HOSPITALITY AND HOMECOMING
April 19, 2010
The
abundance of God’s provisions ― manna in the desert, loaves and
fishes for the multitudes
―
points not only to God’s hospitality across time, but also to
the abundance of Life itself, which becomes reality after
Easter.
~ Elizabeth Newman
A recent but posthumous book by Henri Nouwen, Home Tonight:
Further Reflections on the Parable of the Prodigal Son,
opens with a reflection on Nouwen’s arrival at L’Arche Daybreak
in 1986. Unnervingly, Nouwen was confronted daily by one of the
members in the group home, who always asked the same two
questions of people: “So, where’s your home?” and “Are you home
tonight?” In her Introduction, Sue Mosteller writes that with
his frenetic schedule Nouwen “very often had to falteringly
explain to John that he would again be absent from the table
that evening.” Mosteller suggests that Nouwen, who came to
Daybreak in search of a home, needed John’s constant reminders
that he was on a journey ―
home. Nouwen had written earlier in his career that hospitality
is “the creation of a space where the stranger can enter and
become a friend instead of an enemy.” (Monastic Studies 10,
1974). One is left with an impression of unrealized longings.
The stranger belongs in the story. Contrary to the modern
notion of hospitality, which is thought of as entertaining
friends and hosting parties, the Greek concept of hospitality
meant offering all you had to feed and house a complete
stranger. It was wrong to send any stranger away. The Greek
xenos, referring to a stranger who receives welcome or
who welcomes the other, stands behind the dual notion of
hospes, meaning both “guest” and “host” in the Latin, from
which we get our word hospitality. Hospitality therefore
implies mutuality and is characterized by sincere graciousness
between strangers. (The New Dictionary of Catholic
Spirituality, p. 515) Augustine apparently understood this
when he wrote:
You take in some stranger, whose companion in the way you
yourself also are, for we are all strangers. This person is a
Christian who, even in his own house and in his country,
acknowledges himself to be stranger.
In “Accepting Our Lives as Gift,” Elizabeth Newman
suggests that Jews and Christians are “homeless” or “displaced”
(strangers) in this sense: “They are called to turn from
identifying themselves primarily by their nation or their family
or their position in society in order to draw their identity
from God . . . who acts in and with a people, for the sake of
the world.”
As “guests” and “hosts” in the world, it is possible to
view hospitality within the larger context of the gift of
relationship with God. As Newman also notes, the “home” from
which we offer hospitality is God’s household. Joseph B.
Soloveitchik discerns a connection between hospitality and the
growth of mutuality and friendship between Abraham and God in
Abraham’s Journey. In the beginning, God commands
Abraham. But later he enters into a more mutual relationship
with him, reveals himself increasingly to Abraham, and is
present to comfort him when he is in pain. Abraham welcomes and
is welcomed. God-Host is the sometimes guest of Abraham.
Soloveitchik asserts that the gift of hospitality received
requires that the hospitality given be more than mere
charity:
. . . charity reflects sympathy, not equality. Giving a
handout to someone at the door does nothing to erase the social
gap between the giver and the one to whom the handout is given;
inviting that person in for a meal does. . . . Hospitality
requires patience and perseverance. Acts of charity take a few
seconds. Once they have donated, people with wealth can return
to their own cares. Hospitality, on the other hand, means,
caring for another person for an extended period . . .
We have to go beyond. That seems to be the message. To
the list of dispositions for hospitality offered by The New
Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality (p. 516)
―
a willingness to listen to the needs of the world, to
acknowledge a preference for the poor and the stranger, and to
maintain an openness that is conditioned by attentiveness,
humility, kindness, readiness to meet and to be with the other
―
we might add “a hospitality of thinking,” a graciousness
and spaciousness of thought that is open to the other as guest
and host, that transcends rationalism and trusts that God’s
household “rests on the assumption of superabundance, one in
which there is not need to hoard and save.” (E. Newman).
Hospitality in thinking is a spiritual disposition closely
allied with contemplation. It is, if you will, meditative
thinking or reflection. And it may be what Jesus was speaking
about when he tells Martha that Mary has chosen “the better
part.” Martha, we know, has been beside herself preparing to be
the good host, and she appeals to the Lord to get Mary to help
out. Yet, in his response, Jesus affirms Mary: she is doing
something commendable, even pleasing to him. What could that
possibly be?
Is Mary in her own way preparing to receive the
Guest? Has she recognized that in some way she herself is the
guest, and that he who is coming is also the host whose
hospitality she should be prepared to receive? Contemplation
has awakened her to the abundance of God’s graciousness in her
life, to the gifts she has constantly received from the
hospitality of God’s household. Sensing mysteriously the
presence of the Provider in the expected guest, she sits in
anticipation and enhanced receptivity. In paradoxical fashion,
this contemplative stance fosters receptivity and hospitality on
her part: she becomes the better prepared to receive the guest
in her home ―
both as host and guest.
“One who opens her home to the Other receives her
inwardness in a new
way.” These words of Kees Waiijman (Spirituality) are
about hospitality. Specifically, they relate to Emmanuel
Levinas’s understanding of recollection as an act of
hospitality. Recollection in a home that is open
―
that is, hospitality ― is
the condition for the “relation with infinity.” Only now,
Levinas intimates, does the home really open itself up. (Totality
and Infinity) In recollection (contemplation) one receives
one’s inwardness in a
new way (as a guest); in establishing the relation with
infinity, one becomes also a host of sorts. The two together
are “the better part” of contemplation affirmed by Jesus.
Hospitality is the recognition that we belong
together, that our destinies are linked, and that in receiving
and caring for one another we “come home” to the spiritual union
we always and already long for.
