My House is Your House

We have come to associate good hospitality with pampering the most demanding hotel guests.  Hospitality makes us think of expensive places to stay and distract ourselves with every conceivable convenience.  Hospitality is an industry; people earn college degrees in hospitality management.

The cultural roots of our understanding of hospitality go far deeper, though, than king-size beds covered in luxurious sheets with high thread counts.  They reach back to a time when there were no hotels of any kind, high-end or otherwise.  Hospitality was a duty that people owed each other, because without it people would die.  As an ancient desert nomad, you had a responsibility to help those who came across your path.  People who were complete strangers, even people who were antagonists, helped each other.  Withholding help was potentially sentencing someone to death.

Nomadic hospitality had little to do with luxury.  Hospitality meant sharing what you had, sharing your life, with others. Having no room, or resources, for pretense gave hospitality a gravity and seriousness that we have lost.

Hospitality is more than a way to entertain.  It is a response to the physical needs of guests for shelter, food, and protection, but also a way to recognize their shared humanity and value.  We share each day with people, strangers and antagonists, for whom that day is a matter of life and death.  The ways we receive them, and respond to their needs, matter to them.  The way we receive them and respond to their needs  says a great deal about us.  The true hospitality I am offered has an authenticity and a depth that is very reassuring.

Our hospitality is not about the people who receive it.

Saint Benedict’s Rule, which governs many monastic communities and was written about sixteen hundred years ago, reflects this ancient way of understanding.  The presence of the holy is to be recognized in each guest who visits the monastery, and they are to be welcomed as God would be welcomed.

Who will you welcome in your life today, and how will you welcome them?  What will it tell them about you?

(Image by steve phillips]