Community and etymology

So first off, here is a good song for Advent, when we look towards a promise and a world that seems too good to ever come true.

I didn’t make it to the midweek Advent service this week, because Sleepy (Grouchy) Children. But I did have a wonderful conversation with Pastor Elaina over coffee about building community, which is a way we can see, dimly and imperfectly, a bit of that promised world. Specifically, we talked about eating together.

Remember the story “Stone Soup”? Where everyone was afraid they didn’t have enough, and so they hid and hoarded it, until finally they were persuaded to share, and suddenly there was abundance. In the church newsletter, Pastor Elaina wrote about this contrast between our fear of scarcity and the abundance of God, in which 2+2 doesn’t equal 4, but 100. And when we each bring our little bit and pool them all together, suddenly there’s more than enough. Like loaves and fishes.

In many cultures, the role of the host of a feast is deeply significant--remember the panic at the wedding of Cana, when they ran out of wine? It’s a matter of honor to be able to provide for your guests, and the guests in turn are expected render honor to the host (hence Sir Gawain’s infamous quandary in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). Our modern English words “lady” and “lord” are derived from Old English “hlaf”--loaf. Lord comes from “hlāford,” which in turn came “hlāf-weard”--bread-keeper. Lady comes from “hlæfdīge”--bread-kneader. Basically, the most prominent members of the community were those who provided food for the others and hosted the feasts.

So what happens when we all feed each other, at a potluck or pitch-in? When we each bring a little something, and lay everything out on long tables--casseroles and chicken wings and salads and the bag of chips we grabbed on the way because we didn’t have the energy to cook--the feast multiplies, and so does the honor we owe to each other.

Later in the day after that coffee conversation, I came across this post--it’s mostly about current political events, but I was struck by the repeated phrase “the kindness of cooks”--this conviction that there is something inherently generous in the act of cooking for someone else, and that this is reflected in the character of those who make a habit of it, that they are the kind of people who won’t support hatred or discrimination. Obviously this isn’t necessarily true, but it tells us something about the power of feeding our neighbors with the best we can provide for them.

There’s a reason that Jesus told so many parables about parties and feasts to describe the Kingdom--wedding feasts, celebrations of finding lost sheep and lost sons. Eating together, feeding each other, sounds like a good place to start when it comes to (re)building communities in a time when we’re fractured and broken.