Used Dishes: A Thanksgiving Story
When he left his native North Carolina to pastor a church in Vermont, he learned a new way in which grace travels back and forth.
Here in the industrial kitchen, the food is piling up.
The deep commercial fridge is stuffed with fowl, and the countertops are close to bending under the weight of a mountain’s worth of rustic potatoes. Several bodies weave around me and one another. Between the clangs of pots and pans, shouts of Behind! and Corner! and Make it again! waft up into the ethereal plane and mix with the steam coming off the transport trays.
There’s no executive chef here, no chef de cuisine. Yet, there is a leader, a first among equals. I know this because he barks a little louder and demands a little more. He glances to ensure the vegetables are cut into a one-inch dice and double-checks the labor of those on peeling duty. He picks and tosses misshapen yeast rolls that aren’t up to snuff. While his hand might seem heavy, it carries the weight it does because he cares. He wants to serve people good food. He also understands that the kitchen is a wilderness: both angels and demons live there. With so much heat and popping oil, you need a level of order. Someone has to make sure that the cave you’re mining for culinary gold doesn’t collapse into chaos. You need a fellow like him in the back of the house.
Out in the Fellowship Hall, tablecloths and seasonal napkins fit the festive theme. Centerpieces and cutlery are positioned with a precision that even the most anal of engineers would sign off on. A place for everything and everything in its place. Front-of-house volunteers buzz, performing last-minute duties. Looking up, their welcomes and hellos are as inviting as hot apple pies. They embody hospitality.
Off to the side, I keep my head down and continue prepping the butternut squash. This is my second year helping with this meal, my second year as the minister of this church in Connecticut, and my second pastorate in New England after serving a congregation in Vermont for three years. As a Baptist who is Southern, but not a Southern Baptist, I still struggle to find my place in the culture of New England Yankeeland.
This means I do a fair amount of watching and listening, and right now, my greenhorn presence is soaking in what has occurred for decades—a faith community coming together, playing host, and giving thanks before breaking bread. To these people, this meal is just as sacred as the one in the sanctuary where communion is served. In old tongues, this sort of banquet was called “dinner on the grounds”—an event possessing a robust ritualistic power, signaling the appreciation of warmer days ahead, or in this case, a harvest festival calling for a time of rest as the days grow shorter and the nights stretch out like the agitated back of a stray tomcat.
Growing up, I never left without a host extending the offer, “Honey, now make sure you make yourself a plate to take home.” Usually they followed this with, “And make one for your Mama (or Daddy), too.”
People arrive early. They tend to do this when delicious food awaits. Familiar faces alongside the ones returning from a time before my time, coming home to be with family. Flocking like disciples to the shrine of moist dressing and tangy cranberry sauce, they embrace one another as they line up with stomachs expecting to taste nostalgia. For the main course, they will come forward to be served. Desserts, however, require a more hands-on approach. People like the freedom to slice their own petite sliver or overly large chunk of pumpkin pie. A table full of sweets is where they embrace decadence and tell moderation to get behind them, like Satan.
The servers fall into a formation so tight it’s like Nick Saban himself made the call, and the room goes quiet. A hand motions for me to come forward so I can bless a spread that will surely put most in this room into a coma. I haven’t even thanked the kitchen crew yet, but heads are already bowing. Taking in one last look before I close my eyes, I realize this is how my new congregation feeds one another.
As a minister and amateur gourmand, how people choose to feed you is their way of telling you how to feed them in return. Every place is different, but if you stick around long enough, folks will show you how they eat. They have easily seen markers, glowing soft like a front porch light, calling you to come forward so you can find out who you're dealing with.
In my South, one of those markers was the “to-go plate.”
It didn’t matter if it was a family get-together or a friend’s cookout, growing up I never left without a host extending the offer, “Honey, now make sure you make yourself a plate to take home.” Usually they followed this with, “And make one for your Mama (or Daddy), too.” This parting salutation I counted upon, I knew was coming, as much as I did the “Get home safe,” which finally granted me permission to leave. They made sure I didn’t leave hungry by making sure I didn’t exit without an extra hunk of country ham, half a dozen or more deviled eggs, and a sinful amount of chocolate trifle stuffed onto a Styrofoam plate. The people of my raising and nurturing, blood kin and kin alike, instilled this source of grace in me—a cup, or in this case a plate, that overfloweth. A piece of them went with me when I departed their presence.
But we landed in our new surroundings right before the end of the known world. Only nine months of strangers becoming neighbors zipped past before we masked up and promised to stay six feet away from each other.
I am grateful for, and downright blame, these same people for condemning me to a life of planning menus for twelve guests when I know only six have RSVP’d.
The thought of those people, grandparents, uncles, and cousins who aren’t real cousins, is where my mind goes as I begin to pray over this meal in the fellowship hall of my Connecticut church.
