for connection and so it’s been a real gift to see how folks have responded to the methodology and adapted it for their sort of own needs and

context in a way that maybe even transcends our original intents, which I think is exactly what any project with worth its muster can do is that it continues to evolve even beyond you, which has been the true gift to me. There’s nothing that makes me happier than traveling and people saying that they love The People’s Supper, and they’ve it done in their communities.

I’m like, that’s great. I don’t know that I knew you were doing it in your community but I’m glad you found us, and I’m glad that serving a meaningful function for you and your community because I think that’s the greatest gift, that it is, something that people feel like they can pick up and use on their own in a lot of cases. So it’s accessible, which feels really great.

00:19:22 Cindy Holmes

Yeah, I think that this piece about what it means to bridge and heal. And as you said, that hunger and demand for that is what I see in communities that I’m part of and also the deep mistrust and harm that has happened. And that continues to happen. And so how do we do this healing work? How do we do this bridging work is kind of at the heart of what we’re really trying to understand in this project and why we’re so curious to learn from folks who’ve been doing it for so long, specifically with the support of the table and the sharing of the meal. I wonder, around this act of sharing the meal together, how does that actually shape and influence the dialogue? Do you have a sense of that? What is it about the table and the sharing of the meal that you think that makes a difference.

Jennifer Bailey

I think it’s is such a universal human experience, no matter who you are or where you’re from.

Everyone has had the experience of breaking bread or sharing a meal with someone else, whether that be someone within their family and it friends, chosen family, members of a broader community. And so I think the starting place feels a little bit more accessible than, you know, a formal debate on policy issue X.

And even then, getting people to come to the table, they have to say, is by invitation and not demand.

So it takes a certain amount of courage, particularly if you’re hosting these conversations with folks you’ve never met before, right to show up and get past literally the threshold of the door and have the courage to sit down and have a meal with someone. And to think about it out loud right now and it also takes courage to sit down with people you know really well.

To have conversations about topics and issues that are not things we’re naturally inclined to talk about because they don’t make for, quote unquote polite conversation.

00:21:19 Lennon Flowers

Yeah, I think the table to me is like actually most impactful in some ways. Maybe I’ll walk back this statement in a moment, but I’m going with it right now. It’s impactful before you ever get to it because it changes your willingness to show up and what you’re showing up to. And I think about, we did a series of potlucks.

00:21:39 Lennon Flowers

And create the community I call home now and this was 2019 before the election.

00:21:45 Lennon Flowers

And a lot of times this is it. It’s a town of 400 people, right? Most people know most people and can’t help but bump into folks. Town’s only grocery store for an hour and a half, right?

But as a consequence. A lot of our conversations were happening in Facebook groups, right and online spaces that weren’t actually meant to be like particular that weren’t adept.

00:22:08 Lennon Flowers

At holding nuance right and inviting in the real stories of who we are and what we’re carrying in a moment, as opposed to all of the things that we tend to project to one another in those spaces or the vitriolic back and forth around the debates in a particular headline that was meant to be clickbaity to begin with, right and to engender that kind of response and so in this community, the table mattered because there was a feeling right. Winters are tough here, right? There’s a feeling of solidarity. And it was becoming harder and harder to access.

00:22:41 Lennon Flowers

And yet, the idea of a potluck is something that, like everybody here, knows exactly what that is and has been to many in a Sunday supper. And so as a result of that new invitation, ultimately in the course of that year, we got more than 20% of the town to come out to one or more right and it felt good to have these kind of collective rituals and moments. You know, when so many of our institutions build or we’re leaving them behind or couldn’t keep up to this moment, right. The act of sharing the ritual and having those invitations feels so important. As Jen said, nobody here was interested in talking about the politics in that moment, and everything happening in DC felt very, very far away, the idea of sitting down and sharing their stories with one another around a table and oh, by the way, let me bring a casserole because I’ve got a great recipe. You know, like there was something that was much more available and accessible and kind of reduced some of the fears that Jen named because it is brave work and to sit down and share a story, right. It is brave work to express real vulnerability rather than all of the packaged stories we tell ourselves or don’t tell it at all, right? It’s brave work to listen to somebody else’s vulnerability and to recognize that our stories might be different, right and the reasons for those differences. And so let’s save the bravery for the thing that really matters here, which is how we are with one another. Let’s let like the easy thing of the act of sitting down and picking up a fork and raising a water glass or a wine glass, be the thing that helps our bodies come into a position of ease. And I think we saw that even during the pandemic where The Dinner Party grieving community, grieving the losses of individuals in their lives, they didn’t require a table.

