It’s weird to stand in the middle. We want you to be on one side or the other, and it was the same way through this. You’re either pro-police and you want nothing to change, or you’re with the protestors and you want everything to change. And if you’re in the middle, trying to call everybody to love, they don’t know where to put you.
I had been with the police. I had been with the protestors. I knew that the root of this was relationship-based, and I knew that in order to overcome that, we would just have to have time together. In the scriptures, eating a meal with somebody is the second-most intimate relationship you can have with them.
The table is always set up so there’s not a head. You noticed it’s square. We have one table because we have one family and one community. I think that’s what’s important. In that space, every week, we try to bring the future we want into today. To sit with another person’s reality is going to change you, and to sit with literally hundreds of people’s realities around a table and to make space for people to talk, changes you.