Hospitality

I had said my blogging time here was over, but I am going to add this one as a topic appropriate for our day. In today’s reading from the Rule of Benedict, the subject is hospitality, a major challenge for the church of today. For Fellowship, we respond by participating in the Interfaith Hospitality Network. We welcome the guests to “our place” for a week, four times a year. The numbers of those who need a welcome are overwhelming, however, when we take a look at the homeless, the newcomers to this country, the ones who have no helping hands except for churches and organizations designed to provide temporary services.

This week I attended the day-long Legislative Seminar sponsored by our NC Council of Churches and learned of the almost unsolvable concerns of immigrants, especially Latinos, who are given so little in terms of a welcome from the general public. We enjoy their labors but we don’t seem to enjoy their presence, judging by the efforts to get as many as possible back to their home countries, however that may be accomplished – either legally or illegally. We are reluctant to educate them or train them or raise their economic situation, all of which would in the long run make them contributing members of our society. I think we have a different standard when we read our scriptures, which call for us to “welcome the stranger.” We too once were strangers, or our ancestors were, for all were immigrants to this country except for the native peoples, and they too may come from immigrant stock of several millenia ago.

St. Benedict made hospitality a prime standard for his group of monks. As Sister Joan Chittister comments in today’s reading from the Rule of Benedict, which addresses this matter of hospitality: “Hospitality in a culture of violence and strangers and anonymity has become the art of making good connections at good cocktail parties. We don't talk in elevators, we don't know the security guard's name, we don't invite even the neighbors in to the sanctuary of our selves. Their children get sick and their parents die and all we do is watch the comings and goings from behind heavy blinds. Benedict wants us to let down the barriers of our hearts so that this generation does not miss accompanying the innocent to Calvary as the last one did. Benedict wants us to let down the barriers of our souls so that the God of the unexpected can come in.”
She adds this comment, “ . . . hospitality is clearly meant to be more than an open door. It is an acknowledgement of the gifts the stranger brings.”

We are charged to greet the stranger with our own hospitality, whether or not we are Benedictines. We are Christians, and we are the Church, and “a charge to keep have [we],” as the old hymn tells us. In the coming weeks, we also can remember to welcome the Interim Pastor who is charged to help Fellowship understand who and what we are and where we are going. We may find that our doors can be opened wider and more often, in order to acknowledge the strangers’ gifts. We may find that kernel of faith within us that nudges us into a great spirit of hospitality, the way we have been challenged to do by our risen Lord. It is time “to let down the barriers of our souls” and let the God of the unexpected enter in.