And we were surprised by how well it worked in virtual spaces and that’s because you had a story and an experience that was just bleeding out of you and you were so desperate for connection in that moment by any means necessary. And then you realize that actually, like the technologist or us, right the table. You know, I’ve never made a sourdough starter. And again, the food eating on the Internet is kind of gross. But like, there was a real hunger to share stories.

00:24:48 Lennon Flowers

Right. And we could create those containers. It was different in some of the communities that we’re experiencing like real rupture.

00:24:54 Lennon Flowers

That people didn’t feel like getting on another zoom call at the end of their day to talk about hard things with people that they have, like good reason to be mistrustful of. And so I think that there’s a role that the table can play in softening and actually beginning to examine who are the folks that you haven’t ever sat down with, right, whose voices aren’t heard.

00:25:15 Lennon Flowers

Who isn’t getting an invitation?

00:25:16 Lennon Flowers

In here, and what stories aren’t shared right and that there’s so much pre work that goes into that kind of examination. What is like the story beneath the story here? What’s driving the kind of, like, particular the overall kind of what can feel at times like kind of abstracted sense of division and things aren’t right here, right.

00:25:36 Lennon Flowers

The ability to like really get beneath that and then use the table as a place to get under our own stories and that of one another, I think is fruitful.

00:25:44 Cindy Holmes

It makes me think a lot about Nina Fernando from Shoulder to Shoulder has said, and I think Shoulder to Shoulder as an organization in gathering people for the interfaith. Iftars, they say the act of gathering for the meal in and of itself isn’t going to end anti Muslim racism. But if we can’t sit down at the table with our neighbors, we don’t know our neighbors and we can’t have a conversation. We aren’t going to be able to address anti Muslim racism. We have to be able to sit down. We need to be able to know our neighbors and gather. So I think that’s a really significant piece about the coming together, sharing food.

00:26:22 Cindy Holmes

One of the things that you’re talking about around bravery makes me think about how the risks are not equally shared, and I know both of you have written about this, have spoken about this, which I find really heartening because often when I talk about the work that we’re doing and the work of these dinner dialogue projects, sometimes folks will say, you know, well, brave for whom, and safe for whom. And of course, we know that spaces are not safe for everyone and the risks are not equally shared, so I wonder whether you could just share a little bit about, you know, the role of power inequities. How does that influence the dialogue at the table? And then we can talk about some of the things because I know you have a lot of thought about the methodologies and the ways in which we do this that make it possible for people to gather, but what have you noticed around sort of power inequities in people coming together for People’s Supper? How does that shape the dialogue or influence the space?

00:27:23 Lennon Flowers

Yeah. I mean, I think it’s singularly, one of the biggest factors right, and it’s a pretty dull statement to say that who we’re sitting down with changes the nature of the conversations that we can have, right. So we spend a lot of time and I think Jen has been one of my biggest teachers in the fact that it’s unethical to ask some people to bridge, right?

00:27:42 Lennon Flowers

And folks aren’t always ready. There are many tables that should not have every single person present at them, and so we think that that’s the tension point that we hold in this work of what does it look like to really center that fact that not every table is meant for every person and simultaneously, how do we widen the circles of belonging rate and how where possible, at narrow limits that do we create a table for everyone right? Even if that isn’t always going to be sitting down at the same space. I think part of even as vulnerability is in vogue.

00:28:12 Lennon Flowers

Right. The reality is that we are asking different things of different people in expressions of vulnerability.

00:28:18 Lennon Flowers

And there is a cost and a consequence to that vulnerability. I think we saw, you know, in the early days of the People’s Supper, I know a lot of tokenizing behavior from many different folks around the table and say particularly among white women. And I am one that if folks were interested in like let sit down with a token Trump supporter and prove that I’m morally superior to this individual. Let me sit down, you know, with a person of color who’s experienced racism and hear a story of oppression and move my eyebrows in a compassionate direction and take a selfie and be done right. And the reality is like, you don’t owe your story to anybody.

00:28:54 Lennon Flowers

How do you earn that trust, you know, I think that there’s the other layer of what’s oftentimes confused for safe spaces, as that language has become ubiquitous, is comfortable spaces, and there are plenty of people in the world for whom, no space is a safe one, right and guaranteed as protected from harm, right? And plenty of spaces in which like, you shouldn’t be comfortable.

