I remember that early in our 6 month stay in South Africa as volunteer teachers in 2002, Jenny and I learned the sacredness of the table. We would often be invited into people’s homes to eat, even though we may just have eaten our own lunch or dinner shortly before arriving. And as Canadians are wont to do, we politely refused, not recognizing how offensive the polite refusal was. Our good South African neighbors gently schooled us by telling us that to decline was offensive and we need not eat a whole meal again. To sit around the table is both symbolic and practical. Being together around the table is what is most important.
The 100 Days/100 Dinners web site says, For millennia, sharing a meal has stood as one of the few things that all of us—whoever we are and wherever we come from—have in common. In the wake of this divisive election, we're hungrier than ever for spaces to break bread, be heard, and build bridges across lines of difference. Why now:
We believe that to be welcome – to feel wholly at ease in our own skin, to be fully seen and heard and witnessed – is a basic right. It is one that we cannot attempt to claim for ourselves, and deny for others. It is a right that, throughout our history, has been granted only to the few. And it is a right that has been denied to a staggering number of people.
We also believe that those decrying hate far outnumber those emboldened by it. We believe racism, sexism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, homophobia and transphobia have no place in our democracy. And we believe this is a sentiment shared by many across party lines.
We have allowed grief – one of the few things that all of us share, regardless of age, or gender, or race, or class, or political beliefs – to become a conversation-killer rather than a conversation-starter. We choose to other one another, rather than pause to appreciate the length of roads traveled and the experiences that have shaped who we are. Changing that starts with each of us.
We’re out to create self-organized structures for community-building, individual and collective healing, and shared solutions, in the form of one of humankind’s most ancient—and deceptively simple—rituals.
We invite you to pull up a chair.”
On the website you can sign up or host a dinner, wherever you are and people can get together to eat and talk and learn how to be together across the differences that are normal in human life.