Dr. Mary Lamb Shelden

Home to the table, home to the feast,
Where the last are the first and the greatest are the least . . .
Where the rich will envy what the poor have got –
Everybody’s got enough, though we ain’t got a lot –
No one is forgotten, no one is alone,
When we’re calling all the children home.
~ John McCutcheon

There’s a rosy glow around my memory of the family dinners of my childhood. My mother cooked five nights a week – a feat hard to fathom in the current version of my world. There were four of us growing kids in those days, and though Mom was far from a typical housewife, she did this thing nightly without fail until I was around ten years old, and my brothers, who had eaten with such gusto and appreciation, went off to college. It was more hit or miss after that. By then, we girls could cook for ourselves, and well, so her cooking became a more occasional thing. But for that stretch of time until I was ten, other than fish sticks on Friday or burgers on Saturday, Mom generally made the meal happen, and marshalled us all into action: cutting up fruit or veggies, setting table, clearing table, doing dishes – there were plenty of jobs to go around. One of the remarkable things about our culture of family mealtime was that Mom made an effort to make these chores gender equitable, and Dad backed her up on this; tasks were generally assigned by age, rather than gender. And in this way, with plenty of reminding and cajoling and the occasional sound of Mom putting her foot down, dinner happened on a nightly basis.

I’m aware of some nostalgia as I recall these events. It wasn’t always delightful. My dad was an Abbott exec who commuted daily from Libertyville to North Chicago. If he left work late or traffic was bad, things would get tense at home. The meal was coordinated to coincide with his homecoming at a particular time, and if my mom was going to the trouble of cooking, you’d best be on time for the meal. This was, of course, in the days before cell phones, so if Dad didn’t walk in the door at 5:30, there was some suspense around the reason for his delay and just how long she would need to keep the meal warm and the hungry children at bay. Still, in a way, this tension around unscheduled delays is more a measure of how often things went according to plan than it is an indication of deviation from it. Then, too, my parents’ relationship was sometimes stormy, or sometimes one of us kids was in trouble. The family dinner table was also the place for family meetings, which in my family were generally about scheduling but often about some sort of family psychodrama playing itself out. I think the stress around meal planning and preparation and family scheduling and conflict have a lot to do with why I was not so adamant about family mealtime when it came time to raise my own daughter. Still, a lot went right in that nightly ritual, much of which I hold fast to and seek to reproduce in my own life.

For one thing, there was the daily check-in and relating of stories about our day. Often my dad’s report was inscrutable to me – the players in it mostly faceless in my mind’s eye, the plots driven by tensions and conflicts I couldn’t fathom. But often Dad brought home a story specifically with us kids in mind – some comedy of error about life in corporate America. My mom was a first-grade teacher when I was little, and later went back to graduate school and became a special ed teacher. Her stories were often about what she was teaching, or learning, or challenges with particular students. The characters in the daily stories of my siblings were better known to me – indeed, sometimes they were at the table with us. That celery-green laminate kitchen table seemed endlessly expandable, and extra places were often set – for neighborhood chums or friends from school, for John and sometimes Greg when they came out from the city, for this or that family friend. Sometimes their stories mingled with ours, or they asked questions to draw us out, or commented on what we’d related. I think my love of story comes in large part from this nightly ritual, as well as my sense of audience.

Then, too, every topic of the day was discussed at our family dinner table: the war in Vietnam, the draft, women’s liberation and equality, gun control, contraception and abortion, gay rights, Watergate, world hunger, world religion, and whatever election was upcoming. My parents, both seekers, shared with us the expanse of their minds, open to learning and, in turn, we each shared what was in our own growing hearts and minds. Everyone at the table of every age was invited to weigh in on whatever was the current topic, and we were invited to try on one another’s perspectives, and to try to imagine perspectives not in the room with us. Though it was never explicitly stated and may have only been half-conscious, what my parents were doing was trying to help us navigate the world around us with compassion, empathy, an open mind, and a questing spirit. Whatever food was on the table each night, there was a concomitant food for thought, as nourishing to me today as it was fifty-odd years ago.

When I consider what is meant by intergenerational religious education, this is the model uppermost in my mind. Though I know many families these days do not share a nightly meal together, as demands on our schedules have increased and our culture has forgotten to honor this nightly ritual, still I hope that the family dinner table of my childhood – or maybe one in your memory or imagination – can offer at least a metaphorical model of what is possible. As each of us considers our own ongoing spiritual development in our community of learners, I hope we see that it’s not enough for us to commune with our agemates. Though we may find our most simpatico audience there, reaching across generations can be a way to bump us out of our well-worn grooves and patterns of thought and into new perspectives and ideas. And we have both a duty and a joy to bring those behind us in the story of time into the larger conversation, to make space for them to weigh in, test their own ideas, and discover the expanses of the mind. What nourishes us is what sustains us – but just as importantly, what nourishes us is what we sustain. Come in – set your place and get your plate. Pull up a chair. Join us at the table.

© March 21, 2018