The Lost Art of the Dinner Party

A millennial laments clap back culture

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I feel like Rose DeWitt Bukater in the opening scene of Titanic when I think about the dinner parties my husband and I used to host before kids and the pandemic. “It’s been 84 years…” I think, my eyes misting with nostalgia.

Before my shoulders fully dropped, I was a gleeful and reckless dinner party host. When we were first married, we lived in a one-bedroom apartment above our landlord’s garage that would rumble and shake every time he hit the automatic door opener. Our floor was painted plywood. Our furniture came from the side of the road. The square footage? Nominal.

That didn’t stop us from stuffing people in, though. I gloried in the responsibility of curating menus and conversations and togetherness—as a young adult, I found a certain joie de vivre in taking the raw materials of food and wine and human beings and creating magic with them on random Tuesday nights. How delicious!

For our first cinco de mayo there, we invited more people than could actually fit in our living room. Our friends ate tacos on the floor, on the couch, and at the counter while I shook margaritas on repeat in the little cocktail shaker we’d gotten as a wedding gift. I still remember smiling as the ice rattled and people talked over each others’ heads and my husband fed me a heaping scoop of salsa that dripped down his hand. I went to the other room just so I could close the door and listen to the din for a moment, to take in the holy reality that almost twenty people were being unified over guacamole and pulled pork.

When we moved into our fixer-upper a few years later, a friend crafted a handmade table for us as a housewarming gift, and we packed that table with guests and lasagnas and hearty red wines for years; food was always brimming from the table and the dishes were always left in the sink and we would always move the party to the living room, where we would storytell and bicker and laugh until someone fell asleep and finally conceded it was time for bed.

After we’d pushed leftovers into the crooks of their arms and waved them off, we would fall into bed and sigh and whisper to one another, “I think that went well, don’t you?” My feet would be zinging and I would feel deliriously human and I nearly always had the thought, “If I died tonight, I think it would be okay.” For I felt like I had done what I’d been made to do: to offer myself to others and to receive from them, too. Now this—I would think—this is the stuff of life.

*

Now, that same kitchen table is covered in blips of fingerpaint and fingerprints, mostly traces left behind from this morning’s yogurt and peanut butter.

It hasn’t seen a three-course-meal or the effervescence of a chilled white for a long time now; these days it’s mostly ketchup and forkfuls of dinner slipped to the dog by our youngest, who loves to share.

I hate to admit this—I really do—but most nights my husband and I will put the kids to bed and then take our own dinner to the couch. We’ll talk for a few minutes, then one of us will suggest a show, and we’ll spend the rest of our meal in near-vegetative states. But sometimes, one of us will say, “We really ought to eat at the table tonight, don’t you think?” And so we’ll light a few candles, pull out the cloth napkins, hold hands and look at one another for a moment after we say, “Thank you, God.” And suddenly it doesn’t feel like such an imposition to sit upright while eating; rather it becomes an event, a touchpoint, a thing of common beauty tucked into a day of many musts.

When did we lose this? When did it become radical just to talk at dinner, we who once reveled in hosting weekly dinner parties? Chalk it up to this post-pandemic world, the kids, the lack of square footage, pick your poison, but we have wandered from the ritual of eating together, and I can’t help but lament what we’ve left on the table.

*

Eating together takes courage, because at the table there’s nowhere to hide.

It is physical common ground that forces all who gather there to reckon with whatever stands between them; it is difficult to hate someone when you’re both eating a slice of warm apple pie, for example. The food and the wine, these are just props that move the act along, this theater of communion that makes its actors look in each other’s eyes and see the shared humanity there.

In Ancient Near East cultures, the communal meal was the red wax that sealed an oath or treaty agreement. Two opposing groups would hash out a deal, then would ratify it with a ceremony that often included animal sacrifice, eating, and drinking together. The table signified a promise: to uphold peace where there had been tumult. It was common to even read a list of curses to hold anyone accountable who broke the promise.¹

God participated in this same type of ritual when he confirmed his covenant with Moses and the people of Israel. In their meeting on Mt. Sinai, he gave Moses the conditions that Israel would have to follow in order to be his,² and when Moses told these to the people, they agreed, saying in one voice, “All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do.”³ Afterward, Moses built an altar and the people brought sacrifices to the Lord, and then Moses sprinkled them in the blood of those offerings to acknowledge the covenant that had been made between these two parties. Finally—and most astonishingly—Moses and the other leaders ate and drank with God.⁴

If anyone had irreconcilable differences, it would be this holy God and these sin-scarred people, yet here they were, commemorating a peace treaty with a mountaintop meal together. It was God’s way of saying, “I will be yours, and you will be mine. Despite our differences, I want to remain with you. I choose you.”

And as I write these words, I realize I am starved to hear them myself, not only from God, but also from the people around me. For covenant is an archaic word in our day, and it has become an almost unfamiliar concept. Just as nations disregard sanctions, friends walk away from years of friendship, saying things like, “You don’t think like I do, and I can’t stand it anymore.” Differing beliefs have become grounds for dismissal: from friendships, from jobs, from families, and even from the Church. In fact, current propaganda would have us believe it is treasonous to engage with people from other sides, and our digital era makes it entirely possible to camp out here, in these self-made chambers resonating with the echoes of our own “tribes.”

