By Joe Mancini
Published in March 2018
St. John’s Kitchen is a place of relationships. From its first meal served on Jan 15 1985, it has been a refuge in downtown Kitchener. In December of 1984, the community was waiting for this new place to open. Anna Kaljas wrote in a letter to the Kitchener Record asking why the fire department was holding up the opening of the Kitchen. Anna stated emphatically in her letter that people needed a place where the community could serve a daily meal for those in need.
32 years later, St. John’s Kitchen continues to be a place that serves a free daily meal in downtown Kitchener while fostering a unique kind of belonging.
Grace, dignity, mutuality, and generosity have made St. John’s Kitchen a place of meaningful daily exchanges. Creating a place of attachment where the community’s effort to produce and serve the daily meal is complimented by relationships that overflow. It is often a place of contradictions. It is not one group over the other but the recognition of the human condition, that we are all broken and that we can help each other.
How did such a place take root? At this year’s Mayors’ Dinner, Arleen Macpherson, Gretchen Jones and Jennifer Mains will tell the story of St. John’s Kitchen, how it has endured as a place of relationships.
These three women have been essential to the St. John’s Kitchen community over these 30 years.
When Arleen retired in 1999 she used the words belonging, laughter, understanding, gratitude, hospitality, and openness to describe St. John’s Kitchen. What she meant by those words was a description of the culture she encountered each day. “Food is an important part of St. John’s Kitchen,” Arleen wrote, “it is around food that we gather to recognize our common humanity and to establish a sense of belonging.”
Arleen weaved hospitality into the fabric of St. John’s Kitchen, often writing about the courage, simplicity and generosity that was an everyday occurrence at the Kitchen. Arleen considered St. John’s Kitchen to be a “wonderful meeting and gathering place.”
The Miracle on Duke and Water by Dave Conzani conveyed the friendship he encountered at St. John’s Kitchen. Today we understand that Dave was a survivor of the 60’s scoop, taken away from his aboriginal mother when he was only 3 years old. Arleen and Gretchen were important supports to Dave as he moved past his alcohol addiction. A few years later he wrote poignantly about his experience,
“Later I came to meet the two dearest women I have ever known. I can’t count how many times I sat at my table drunk and cried my heart out to them about grief over my lost son, my inability to quit drinking and the cold stark horrors of my life on skid-row. They sat and heard my pain for hours, and though I reeked of alcohol, and hadn’t bathed for God knows how long, and had only that one filthy change of clothes I was wearing, they gave me a hug of encouragement and never batted an eye of disgust. I know because I looked for it and it wasn’t there.”
Gretchen first started volunteering in 1991 and soon was an integral part of St. John’s Kitchen coordinating the kitchen and volunteers for 26 years. Gretchen has been a big part of the magic that happens each day to ensure the daily meal is served. Her work has been to invite the many from the floor and from the community to work together. The distinctiveness of the kitchen is its open structure. There is an overriding trust that people working together can take the gift of food and turn it into a meal shared by the community.
Gretchen knows the feel of community. She is often in the middle of it as up to 40 people go about the work of chopping vegetables, keeping the coffee pot filled, washing dishes, scraping pots, cleaning tables, and mopping the floor, all ensuring that community is built through the daily meal.
Jennifer started coordinating St. John’s Kitchen in 1999 and for 19 years has been committed to developing ever-increasing supports for those most disadvantaged. Jennifer questioned right away why there were so few resources at the grassroots for those most marginalized. As Gabor Maté noted, why is it that those who face the greatest challenges face a system that ostracizes, marginalizes, impoverishes and refuses to provide the means for support to move past addictions.
Overtime new social supports took shape at St. John’s Kitchen that included Downtown Street Outreach, Hospitality House, Psychiatric Outreach and the St. John’s Kitchen medical and dental clinics.
For Jennifer what matters most is creating a place where the work of community is seeking beauty. She described this way of thinking and how it relates to St. John’s Kitchen in a Good Work News article in December 2012.
“The framework in which we work is one of understanding the role of beauty in our lives. We do the work because we are seeking beauty in the other, celebrating the spirit in the other and renewing our own.
“We have frequent outreach meetings in which we carefully listen to each other, hoping to gain counsel, support or a broadening of our understanding but at one particular meeting I was struck by the focus of the dialogue. I heard the outreach workers speak with delight and vigour about their work during the past week, naming situations where they saw insight, caring and compassion, the human spirit rising. This is not to say that their week was not also filled with anger, despair and desolation. But the conversation was not about what was pathological, wrong or negative. They spoke of peoples’ desires, their hopes and wishes.
“Instead of goals we prefer the practice of walking with the other, which has the possibility of giving dignity to their experience and allows us to be open to the mystery of the human spirit.”
The Mayors’ Dinner will celebrate the culture that has grown in downtown Kitchener at St. John’s Kitchen. We often remember a quote by our friend Myrta Riveras who used to say, “She would not like to be in a city that did not have a St. John’s Kitchen.” This celebration is recognition that for 32 years our community has created a place of friendship and hospitality open to all with no questions asked.
