How to treat your guests; Angels: Day 083

How to treat your guests

St. Cyril of Alexandria has some advice for those who might entertain wandering monks, or any other stranger who comes by. Don’t try to impress them with a magnificent feast: be grateful to them for coming, and give them just as much as they need to take care of their hunger.

But if you do open your house to them, meet them cheerfully, and quick- ly, and as their equals—and not so much as if you were giving something to them, but as if you were receiving something from them—as if you were gaining and not spending. And the more so because you profit doubly. In the first place, you enjoy the instruction of those whom you hospitably entertain. Secondly, you also win the reward of hospitality. Either way, you profit.

But when you receive the brethren into your house, do not be distracted with much service. Do not seek anything beyond your means, or more than enough. For everywhere and in everything excess is harmful. Often it produces hesitation in those who otherwise would be glad to receive strangers, and causes but few houses to be found fit for the purpose—while it proves a cause of annoyance to those who are entertained.

But when holy men are assembled at the house of one who fears God, let the table be plain and temperate, the food simple and free from superfluities. In everything, a small supply of such necessaries as will take care of the bodily appetite with simple fare.

This is how to receive strangers. In this way, Abraham by the oak at Mamre received those three men, and won as the reward of his carefulness the promise of his beloved son Isaac. In the same way Lot in Sodom honored the angels, and for doing so was not destroyed by fire with the rest, and did not become the prey of the inextinguishable flame. –St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Luke, Sermon 59

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER . . .

Am I more concerned to impress people than  I am to impress the angels? Do my efforts really impress people anyway?

CLOSING PRAYER

Guardian Angel, make me attentive to others, so that I may never fail in the duty of hospitality.

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