Reading time: About 6 minutes.
I keep trying to imagine what love looks like when you scale it up to a country. It’s an easy word to say, but a difficult one to define. And once you think you’ve got a handle on it, how does it ripple outward into a community and circle back to nourish the individuals who make it up?
Here’s the take that sits in my bones: across faiths and philosophies, there’s a recurring idea. We are born to be a gift to the community, and the community is meant to be soil that nourishes us. Ideally, you grow into yourself, bring your particular gifts, and everyone thrives a little more because of it.
It doesn’t happen automatically, though. Curiosity and listening have to take root. Paying attention to what happens when someone is truly heard, seen, and encouraged. Over and over, I’ve watched people blossom when they’re listened to. That blossoming feels to me like the American dream at its best: not about getting rich or being right, but about being seen and being useful in the best sense of that word.
Of course, it rarely stays that tidy. Power likes a seat at the head of the table. People like being comfortable there. So the beautiful idea frays. Still, I keep returning to it.
How Power Rearranges the Chairs
Power (and greed) are sneaky. They often wear the costumes of tradition, of “common sense,” or of piety. When they sit at the table, they rearrange the chairs so the guests who already have power can reach the mashed potatoes first.
Fear makes it worse: fear of losing a place in the world, of being forgotten, of not having enough to feed one’s family. In that atmosphere, fear pushes away chairs, narrows the menu, and makes the feast feel scarce.
Love, on the other hand, keeps dragging in more chairs and more food, too. Yes, there are more mouths to feed, but more dishes arrive. More people bring their offerings, and somehow there’s enough. No one goes hungry.
The table expands because the soil beneath it is rich. When love nourishes the ground, generosity takes root, and what grows can be shared.
The Table Shrinks Until Love Speaks Up
But let’s be honest. Fear is always sitting at the table, too, whether we invite it or not.
Jobs are uncertain. Rent takes bigger bites out of paychecks. Groceries and medical bills pile up. And lately, our leaders have only fueled these fears, dividing us into “Us vs. Them.” The shouting has grown so fierce it’s no longer just rhetoric. We’ve seen what happens when that fury leaps into violence.
In that atmosphere, love can feel flimsy. Fear tells us: protect what you have, keep your circle small, brace for impact. Sometimes that feels like the only sane response.
When fear gets the microphone, love loses its volume. The table shrinks, and only the most powerful have access to anything more than crumbs.
I keep thinking about the response after 9/11. There was fear, of course. But there was also an outpouring of love that boosted courage and brought us together.
At the time, I was a student at Seattle University, facilitating a spirituality class. All of us felt broken after the events of that day. Then my friend Saundra came in with a name. “These families need to know we’re with them,” she said, holding up the address of a New York firefighter who’d helped rescue people at the Twin Towers.
Her passion fueled ours. We prayed, wrote letters, and sent cards. Our goal was simple: let those families know we were in it together. What surprised me was how much that act healed us, too. Nearly 3,000 miles apart, we were connected. By loving them in their grief, we felt less alone in ours.
I felt that same truth years later, after a windstorm near Seattle left our neighborhood without power for ten days. My husband Mike and I had installed a generator. Our neighbors had thought we were a little nuts for doing it. One of them even laughed, “You guys are crazy for buying that thing.”
But a few nights into the outage, he was standing in our kitchen with a plate of hot food. Our house turned into a kind of “winter summer camp.” Our neighborhood was a hodgepodge of people from all over the world. Neighbors from India, Colombia, and across the U.S. crowded around our table for meals, deep discussions, and laughter. Looking at all their faces, I had this flash of recognition: this is what America is supposed to be. Not power hoarded but shared. Not fear, but respect. Everyone had a seat at the table, and it was good.
Fear will always be loud. The trick is finding the courage to keep love from losing its voice.
Courage, I’ve come to believe, doesn’t come from denying fear. It comes from loving something enough that you refuse to let fear have the last word. That’s how I feel about America. I don’t want to lose my country to authoritarianism. I want to be able to vote, to speak my piece, without fear of retribution or violence.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves (and the Ones We Forget)
Americans have always been known for our hope, our openness to experiment, our willingness to give people a chance. We’re also known for punishing differences and forgetting who was shoved away from the table.
History shows the pattern again and again: movements that begin with moral fervor are folded into policy that excludes. You can see it when we locked up Japanese-Americans during World War II, or in the McCarthy era, when anti-communism flared into witch hunts that destroyed lives. Families torn apart. Businesses shuttered. Careers ended. All in the name of protecting the nation from fears of the other.
People who feel rattled are often offered a neat explanation: blame the other, tighten the rules, protect what’s “ours.”
But maybe what we need more than outrage is an alternate story, one that insists on nourishment instead of scarcity, on belonging instead of barricades.
Pull Up a Chair
Sometimes discomfort is the best invitation. The people we least expect to connect with end up holding the stories that surprise us most. It’s like the way a child blurts out the awkward question and then actually listens to the answer. That kind of curiosity is what love looks like in practice.
I keep falling in love with humanity this way—through the people I meet from all walks of life, who are simply doing their best to be themselves in a world that keeps trying to push them away from the table. If we’re honest, pretty much all of us have been shoved away from somebody’s table at some point. It’s not fun. Which is why we already know how much it matters to be included.
Of course, I’ll grant that not every person belongs at your table. Some people intentionally cause harm, and love does sometimes mean keeping boundaries strong. But most people? Most people are open, interested, and surprisingly interesting when you give them the chance to be heard.
I think about the time our refrigerator broke. Out of nowhere, our friend Caroline, known by everyone as “The Soup Lady,” showed up with a giant cooler so we wouldn’t lose all our food. “I’ll bring more if you need them,” she said, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Just a small act of love.
But that’s the thing. It didn’t feel small. In that moment, I realized community isn’t built from grand gestures. It’s made of these ordinary offerings, multiplied a hundred times over.
Even voting feels like that to me. Not dramatic, not glamorous. Just one more offering into the mix. Not out of spite or fear, but out of care for whichever future we hope for.
Love at scale doesn’t mean we’ll all agree, or that fear will vanish. It means the soil of our common life is rich enough to grow a feast that can be shared. That’s the table I want to sit at, one where no chair is wasted, no gift is lost.
