Ersela Dehiya, left, shares Thanksgiving dinner with her father, Stanley Dehiya, at the John Day Elks Lodge on Thursday, Nov. 23, 2023.

Last week, the John Day Elks Lodge held its annual free Thanksgiving dinner for the community. Volunteers from the lodge spent hours preparing the feast, ultimately serving well over 400 plates piled high with turkey, ham and all the trimmings of a traditional holiday feast. (You can read our story about the dinner on page A7 of this week’s paper or on our website.)

Roughly one-third of the meals were boxed up for takeout, one-third were delivered to people who were homebound or otherwise unable to get out on their own (including dispatchers working at the county’s emergency communications center and the crew on duty at Blue Mountain Hospital) and one-third were served in the lodge’s dining room.

Wherever they were consumed, those Thanksgiving dinners provided a heaping helping of holiday cheer.

But the people who were able to come to the lodge to enjoy the feast may have gotten the best deal — because as soon as they walked in the doors, they became part of a community.

As the long tables began to fill up — with individual diners, couples, small knots of friends and family groups — the spaces between the diners began to disappear. People started greeting old friends they hadn’t seen in a while and began chatting with strangers who happened to sit down across the table from them. They started making connections, and suddenly the energy in the room became greater than the sum of its parts.

Much has been written in recent years about the decline of communal life in this country. As a nation, we are less likely than ever before to go to church, to join civic organizations such as the Elks or engage with others outside of work or family. The pandemic made a bad situation even worse.

In today’s high-tech world, it’s incredibly easy to communicate with people through video chats, social media and so forth. But those kinds of virtual interactions can never take the place of face-to-face conversations, the kind that come with a hug or a handshake or a friendly smile. We all need real human contact in our lives, especially our neighbors who find themselves living alone.

Dr. Vivek Murthy, America’s surgeon-general, has written about the “epidemic of loneliness” gripping this country and the need to combat it.

“We are hardwired to live in community,” he wrote earlier this year in a column for U Magazine, a publication of UCLA Health. “Connection is the essential glue of our lives. It is what brings us happiness and fulfilment. We need social connection for our survival and collective well-being.”

Murthy’s column called for Americans to reverse the troubling trend of disengagement by making those human connections. You can do that by getting involved in civic organizations or faith groups, reaching out to old friends, volunteering with a service club — or joining in a communal meal.

The power of community was on full display at the John Day Elks Lodge on Thanksgiving.

Charlie Caughlin, a former exalted ruler of the lodge and a member of the volunteer kitchen crew, got a big smile on his face as he looked out at the dining room, where people were bonding over good food and friendly conversation.

“This is the part that warms my heart,” he said. “You get the fellowship — everybody from the community coming in here, sitting with people they probably never talk to (ordinarily). That’s what it’s all about.”