Hospitality

I had seen her on Markham Street on my way to work a couple of times. She was hard to miss among the bizarre confluence of colors and patterns, the hats and skirts and beads that she had wrapped herself within.

She was even harder to miss on the front row of the Christ Episcopal Church nave. There she settled in, fully regaled not only with gowns and bags, but with a bright red bear. Throughout the service that bear was lifted up, perched on her head, and occasionally turned around so that the rest of the congregation might benefit from the message of love it bore on its belly.

I'll not pretend that my thoughts were only charitable. I'll not pretend that I thought only of the welcome to the displaced stranger Christ commanded of us. Probably the closest thing to a Christian response that stirred around in me was, "I wonder what it's like to be her."

What visions swim before or within her eyes that cause her to clap her hands, pleased with the sharp sounds bouncing around all that silent stone? What did the brass cross above the font bear or reflect or cry out to her? Something asked her to lift the stuffed red animal up in an offering gesture and to wave her hands and to stand while the rest of us sat. But what was that something, and how did it ask, and why?

I wonder what it's like to be her.

Such curiosity isn't always charitable. But could it contain or become the beginnings of hospitality?

Hospitality is fundamental to the Benedictine Rule of Life. But the practice of hospitality is meant to arise less out of obligation than expectation. It's that Christian anticipation of God's arrival into our lives through the life of the stranger that makes hospitality an avenue to the divine.

Ironically, religious fervor even among Christians is often marked by a deep suspicion of the 'other'. Suspicion and distrust fills all the space where one might wonder what it's like to be that street person or that gay person or that conservative person or that (fill in the uncomfortably other of your choice).

But maybe God has scattered the seeds of new life indiscriminately. Even in the seemingly perverse curiosity of our gawking selves we might find enough empathy to be tended and nurtured into the lifegiving expectation that God may be coming to us even through this strange one.

Kathleen Norris tells the story of an old aquaintance showing up at her door needing hospitality one night. She and her husband were in something of a crisis. He had fallen into a fit of depression, and Ms. Norris found it contagious. But the truth soon came clear that what these two people needed was to be hospitable that night. Not for the sake of the stranger, but for their own sakes. They needed to look up and out and away from their own lives for a moment, just long enough to break them open to a little grace.

Maybe that's what hospitality has always been for. While we know that there are people in this world whose very survival depends on the hospitality of others, what if the Christian practice of hospitality begins with my very own need to offer welcome to someone who is not myself.

Some days I need more than a nudge to be reminded of this truth. I need more than a whisper. Maybe some days I need the strangest of strangers to walk to the front row of my life and plop down, wave her arms, clap her hands, lift her red bear in the air. Reminding me of how bland and colorless God's world would be if it were populated by nothing but me. Opening up, I hope, enough hospitality to receive a little of that color, a little of that grace for myself.