Bearing the Beams of Love

dinner and kinship at Trinity Community Commons

We’re been back in Nashville for a few weeks while repairs from Hurricane Helene happen at our condo complex in St. Pete. So, during the moments between my day job, I wrote a quick story for the Nashville Scene — partly to catch up on what I’ve missed around here in the realm of food justice. (Thank you to Kim Baldwin for encouraging me to do this. Check out Kim’s excellent newsletter, The Blonde Mule.)

As part of the reporting, I went to the weekly dinner at Trinity Community Commons and got to know Angie and Jimmy. They met at Room In The Inn, a homeless shelter and resource center. It’s where Jimmy won a beanie hat for Angie during a game of bingo. It’s also where they got married in February. They mentioned that they didn’t have any pictures from their wedding day. “I just want something I can hold,” Angie said. So, Scene photographer Eric England offered to take their photo, which we delivered to them the next week.

The photo wasn’t part of the story, and it doesn’t feel like a photo I should share here — it’s just for the two of them. But it wouldn’t have happened without the consistency of the Trinity meal. The dinner is high quality, fresh and free, and it happens with regularity. Guests, then, have the opportunity to get to know one another and learn each other's needs and gifts and the ways resources can be shared. And it’s a beautiful blurring of lines between volunteers and recipients. Everyone is welcome. Everyone eats, everyone serves. Everyone gives, everyone receives.

I loved meeting, for example, a woman named Peggy who brings homemade pies every week.

The main course of the meal at Trinity is provided by The Nashville Food Project, a place I had the gift of working for a few years. The meals from the Food Project come together because of donations from farmers, grocery stores, restaurants, conferences, etc.

These ladies—Julia and Bianca—run the kitchens at the Food Project and decide the highest best use of the thousands of pounds of ingredients they receive. It’s a huge and hard job, and they work wonders with creativity and care.

Then another team of employees/volunteers scoops up the food and delivers it to various organizations across the city including Trinity Community Commons.

It’s wild to look at this plate and think about all the work and generosity involved—all the hands coming together to make dinner, a meal that’s meant to provide nourishment but also as catalyst for people to be together, talk and share, and hopefully break down barriers that can cause loneliness and feelings of isolation.

On the night of this meal, Angie sliced and served the donated loaves of sourdough while Jimmy adamantly encouraged cups of hot chocolate. Then over dinner, he was forthcoming in showing the tattoos he got on his forearm of the names of his four children. He also shared how tattoos happen in prison—an ingenious (and painful sounding!) process involving a whittled paperclip, a ballpoint pin and a dismantled remote controlled toy car. It felt like a privilege to learn from him.

Someone asked me in the process of writing the Scene story how we can measure the success of a meal like the one at Trinity. Someone always wants to know the numbers, the specific return on investment, and I get that. But I also appreciate Gregory Boyle’s take on this issue in his book Tattoos on the Heart. He’s founder of Homeboy Industries, a gang rehabilitation program, and he’s just not down with the typical measurement of success in his work when he’s investing in “compassion, kinship redemption, mercy and our common call to delight in one another.”

He cites the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, who says compassion’s truest measure lies not in our service of those on the margins, but in “our willingness to see ourselves in kinship.” And how do we even measure kinship? It’s not just serving, Boyle says, but standing with people until the circle wides and the margins disappear.

I also appreciate how Boyle says we have a common human hospitality and that we’re all “just trying to learn how to bear the beams of love.” Those beams can, indeed, be blinding when we spend so much time being hard on ourselves.

I’ve been thinking about all the ways the beams manifest—in the making and sharing of pie, in a plate of pasta, in the sharing of gifts or the storytelling-listening of experience.

As dinner ended the other night, I heard Angie look at Jimmy and ask him tenderly, “Did you get full?” And there it was. Another beam of love. It’s happening all around us all the time, I suppose, and it’s been the greatest gift of this season to remember and witness its exchange.

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Recipe: The pasta at Trinity Community Commons reminded me of this dish, which I haven’t made in years. I used to like taking it to various brunch situations. It’s sort of like a breakfast pasta with bits of bacon and swirls of sweet caramelized onion, spinach and fried egg. I searched for the recipe online and realized it’s 20 years old. Amazing how a taste can stay lodged in a memory after such a long time.