00:29:16 Lennon Flowers

As you understand, a role either directly or indirectly, in complicity with harm.

00:29:21 Lennon Flowers

Right. And what does it look like?

00:29:22 Lennon Flowers

To build a wider coalition of people who are working.

00:29:25 Lennon Flowers

Towards equity so I think power is everywhere in this and part of our work is around. How do you train hosts to be able to notice those power dynamics within a circle to notice the difference between somebody who’s being silent? Right? Because pausing for a moment to consider what I want to say.

Right and there’s plenty of stories that we can share at any given moment, and some take us to deeper truths than others.

00:29:48 Lennon Flowers

Right. And there’s a difference between that and being silenced, right, because you’re either being squeezed out of the conversation or because your story and experience is actively being rejected or at risk by others around the table. And so I think that awareness of the ways in which like power differentials within the table inform conversations.

00:30:09 Lennon Flowers

And the good news is that we can interrupt that and we can name, you know, in a moment.

00:30:12 Lennon Flowers

Like, hey, just my apology right there. Something’s just not sitting with me, I’m feeling a little like tension in my shoulders. Let me work that out or like I think what you just said is different from what you intended, but it’s important that you understand the ways in which I heard that right or I’m noticing around a table and suggest building our musculature for those uncomfortable conversations without pretending falsely that this is easy for anybody, and particularly easy for people who’ve experienced real violence at the hands of others who directly or indirectly share the identities of people who’ve perpetuated harm.

00:30:47 Cindy Holmes

Thank you. Jen, do you want to talk a bit about that or add anything?

00:30:52 Jennnifer Bailey

I think the triggers that all of us have had experiences where we have been in power position and many of us have experiences where we’ve been in a powerless or felt powerless, right structurally or interpersonally in relationships. And so being mindful of the ways in which those experiences also come to the table because all of you always comes to the table feels essential to me, and particularly as we have people suppers around very sensitive topics, from abortion to immigration to and issues dealing with race, right, and issues that are very tender and very intimately linked to people’s identities, recognizing that there are times when the invitation to bridge is that side of an invitation and there are times that to expect people to come to a table with those who have harmed them either directly or indirectly, depending on where they’re at in your personal healing journey. This is not a good thing to do if we are grounding all of this work in a deep effect of care.

00:32:10 Cindy Holmes

Yeah, I think that just appreciating all of what you’ve both spoken about and also that there’s different kinds of tables and different kinds of gatherings and different kinds of conversations that we have and some of them are more intimate and more vulnerable than others. And as you said, these power relations are with us always. So I appreciate what you’re talking about.

00:32:31 Cindy Holmes

About how do we equip communities? How do we support hosts? How do we all build our skills, our ways of being in relation with one another, to have these conversations that are sometimes hard?

00:32:45 Cindy Holmes

This theme around a shared meal being a sacred space and the site of healing seems to be repeated when we look at a lot of different dinner dialogue initiatives. So obviously this is something you’ve written about Jen and I know The People’s Supper as talked about even though you’re not a faith-based organization.

00:33:04 Cindy Holmes

This piece about the meal being a sacred space and that the opportunity to come together around the table for dialogue can be a site of healing, and I’m curious to know and even for folks who where they may not have particular faith tradition or a sense of religious affiliation, curious how you might speak about spirituality in your work of organizing dinner dialogues. Is there a connection between the sharing of a meal and spirituality? Or is the connection between spirituality and social justice.

00:33:40 Jennifer Bailey

Ohh Cindy, you’re asking me about my life’s work.

00:33:43 Cindy Holmes

I know, and I’m so grateful for this.

00:33:46 Jennifer Bailey

Yeah, yeah. It’s just thinking about your use of the time sacred and what’s when I think about the term sacred, what I’m thinking about is like a space that is set apart, right designated as distinct as in the language of my own faith tradition as holy, right. It’s a space that is different from another space. It is a space that in it’s the presence of the divine. However, one might formulate it in order for there to be a space of transformation, and I can think of no better description than that. Describe the dinner table during these conversations. It’s an invitation to set aside and set apart sacred time, then right time.

