Susan's Musings: The Longing Heart for Hospitality

Hospitable words like hospice, hostel, and host address our heart’s longing to be and become a welcome space for anyone suffering from hunger of body or sickness in soul. We know intuitively that they need respect and care, complemented by compassion, charity, and the sheer milk of human kindness.

            Hospitality manifests reverence and respect for the inherent dignity of every person created by God. We greet one another with warmth and affection because Christ is in us and with us; we try to see his face in all the faces we meet.

            Hospitality is healing because it brings us, stressed as we often are, to a kind of spiritual hospital where we begin to feel better. In its ambience, loneliness lessens and joviality increases. We see ourselves and others in the softer light cast by our Divine Host. The veil between the temporal and the eternal parts a little, and we taste and savor the goodness of the Lord (see Psalm 34:8).

            Hospitality fosters a peaceful, welcoming way of life that offsets the destructive forces of disrespect and indifference. In this hospital of the soul, there is no room for the death-dealing, life-denying exercise of inhospitality.

In the midst of productivity or in our final hour, hospitality heightens our sensitivity to what others need—from material goods to spiritual blessings. Without this virtue, we might succumb to one-upmanship, backstabbing, and cynicism. Our goal must be not only to host an occasional dinner party or hug a lonely person once in a blue moon but also to make hospitality a habitual practice. We believe and show by our behavior that everyone ought to be treated with dignity, whatever state of life he or she represents.

            Hospitality allows us to be as generous to others as God has been to us. Receiving a hundredfold in return for even the smallest act of kindness (see Luke 8:8) is the surprising gift that awaits us when we listen to the Lord. We minister to others only to find that the tables have turned and they have become the hospitable ones who minister to us.

            Such hospitality depends on our being not me-centered but mystery-centered. More than ushering people into a perfect house, we strive to create a home, that is to say, a welcome space from the workaday world. We try to find the right balance of silence and speaking, of listening and responding. We foster in ourselves and others the feeling of being free from rejection and misunderstanding, from unrealistic expectations that mask the inevitable suffering that accompanies self-giving love.

The essence of hospitality resides, therefore, in the following three facets of true engagement:

1.     Embrace others with a heart full of care and concern. Embrace, if not physically by touch, then spiritually in the warmth of a smile, those who enter through your doors. See your guests as “other Christs” with whom you, too, want to rest a while.

2.     Encounter all who come with a gracious ebb and flow of nearness and distance, of community and privacy. Trust that every meeting you have is full of grace; that you ought to pray for one another, offer a helping hand, feed the hungry and clothe the naked. To help everyone in some way is to be a “wounded healer,” especially in a world that suffers so much from the sickness of loneliness.

3.     Empathize with one another without any superficial chit-chat or condescending gossip. Ask your guests how you can help them and listen respectfully to their voiced or unvoiced response. “Checkmate” condemnation, strive to excel in compassion, and allow the outflow of charity to be the true test of your life of prayer and presence, of contemplation and action.

In summary, we empathize with one another without any superficial chit-chat or condescending gossip. Hospitality counters a culture of violence and the anonymity of making good connections, often and only on social media where contacts are kept at a distance and one may not even know the neighbor next door. Instead we ask our guests how we can help them, and we listen respectfully to their voiced or unvoiced response. We “checkmate” condemnation, strive to excel in compassion, and allow the outflow of charity to be the true test of our life of prayer and presence, of contemplation and action, and so we pray:

Lord, in contrast to the discourtesy I receive at times in this dysfunctional

world, let me be kind and courteous to everyone I meet, Free me from the

hypocrisy of preaching with glowing words in public while withholding in

private the hospitality others crave. Replace selfish hoarding with selfless

love so that in my company all may taste a morsel from the heavenly banquet

table You have prepared for us. Every time I receive hospitality, let me do

what I can to pass this gift on to others. May friends and strangers feel at

home when they come through my door. Let them sense in my hospitable

presence that they are precious in Your sight, that each is a mirror of the

Good Shepherd we serve.