Called to Hospitality
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What does it mean to a Unitarian Universalist to be called to hospitality? And what or who is calling us?
For some it comes as recognition of an immediate need for intervention to stop impending environmental disasters; for others it may come from God. Or the call emerges from a knot in our stomach when we see injustice, when we are faced with the worst of what humans can do to one another. I have heard some UU ministers refer to the Seven Principles as a way of being called to action, to hospitality, to justice work.
The calling, wherever it comes from, is there. The question is, will we answer?
In recent weeks I’ve been polling people about radical hospitality. The first time I encountered the phrase I wasn’t sure I understood what it meant. What made some hospitality radical and other forms of hospitality average?
In general, people agreed that what makes hospitality radical is when it’s not easy or when there is some kind of associated risk. I asked on Facebook: “How do you practice radical hospitality? What is it? How is it different from regular hospitality?”
Some answered that it means giving when you have little to give. Others said it is putting trust in a stranger. My friend Robin, a liberal Christian, had this to say:
Regular hospitality is opening your home to acquaintances who need a shoulder to cry on. It’s keeping your heart open to see past people’s foibles. It’s working to share your life in such a way that you can work toward creating a better world. Radical hospitality is opening up your home to the stranger. It’s opening your heart to the unlovable. It’s allowing your life to be totally disrupted when you are called to do so.
Another person in my survey said radical hospitality is not just letting the stranger join you, but also about you joining the stranger—a subtle but major difference. How do we join the stranger? How do we go from acceptance to affirmation?
This is where curiosity comes in.
Greeting the stranger with curiosity means getting to know who they are, rather than talking about who we are. Often in our communities we greet people with an expectation that we will share with them what Unitarian Universalism is, what our congregation does, maybe even what it is we do personally in the larger society. This approach to hospitality isn’t a bad one. It’s the mode of the greeter, or the community member, being the one to share information. This style of being the one with the information to give is hospitable. It is making space, sharing, and through that sharing extending an invitation.
However, if we adopt curiosity as our approach, we make that subtle shift from letting the stranger join us to our joining the stranger. Now our role, while still one of welcome, is about getting to know the new person. “What brought you here today? What do you do for fun? Where are you on your spiritual journey?” All good questions to open a deeper and more meaningful exchange, where space has been made to affirm the gifts this newcomer brings with them into community.
This feels like a safe place to begin the practice of radical hospitality.
My friend Joy uses this kind of curiosity as motivation to pick up hitchhikers. Which is not something I personally want to do. Practicing radical hospitality will look different for each of us. We each have to weigh the perceived risks, the inconvenience, and our emotional and physical abilities to see what way radical hospitality will manifest in our lives.
In my search for more opinions and examples of the radical nature of hospitality, I asked people to share a time they felt they had received hospitality that was above and beyond any expectation; hospitality they consider radical. Oddly enough, someone listed being picked up when they were hitchhiking as one of the examples—evidence that Joy’s hospitality is both needed and appreciated.
A story that really spoke to me was from my friend Robin about her congregation:
One Sunday morning a couple of winters ago our church organist was in her office before anyone else was in the building. All of a sudden, a guy opened her always-locked door and gave her quite a scare. Once over her shock, she talked to him a bit and found out that he’d snuck in during the week and had figured out how to dislodge the latch on the door so that he could get in and sleep there at night.
By then another woman was in the kitchen preparing coffee and found some rolls and peanut butter to feed him. He stayed through the church service, after which a man in the congregation spoke to him and found out he was a homeless wanderer, just staying in town a few days until he found a place to stay.
This was a small town with no shelter facilities for men. So the man from the congregation took the guy home, fed him, let him sleep there, and then drove him to the next city the next day to help the guy find lodgings.
Another congregation was in the news last year for a similar incident. A homeless person had let himself into a church in Palm Beach, Florida, and was eating cookies in the church kitchen. Unlike Robin’s church, this congregation called the police, had the man arrested and pressed charges for stealing the food he had eaten. I suppose the perceived risks just felt too high. But one wonders how the story might have been different had they taken the time to consider hospitality and the mission of their church.
In a sermon entitled “Radical Hospitality,” Rev. Marilyn Sewell points out:
Hospitality is a word with a spiritual history. Hospital, hospice, hospitable and hospitality all come from the same root word, meaning generous, caring and sustaining. The very first hospitals were housed in monasteries and open to strangers in need. The most famous of these early monasteries was that of St. Benedict, who created a book of rules to live by, called The Rule of Benedict, still in use today by many monasteries. The foundation of the Rule is listening. As Benedict wrote, “Listen with the ear of your heart.
One Sunday some years ago at my congregation in Arkansas, two men entered the building dirty, dazed and reeking of alcohol. Our religious educator at the time was a champion for underdogs and sympathetic to the plights of the disenfranchised. She and I both watched as the congregants in the foyer stared and lay leaders started whispering to each other. This was not long after the 2008 shooting at the UU church in Knoxville, Tennessee, and UUs in the south were jumpy about strangers who looked like they didn’t belong.
The educator made her way to these men, shook their hand and asked them if they would like a cup of coffee. She sat with them during the service, which that morning was lay led and involved a call for people to come up to the pulpit and share a poem or song that was meaningful to them. The drunken man had barely been able to sit upright, but took notice of this and become fidgety. She asked him quietly if he wanted to go up, and he nodded. Oh boy, she thought.
She later told me she knew if he tried to go up alone certain members of the congregation might actually stop him. So at the very end when he finally stood, she stood with him. She put a hand gently on the back of his shoulders and walked to the pulpit with him the way one might walk a small child. She stepped back and stood quietly next to him.
The man said he hadn’t thought of this in years but suddenly remembered a song his mother sang to him as a child. He sang it and he wept. I don’t remember the song; I remember it being something gospel and I remember the tension I could feel in the room while he sang. Still, several of us noticed what had really happened that morning. A way had been made for a man—a stranger, a drunk, someone who definitely had on the wrong coat—to have a spiritual experience. Our educator had midwifed the entire congregation into experiencing that it really can be okay to let a stranger come in.
I want to live my life like this: to be radically hospitable, to be firmly footed in the work of the Holy which is common and often broken. I want to be part of a faith that says, Come anyway. Come in. Come sit at the table in your dirty clothes caked with mud. Whoever you are, whatever the circumstances of your life, find welcome here.
An advocate for gender identity and body positivity, Starr has created and led workshops on transgender and genderqueer identity, creating safe spaces, and supporting non-binary gender expression in children and youth. Starr co-founded the Bare Beauty Project in 2010. Bare Beauty Project works with individuals to combat body hatred through coaching, spiritual practice, and photography. Starr has a deep belief in the right to self identify and the freedom of self expression as fundamental human rights
- Called to Hospitality - February 1, 2016
Thanks for sharing this article. Combining stories, research, and deep thinking, you have helped me to appreciate hospitality at a deeper level than ever before.