And to spend other time to be in deep relationship with those who are gathered around the table and the depth of that relationship may be the product of years of relationship. Or it could be the beauty of encountering a stranger. And so I think the table is where we practice what it is to be human with one another and in my own Christian tradition, the way that I come to know God better as a reflection of God as a reflection of the Imago Dei or the image of God is through the encounter with others, right, because there’s an implicit assumption that there is a God presence in each of us who that in our encounter with one another, we actually get to know the divine better and we’re seeing things we may not like, right? But there’s something there that speaks to that sense of a greater whether you call that greater being love, what do you call that, greater being community, whether you call that greater being bad as I do, right and so I think to take any movement for social change has always had infused within it a sense of spirituality, perhaps not religion, but a sense of there being a higher power that we are aspiring towards or a vision that we are aspiring towards. That is beyond that which we can currently imagine, right is beyond that which is the product of our current circumstances and in that way you know I define faith as trust in the absence of certainty, right in the midst of changing conditions in the midst of the uncertain, to lean into faith, to lean into trust, because there’s nothing greater than vulnerability as an act of trust, right? It is a risk that we are inhabiting for the sake of doing something bigger than yourselves, whether that be at the table or within organizing or substantive changes to our lives and policies and communities, all of that, to me, feels really deeply wound up in what it means to be human, what it means to be a person of faith that what it means to be in tune with the quote unquote spirit, and I imagine that there are many different ways that across traditions and cultures people have described that experience and so thank you for the question. I had a dear seminary professor who passed away, Doctor Dale Andrews used to say I have more questions than answers, more problems and solutions of these gifts. Actually they give like that is the posture they think about Doctor Andrews is like what a gift to be able to gather around tables to ask questions and knowing that we might not come to a concrete answer, that there’s something the practice of attempting to get towards those answers together and collectively that we learn and grow and see a vision that might be a little bigger than anything we can individually  through the collective.

00:37:45 Cindy Holmes

I’m just really appreciating you, speaking about all of this, because my sense is that there’s something else happening beyond just an intellectual understanding of the dialogue or just relationship building that there’s something at the level of spirit and the sacred happening, even if we don’t necessarily define ourselves by a particular religious tradition or faith, or however we might define what spirit might mean, and my sense is that this is happening in these spaces, but finding a way to talk about it isn’t always easy for me, and I turn to folks like yourself who are thinking about and experiencing this and talking about it and leading people in these conversations around how we think about the spirit and sacred space and what it means to create that kind of space. So thank you.

00:38:41 Cindy Holmes

Lennon, did you want to add anything?

00:38:41 Lennon Flowers

Yes, I think you’re exactly right. And it’s interesting. The entry point in a lot of this work is as an organization that was originally kind of characterized as being, you know like comprised mostly of millennials and Gen. Z and folks who are part of the biggest growing cohort of spiritual but not religious.

00:39:01 Lennon Flowers

And the kind of like unchurched unfaith. And it’s been interesting, I think as we dug into our community, it’s actually not true.

00:39:08 Lennon Flowers

That many of us hold many identities, right? And neither are we ever one thing.

00:39:13 Lennon Flowers

But regardless of whether or not your relationship to the language of spirituality and you know, I think that there is something that is innately human that is hungry for these transcendent moments of connection with one another, right where you suddenly see in someone and are able to marvel at the roads walked, right, you see in yourself something like you maybe kind of knew was there, but had never actually put language to. Right, or had the courage to say out loud and you discovering the process.

00:39:41 Lennon Flowers

You didn’t break while doing it, and so I think there’s something to me. The dinner table is one of the last sacred spaces and obviously I’m a person who is certainly violated exactly what I’m about to offer up, you know, of, of checking my phone while in a restaurant. But there are certain spaces in which, like, I know better, right. And it’s always been interesting to me that we actually don’t have as big of a problem as I imagined we might of asking people to turn off your cell phones before a dinner conversation, and I think again, when you’re here around the sharing of something that comes from a place of usch deep vulnerability and truth telling and examination.

It’s cool that we actually don’t have to, like, give that guidance most of the time and that we are as one of the last standing spaces where we are apt to treat it as a mindfulness tool and to be really present with one another. And I fear that that capacity is dwindling.

