Hospitality: Tuning Into Our Neighbors
Although I am hearing impaired, I spend time and energy each week attending to Radyo Lekól, a Creole language program on one of my local public radio stations. I always learn a lot, just as when I turn and attend to Democracy Now En Español. The news covered is sometimes the same stories as in the English language media, but often from different perspectives, and, even more often, completely different stories.
I am fluent neither in Creole nor Spanish, but tuning in and attending to the news of my larger community, in the languages of my larger community, is part of living faithfully. I listen as a stranger when I do not understand what is being said. I listen as a neighbor to seek to understand. Even though listening is exhausting—that’s part of life for many of us with hearing impairments—as a matter of faith, I need to spend energy attending to my neighbor’s concerns and dreams.
How can I care about my neighbors’ concerns and dreams if I do not know what is going on with them?
Attending to my neighbors’ concerns and dreams is the kind of hospitality we practice with committed multiculturalism, with working for justice and equality, with choosing and sustaining pluralism day after day. It is a hospitality where I am sometimes stranger, sometimes neighbor, sometimes host, and sometimes kin. But in all of those roles I am called in love to a generosity of spirit to hope, to cultivate understanding, and to care.
How are you attending to your neighbors’ concerns and dreams?
- Another Helping of Brokenness - March 1, 2014
- Keeping On Though Not Yet - June 11, 2012
- Spiritual Drought & Restoration - June 4, 2012
