Open, self-aware conversation

Part 4: Sharing table fellowship

May 16, 2025

In “There is no nation without genuine conversation” (3/27/2025) I raised the following concern:

What seems to be missing is any coherent shared context for conversation, any safe space to disagree while still being one nation. Between our obsession with identity politics and our reliance on social media instead of person-to-person engagement in debate, fewer and fewer Americans are dealing with conflicts in productive ways. We fight using disembodied words and ideas rather than meeting to seek common ground and compromise.

Every human culture can slide into such a polarized impasse. It happens in cycles, very slowly over decades. The mass appeal and politico-religious power of notions of “right belief and behavior” shifts and shifts.

Those like myself who became young adults during the 1960s and 70s saw such violent polarization over civil rights for minority races, women, and queer people and over the Vietnam War. For us, the 21^st century is a horrifying, far more destructive replay of those ideological battles.

But recall from “America’s culture of disgust: Heartsickness and healing” (3/11/2025):

Heartsickness and the spiritual strength to heal it are at the center of the historical Jesus’ life. In contrast with the dominant culture of Roman-occupied Palestine, Jesus refuses to be constrained by abstract notions of ritual purity.
His soul-deep impulse is always to reach out to and touch those who are scorned as unclean. In fact, sharing table fellowship with everyone from religious leaders to outcasts is one of his main ways of inviting people into healthy relationships with each other.
In [Matthew 9:10-13], some Pharisees directly confront Jesus about eating with “tax collectors and sinners.” Their culture of disgust teaches them that he himself would be polluted by such people, regardless of how righteous he might be.
But Jesus’ response is to speak about healing and his readiness to be in the midst of any who need it. “Go then and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice….’ [verse 13, quoting Hosea 6:6].

My husband and I visited Worcester, MA, in October 2019, when we were pondering whether to move here from Jacksonville, FL. Our bed and breakfast host, a native in his 60s or thereabouts, was also the entertaining breakfast chef. We enjoyed several friendly mornings with him, until on October 17^th he asked us what we thought of “Nervous Nancy's unhinged meltdown” (referring to Nancy Pelosi’s White House confrontation with Donald Trump the previous day). We both became quiet, and our host dropped the subject. After an awkward minute or so we found a safer topic and resumed our conversation.

That, Friends, is the difference between sharing table fellowship after the manner of Jesus and going face to face over hostile differences. The three of us solved nothing about our political differences. Didn’t even pursue the issue. But we resumed the genuine friendliness of an informal breakfast with strangers.

There’s well-documented research that recognizes “Purple” neighborhoods, towns, and states as more culturally and politically healthy than steadfastly “Red” or “Blue” ones. What the research shows is that when supposedly polarized people live side-by-side day-by-day despite their differences, they learn about each other as whole people. They don’t wait until there is agreement over belief. They understand—even if not with full awareness—that being genuine human beings with each other is more healing and blessed than determining “who is right and who is wrong.”

What seems to be missing is…any safe space to disagree while still being one nation.

To me this is the bottom line. If we do not learn how to recover and nurture this safe space, none of our social action or advocacy will be enough. The greatest obstacle to any way forward is the toxic polarization of current American culture.

But not just the polarization between supposed “enemy” parts of the populace. Also between people who could be allies, were we not constantly bickering. Were we not constantly accusing each other of failing to use the “right ideologies or tactics” or to be assertive and confrontive enough.

Change has to start with doing the personal work that Lama Owens describes. We need to look into ourselves honestly yet nonjudgmentally. What are our identity locations? The ones we claim and wear as badges in public. But more so the ones that develop as part of our growing up with our elders and peers, our subcultures and identity groups. We each need to do this self-disclosure to self.

But having that inner map is just a start. We need to claim and befriend all of those identity locations, wheher we feel proud of them or pained or shamed. Affirming our inner topography can take a great burden off of us. This doesn’t mean we need to disclose everything to others. It does mean that we develop the heart space to hold all of our identities, happy or unhappy. It’s a lifelong journey, yet each expansion opens more doors.

The other side of this process is to become aware of how different identity locations come into play with each other in different social situations. This is the work that Lama Owen calls intersectionality.

Observing the interactions among these aspects of self, he says, reveals great complexity. “And these identities are always shifting. Practice grants us the space to allow this shifting to happen and to call that shifting our home.”

Instead of over-identifying with one or several identity politics “badges,” we might let all of that shifting take place in the moment. And—most important—we might begin to allow other people to have such complexity within themselves, to welcome both what we like and what we don’t like, to quietly allow them to be as changeable and mixed up as ourselves.

Then we can talk. Or at least change the subject when our being humans together is more valuable to us than being right.

Finally, as Devaka Premawardhana’s research into genuine tribalism teaches us,

Life is predicated not on identity but on mobility, not on our differences but on the common ground we share when we move among each other.

The migratory Makhuwa people of northern Mozambique with whom Premawardhana lived and wandered are a “tribe.” They belong to a common, constantly evolving community centered around that very sense of belonging with each other [ see Note]. They share a language and a culture, but Premawardhana tells us that because

the elders knew me to be in their village for the long haul, and to speak their language and embrace their way of life, I was made to feel welcome. They felt comfortable placing expectations on me, including the expectation that I would turn to them in my own times of need.
This speaks to the one thing above all that I experienced in this relatively remote African village: the quality of hospitality, an eagerness to embrace, and in some way absorb, people like me whose origins obviously lie elsewhere.

Hospitality, table fellowship, even with the “other.”

For the Makhuwa, distinctions and divisions have long featured in everyday life—between the village and the bush, the living and the dead, one ethnicity and another. But as long as these borders have existed, so too have border crossings. Lines drawn to divide can also be used to connect. The Makhuwa show us there is no reason to assume the existence of “tribes” entails insularity within and animosity beyond.

Border crossings.

When my husband and I and our week-long host discovered that we were on “opposite ends” of America’s political spectrum, we set that difference aside for the sake of the hospitality we were enjoying together. In some other safe context we might have sat down and debated. But not over the breakfast table.

There we were doing what Jesus did when he shared table fellowship with the so-called “unclean” of his time and place (Matthew 9:10-13). Matthew does not tell us what he and his fellows talked about. For all we know, they talked about their families or about how to find food and clothing and shelter in a world that treated them as outcasts.

“Foreigners from a PRT and Afghans share an Eid meal,” by Ashley N. Avecilla

Friends, I am not trivializing the harsh, sometimes life-threatening differences of belief and behavior that are dividing us on every “side.” My focus is on one truth: we will never get past such conflict, never, if we do not relearn how to be neighbors. If we can not live in the same space and be fed by the same earth.

Nothing else really matters. Arguments, strategies, immigration control agents, neighborhood watches. Nothing else, if we do not restore the real meaning of neighbor.

Recall the Gospel of Luke’s parable about the man who fell among thieves (Luke 10:25-37, David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation):

A lawyer is trying to trap Jesus in heresy.

²⁹ [The lawyer], wishing to vindicate himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

Jesus tells the parable of the priest and the Levite who pass by the beaten man in the ditch. A Samaritan—another person considered “unclean” because he is not an orthodox Jew—stops to help the man.

Then Jesus asks the lawyer,

³⁶Who of these three does it seem to you became a neighbor to the man falling among bandits?" ³⁷‘And [the lawyer] said, "The one treating him with mercy." And Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise.”

Jesus doesn’t answer “who is my neighbor?” Instead, through sacred story he demonstrates who is neighborly.

And the lawyer gets his point.

Walking the empty path

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