00:40:32 Lennon Flowers

Even as I say those words out loud, but I think there’s also another piece to it, but even if it’s not transcendent, right, I think that like there can be that disappointment of, like, oh, that felt awkward. You know, where, like, there was that beat in a conversation and we didn’t know how to fill it or, you know, filled it by saying something stupid because that’s what humans typically do in response to silence. Right. But there’s actually something about the imperfection that, too, is sacred, right? And like developing our musculature to be in a different kind of relationship with one another and to be willing to be witness to the messiest parts of one another in the act, even if it doesn’t always be, you know, like what we’re craving. And I think designing spaces and containers for is to occasionally hit those moments of real transcendence, you know, and to generate a relationship that you’ll be able to carry out of this room.

00:41:20 Lennon Flowers

But even in moments when that doesn’t happen, I still think that there’s a sacredness to staying in the mess with each other.

00:41:25 Cindy Holmes

Yeah, I really appreciate that. I think that’s a theme that both of you just spoke with Jen speaking about that as well with those questions that are unanswered or sitting with those questions sitting with the messiness or the discomfort, that’s an important part of this and did not think that that’s somehow the absence of sacredness, but that maybe that we have be able to learn to be in that. We’re coming to the end of  our time together but are there particular lessons learned from your work that you think will be helpful for others who want to do similar work or wanna start a dinner dialogue or anything else that you would like to add that we haven’t talked about today.

00:42:05 Jennifer Bailey

Yeah. I think one of my parting lessons is work with the people you love, oh my gosh, I could go on for days about how amazing Lennon Flowers is and how grateful and transformed my life has been since the day we met. Rolling our eyes during a meditation retreat that our friend invited us too. And so, you know, you never know the winding path that your life will take. Gosh, it certainly becomes easier when you get to journey with people who you love and you trust and you’ve been with you and seeing you at your worst and at your best. And it makes it so, so, so worth it. So build with people. Not only that. You like that you love.

00:42:53 Lennon Flowers

Yet did it at big time lesson learned and offering is don’t be satisfied by one time, right? And I think that like we also is the proliferation and I am a big believer in that proliferation of dinner gatherings and like the changing relationship, too. Oh, indeed. You know, like we do actually have a social technology that’s familiar to all, wherever you come from. And we should put it to better use. Right. And that there are conversations to be had with one another that have nothing to do with your, you know, like belief or opinion on a thing they’re about.

00:43:25 Lennon Flowers

The stories and experiences you’ve lived, right, and it’s those conversations that don’t oftentimes come up around a water cooler.

So let’s create a container in which they might right and in which we can come to see ourselves differently. But I also think that there’s a real risk in that that is satisfied with the number of people who sat down and the accumulation of transcendent moments within a single night, and recognizing that if we’re actually here to do this work to build relationships to be a little like change the world we live in. Like, let’s actually use this to build those relationships over time and what might we be able to do with trust?

00:44:01 Lennon Flowers

And that we can’t do now? And how might in the face of another rupture, because rupture is a thing that’s going to happen? Because that’s part of the human condition. How might we feel a little more confident in our capacity to move through it as a consequence of having done it already and bringing to bear a different set of tools in our tool boxes. So often you know we think of I think a lot of the kind of act of gathering around a table with strangers and I’m going to sit down and hear a different set of stories and ones that I’m familiar with, and there’s a value to that. But how many people in your own life you know? Can you imagine? There are probably stories you haven’t heard either. Right. And multitudes that have gone unseen by you and others. And so just an invitation to really bring this into our daily lives and to not be satisfied with one time, but to keep going.

00:44:45 Cindy Holmes

Thank you so much. We are so grateful to have you sharing this rich knowledge and experience with us and I know others listening will be inspired and lifted up to take out this work or to continue it if they are already doing it and we will link on our website to resources.

00:45:04 Cindy Holmes

At The Dinner Party and The People’s Supper so that folks are looking for. You’ve got so many great tools and guidebooks, including how to do this during times of physical distancing during COVID and virtual gatherings, and the kinds of questions and some of the.suggestions for how to create safe enough spaces for people to gather and have these conversations. Thank you so much for taking the time. We’re really grateful and inspired by both of you.

00:45:39 Cindy Holmes

That’s it for this week and I look forward to seeing you next time if you’re enjoying this, you can subscribe at Spotify, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts and follow us at our website aroundthe tabledialogues.ca. Around the Table is produced by Cindy Holmes, Fionna Chong, and Leslie Williams.

On the unceded ancestral and traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples. Support for Around the Table comes from the University of Victoria, Vancouver Community College and the Sharing Farms Society.

Podcast editing is provided by New Leonard Media and music is by Oleksii Kaplunskyi.