sustain:if:able kiwi

dreams around table

I’m thinking tables at the moment. It’s seems to be the most helpful metaphor for the Breathe conference I’m speaking at next week. I’m speaking to a mix of children, youth and family workers and it seems to me that all ages potentially sit at tables – children, mcdonaldised teens, young adult cafe dwellers, families.

The need for long tables as essential to a church foyer came up last week.

So a conversation this week got me spinning on another dimension of tables. A parent shared how tiredness, personality and family size made table talk over meals difficult for them. And their need for ideas and support in this very practical area of talking over food together.

It got me wondering about the place of shared family food.

Imagine a big long table in a church foyer at which families sat to eat, talk and catchup on the week. It would be a participatory table, in which everyone brought something, it might be food, it might be a joke or an item, it might be a willingness to set or clear the table. In other words, this was not a free lunch, but a family working together – not a nuclear family so beloved by Western culture – but a larger family. Surely it would be no more work than a meal at home. Meeting weekly, even fortnightly, I reckon that it would strengthen families and offer real, practical, tangible relational support, modelling inter-generational relationships and providing mentors and advocates.

Now, with Opawa’s building project still on track for a end of September completion, meaning a dishwasher, kitchen, coffee machine, all integrated into one sensible space …..