But the table, the table. I think now of the Upper Room, where Jesus—King of the dinner party—gathered his disciples for the Last Supper and taught them about covenant again by holding out bread and wine and saying, in essence, “Take this. Consume this. Consume me.”⁵ These people couldn’t be spotless, couldn’t even manage, a few hours later, to stay awake with Jesus in his darkest hours. Heck, even Judas was allowed to come to dinner, to eat bread dipped from Jesus’ bowl.

In this overwhelmingly intimate scene before Jesus’ betrayal and arrest, we see him using the basic materials of bread and wine to demonstrate his holy commitment to maintaining togetherness with his people, no matter what—again defying those differences deemed otherwise insurmountable by the world’s standards. “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer,”⁶ he says, welcoming them to recline alongside him in this covenant circle of quiet before the storm.

*

In Life of the Beloved, Henri Nouwen writes:

Isn’t a meal together the most beautiful expression of our desire to be given to each other in our brokenness? The table, the food, the drinks, the words, the stories: are they not the most intimate ways in which we not only express the desire to give our lives to each other, but also to do this in actuality? I very much like the expression “breaking bread together,” because there the breaking and the giving are so clearly one. When we eat together we are vulnerable to one another. Around the table we can’t wear weapons of any sort. Eating from the same bread and drinking from the same cup call us to live in unity and peace.⁷

What if we began to treat the dinner party as our modern-day ritual for peace-making covenants? In this sense, the table becomes the meeting spot to hash out our differences, and all excuses for not gathering can be set aside as the sacrifice. The breaking of bread can serve as the symbol of our own brokenness, and we will eat it together just as Nouwen suggests, laying down these weapons of clap back culture and instead committing ourselves for communion, no matter what.

Of course, it’s a dangerous proposition, as I’ve already mentioned. There is a level of emotional and intellectual accountability involved when you’re sitting around the table with someone who thinks differently than you. In the digital space, we can make impassioned statements with little to no evidence to support our claims—and if someone disagrees, we can simply mute them, block them, render them obsolete in our minds.

But at a dinner party, someone can say, “Can you tell me why you think that?” What’s more, they may even tell us how they feel, and provide a compelling reason to boot. And there’s always the risk that they’ll be funny and charming, and then we’ll be in real trouble; before the night is through, we might have to face the prospect of a more open mind—or worse, a new friend.

*

When I first set out to write this piece, I wanted to stir up a sense of enchantment around the dinner party.

I wanted to talk about the whimsy of choosing vinyl records for the summer soirée, or finding cloth napkins at the local antique shop. I wanted to write to you about picnic baskets and clinking champagne glasses and how to plan a menu that fits the personality of each guest. I thought I was nostalgic for that young, spunky girl, filling her home to the rafters with laughter and chatter and mounds of guacamole.

But that wasn’t the thing, not really. I have found that what I’m really longing for is a deep sense of belonging, to sit at a table where belovedness is not dependent on aligned beliefs but rather on a shared humanity. To offer and benefit from the type of covenantal relationships that say, much like Jesus modeled, “I give myself to you. I want to be together with you, no matter what. Let’s eat.”

“Don’t you think that our desire to eat together is an expression of our even deeper desire to be food for one another?”⁸ Nouwen asks. I do think that. I think that we’re starving for one another, and we can find our way back by first coming back to the table, to physical common ground. With the raw materials of food and drink and laughter and touch, I believe it’s possible to write treaties of peace and ratify such oaths of belonging.

I’m preaching to myself just as much as I am to you, of course. I love the theory of dinner parties, but the execution feels so much more daunting. I really do love eating takeout on the couch, and my routines for comfort get more defined by the day. But when I think of what Mr. Beaver told Susan about Aslan, saying, “Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good,”⁹ I can’t help but admit that that’s often the way of the Kingdom: hardly safe, but good for us nonetheless.

So yes—stepping toward covenant community will probably feel uncomfortable, but I can almost still taste the memory of laying in bed after those dinner parties of old, and I hope it drums up some old nostalgia inside of you too, so much so that you’ll long to be satiated by the bread of belovedness. I hope you hunger for it so much that it drives you to pick up your phone and, rather than doom scroll, go to your contacts and dial up some friends and gather the courage to say:

Hey—what are you doing this weekend? Wanna come over for dinner?

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1. Melissa Ramos, “The Making of a Covenant: The Book of Deuteronomy,” The Torah, accessed June 25, 2025, https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-making-of-a-covenant-the-book-of-deuteronomy#:~:text=Ritual%20Accompanied%20Ancient%20Near%20Eastern,anyone%20who%20violated%20their%20oath.

2. Exodus 19-23

3. Exodus 24:3

4. Exodus 24:11

5. Luke 22:14-20, paraphrase mine

6. Luke 22:15

7. Henri Nouwen, “Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World,” (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1992), 88.

8. Henri Nouwen, “Life of the Beloved,” 89.

9. C.S. Lewis, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” (New York: Macmillan, 1950).