What happens when a minister asks for all eyes closed and every head turned down? Nothing and everything. I call out to the divine mystery, trying to summon through oratory that which is seen through a glass darkly, if seen at all. My voice grows bold, pounding at the liminal space between the sacred and secular before it tapers off into a whisper. Silence hangs, and I find myself praying for people who are not in the room with me. Those children of God who have helped me realize the beauty of belonging and the welcoming warmth of grace. Faces associated with a time where I felt I could taste thankfulness in the contents of a casserole dish.
Rolling off the hills of Appalachia, my family traded the sight of Pilot Mountain for the Green Mountains. The opportunity to head to the Northeast presented itself late one night during my last semester of seminary at Wake Forest School of Divinity. While lifting up prayers of lament straight from the book of Psalms for our then infant daughter to go to sleep, my spouse, Lauren, rocked her gently in our large purple La-Z-Boy recliner. Just a few feet away on the couch, in between my own acts of pleading and supplication, I doomscrolled and checked email. During one upward swipe, a newsletter appeared containing, of all things, a list of ministry job openings. I glanced over the positions, until my eyes landed on a description of a church in Lincoln, Vermont. With prayers answered and the baby asleep, I whispered to Lauren what I had just read.
“Sounds nice, right? What do you think? Should I send them something?”
Unlike some of my fellow seminarians, I was fortunate to have a job already—working as an associate minister to youth and their families at a healthy congregation in a nearby North Carolina town. While conversations were taking place about making my position full time come graduation, nothing was set in stone. On top of this, I was discerning too if my time in youth ministry was ending. Looking at Lauren and the babe that night, I knew weeklong summer camps and overnight church lock-ins were not in my future plans.
“Can’t hurt,” she said back. “I know as a musician you audition for everything. It’ll be a good experience for you, regardless.”
“So, I’ve been dropping off food to people, and everyone keeps sending me stuff back. Yesterday, I took Elenor a piece of pecan pie, and today, she brought back my plate with a Costco bag of pecans! Am I missing something?”
Let this be a fair warning to anyone bold, or foolish, enough to step out and into the flowing river of faith—you could unexpectedly find yourself in the land of New England.
Our transition from the South to the Northeast wasn’t easy. My knowledge of Vermont was next to nothing. Outside of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Bernie Sanders, and the fictional location of the film Super Troopers, I was clueless about the place that was to be our future home. A move of this size brings all sorts of challenges even in the best of times. But we landed in our new surroundings right before the end of the known world. Only nine months of strangers becoming neighbors zipped past before we masked up and promised to stay six feet away from each other. Our relationships just grazed the surface like stones skipped across a pond. Yet, I was called to serve them and learn to care for them in the best way I could. As fate would have it, that turned into feeding them. I wasn’t prepared for what they would teach me by feeding me back.
We slowly adjusted to living in an old farmhouse turned parsonage. Feeling it out and grudgingly allowing the quirks of the narrow stairwell and scalding hot water to grow on us. The parsonage would turn out to be the least of our worries. Those first few months of being in a new place and away from my home in North Carolina were like a negroni, bitter and sweet. Bitter in coming to terms with my pastoral call not being what I signed up for, and sweet in discovering I enjoyed spending early mornings and late nights in the kitchen rolling out pie dough and making chicken stock. My daily devotional? A whoopie pie recipe inspired straight from the Holy Ghost Herself. My time of prayer? Watching my wife and young daughter wake to the smell of fresh muffins and deciding which Ball jar full of experimental sauce I would pluck out of the fridge and take to a parishioner. With pandemonium raging from the pandemic, what I did in the kitchen helped me establish a sense of control. Rather quickly, desserts and sourdough starters began filling up the available counter space.
“My God,” Lauren said. “Who’s going to eat all this food?”
Icing a Hummingbird cake, I replied, “I’m gonna give it away.”
Now, some folks and their nutritionists might tell you they don’t need an entire cake or sheet of brownies for themselves, but most want and will gladly accept one. I know this to be true after dropping off whole homemade pies to lifelong bachelors. Men who know the Stouffer’s section at the local grocery store like they know the backs of their hands don’t say no to anything made from scratch. My activity was appreciated until rumblings around town suggested the new pastor was trying to bless his new congregation with diabetes. In the much-needed revelation, I turned to dispersing single servings.
I made what I knew—Southern staples I hoped would convey to Vermonters who I was and where I came from. Slices of buttermilk-and-vinegar pie went out the door to my neighbor Lisa, whose humble hen eggs made the treat possible. A cake stand supporting half a cake given to a family down the street. A dozen pints of chow-chow left on porches. Apple butter to a local writer who had ties to the Tidewater. Bowls full of macaroni and cheese covered with tinfoil were dropped off at the counter of the local general store. And biscuits, my God, the biscuits I gave away. Baked with cold grated butter and pinched to perfection.
