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?
The Company We Keep: Hospitality and Mutuality
Moral communities in which roles of host and guests are not tightly defined but allow for mutuality are communities that recognize a multiplicity of gifts.
—Christine Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, (1999) p.122
Often in religious community we speak of nurturing diversity as welcoming. When we use the language of welcome, we are embracing the language of hospitality. When you think of hospitality, are you most comfortable as guest or as a host? How comfortable are you with being both stranger/guest and host at the same time? How easy is for you and your community to move fluidly between those roles?
Radical hospitality makes room for and is grounded in:
- the generous care of every person’s gifts,
- the belief that every person has gifts worthy of and necessary to the flourishing faithful community, and
- the commitment to answer the calling of each other’s gifts into the life of service, worship, leadership, membership, and spiritual growth.
To Be Seen
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Every particle of the world is a mirror,
In each atom lies the blazing light of a thousand suns.
In the pupil of the eye, an endless heaven.
—Islamic mystic, Mahmud Shabistari Read more →
Hospitality at Our Borders
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There has been a lot of conversation lately in the United States in general, and the world of Unitarian Universalism in particular, about immigration. Read more →
The Fine Art of the Good Guest
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The most important thing that I’ve learned in traveling to more than twenty countries is the art of being a guest. And I’m a particularly fine visitor at the supper table. Read more →
From Your Minister
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For years, Biblical scholars have suggested that the real sin condemned in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was not homosexuality, but inhospitality. Read more →
REsources for Living
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How do you feel when you are about to head off to a party? Excited? Eager? Maybe a little bit anxious? For me, heading off into the midst of a group of people, some of whom I don’t know, always makes me a little jittery. Am I wearing the right thing? Am I bringing the right kind (or amount) of food? Will anyone want to talk with me? If people do want to talk with me, will I say the right things?
Descent into JFK
Living Faith in the Light of Racism
American racism is still with us—in our minds, hearts, and souls. In every sphere, in every place, in every corner of every role that constitutes who I am, the tentacles of race and racism infiltrates. I am focusing specifically on racism because of a particular class discussion that chipped away at the edges of my soul. But make no mistake; it is certainly not the only “ism” grinding at the edges of our souls. If there is any area in my life where I struggle most to have faith or to live out my faith, it is in the area of racial healing.
My soul feels at times to be a sculpture of sorts. And there have been times when my soul has painfully cracked.
Faitfhful Risk for Living Faith
I rarely speak of faith as a noun, but rather of faithing and faithful living. Every day we’re invited on a risky adventure of living into our promises and aspirations, of growing spiritually, and of contributing to the blessings of this world. If we’re not risking, we’re probably not faithing, but play-it-safe-ing.
Yet because so many of us have been taught that faith is either a virtue (you have it or you don’t) or a place (Greetings from Faith!), we have to unlearn the play-it-safe-ing that often accompanies the virtue and place ideas of what living faithfully is. We have to develop new spiritual habits, spiritual habits that have very real world consequences and actions attached to them.