I would feed them pieces of broken biscuit I baked in the parsonage oven that morning. As the warm bread left my hands and fell into theirs, I looked them in the eyes and said their names. It was here where I shared a part of me I believed was the best of me. Through the grace of reciprocity, they would do the same—serving me holy communion, becoming priests and ministers themselves.
I relinquished them all from my kitchen, but like a boomerang, every container would find its way back. Most often, I would find my bowls resting on the parsonage’s steps.
Left there, but never empty.
The first time it happened, it was cookies. I was experimenting with cheesecake and dropped off several slabs to congregants. When the plates came back, the first contained a mess of Dave’s famous chocolate chip cookies. A day or so later, another showed up, but this time filled with Hershey’s Kisses. When the last dish arrived, a small pint of maple syrup accompanied it.
“What’s this all about?” I said to my spouse.
“I don’t know, but I bet you Judy does,” she said.
For three years, I took all questions, big and small, to Judy. Her calling to serve as the administrator in the church was just as, if not more, significant as my call to be a pastor there. People came to me if they had a question and wanted more questions. If you needed an answer, you went to Judy. Like J.Q. Dickinson, she is some of the finest salt of the earth.
Peeping into her office, I asked, “So, I’ve been dropping off food to people, and everyone keeps sending me stuff back. Yesterday, I took Elenor a piece of pecan pie, and today, she brought back my plate with a Costco bag of pecans! Am I missing something?”
She smiled, “Here in Lincoln, you never return a dish empty.”
Even without the use of a telescope, you can catch glimpses into different universes. You see a way of life so counter to what is going on anywhere else that it leaves you wondering if what you’re witnessing is real.
I peeked into one of those alternative realities in Lincoln. A place where empty dishes were unacceptable because the people there would not allow them to stay that way. They replenished everything that was empty, including me. On Sunday mornings, my role was to invite everyone to the Lord’s Supper, one of only two ordinances held by those who call themselves Baptists. Emptying out of pews they would come, one by one. The cradle church-goer, the questioning agnostic, all were welcome. Reaching out their hands, I would feed them pieces of broken biscuit I baked in the parsonage oven that morning. As the warm bread left my hands and fell into theirs, I looked them in the eyes and said their names. It was here where I shared a part of me I believed was the best of me. Through the grace of reciprocity, they would do the same—serving me holy communion, becoming priests and ministers themselves, every time they returned my dish, one I expected to be empty, filled instead with an authentic love and way of living I’m still learning to understand. Sometimes this included something savory or sweet.
It always included something sacred.
That was the case during my last week there as their pastor, when I found myself on the phone with a woman there who had been all things to me and mine. She had allowed me into her life. Inviting my family to her townwide Christmas party, to summer evening weenie roasts where the marshmallow bag was always within reach. She called on me when her beloved dog, Georgia, passed. I prayed with her, laying hands on Georgia as we both choked back tears at the holiness of a creature nobler than most. We cried some more when she sold her home of over thirty years and flirted with moving away.
“What will this town do without you, Nancy? Who’s going to deliver food and gifts to the boys in the trailer? Who could ever fill your shoes as justice of the peace? Who going to be the town’s personal private investigator and notary?”
In the end, we wouldn’t let her leave. She admitted defeat, renting a small cottage a mile or so away.
“I have something for you. I’ll leave it outside your office door,” Nancy said before saying goodbye.
I found a casserole dish waiting for me the next day. It was stained in a few places, proof the previous owner had used it well. It was the only dish someone there had ever given me with nothing in it. Picking it up, I discovered a small Post-it note attached. It read,
Food made in used dishes always tastes better.
She’s right. Plates, bowls, pie tins. All belonging to someone and, somehow, to everyone. Dishes that have spent time in someone else’s house have a special kind of seasoning that can’t be replicated.
I’d like to think that people who are willing to be used for the greater good turn out the same way.
This spirit of never returning a dish empty has stuck with me, becoming a continuation of the doctrine of the “to-go plate” from back down South. It follows me like a shadow.
As I finish saying grace in this fellowship hall in Connecticut, I wonder what new spirit these people will put into me. I watch folks I’m still getting to know from two parallel lines, their stomachs grumbling. I make my way to the end of the line, like the good backrow Baptist I am, thinking of the countless bread puddings I’ve produced in Nancy’s used casserole dish, which I have brought with me from Vermont. I have already taken large gobs of that bourbon-soaked Southern goodness to some of the folks who surround me right now—people who are showing me their own traditions and who will, I hope, welcome some of mine.
Justin Cox is an ordained minister, late-night baker, and displaced Southerner. He's a regular columnist at Baptist News Global, Good Faith Media, and The Christian Citizen, where his writing often engages the intersectionality of food and faith. He currently resides in New England with his family.