[hospitality as subversive and countercultural]

Christine Pohl, in Making Room, says this about hospitality:

Although we often think of hospitality as a tame and pleasant practice, Christian hospitality has always had a subversive, countercultural dimension. “Hospitality is resistance,” as one person from the Catholic Worker observed. Especially when the larger society disregards or dishonors certain persons, small acts of respect and welcome are potent far beyond themselves. They point to a different system of valuing and an alternate model of relationships.

Today, some of the most complex political and ethical tensions center around recognizing or treating people as equals. Recognition involves respecting the dignity and equal worth of every person and valuing their contributions, or at least their potential contributions, to the larger community. Struggles over recognition also encompass questions about what it means to value distinctive cultural traditions, especially when a particular tradition has been tied to social disadvantage and exclusion. Central to discussions of recognition and dignity are concerns about basic human rights and identity.

For much of church history, Christians addressed concerns about recognition and human dignity within their discussions and practices of hospitality. Especially in relation to strangers, hospitality was a basic category for dealing with the importance of transcending social differences and breaking social boundaries that excluded certain categories or kinds of people. Hospitality provided a context for recognizing the worth of persons who seemed to have little when assessed by worldly standards.

Because the practice of hospitality is so significant in establishing and reinforcing social relationships and moral bonds, we notice its more subversive character only when socially undervalued persons are welcomed. In contrast to a more tame hospitality that welcomes persons already well situated in the community, hospitality that welcomes “the least” and recognizes their equal value can be an act of resistance and defiance, a challenge to the values and expectations of the larger community.

People view hospitality as quaint and tame partly because they do not understand the power of recognition. When a person who is not valued by society is received by a socially respected person or group as a human being with dignity and worth, small transformations occur. The person’s self-assessment, so often tied to societal assessment, is enhanced. Because such actions are countercultural, they are a witness to the larger community, which is then challenged to reassess its standards and methods of valuing. Many persons who are not valued by the larger community are essentially invisible to it. When people are socially invisible, their needs and concerns are not acknowledged and no one even notices the injustices they suffer. Hospitality can begin a journey toward visibility and respect.

From Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition

(Christine D. Pohl, (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 61-62

[the story of Le Chambon]

Christine Pohl, in Making Room, tells the story of the village of Chambon:

It is critical to have the freedom to define a Christian identity and Christian community with distinctive beliefs and practices. But, to welcome strangers into a distinctly Christian environment without coercing them into conformity requires that their basic well-being not be dependent on sharing certain commitments. When basic well-being is under attack by larger society, Christians have a responsibility to welcome endangered persons into their lives, churches, and communities.

The story of the village of Le Chambon is a powerful example of the meaning of difference in the practice of hospitality. This small community of French Protestants rescued Jews during World War II. Opening their homes, schools, and church to strangers with quiet, steady hospitality, they made Le Chambon the safest place in Europe for Jews. They acknowledged and valued the Jewish identity of their guests and understood their need for protection. Defining as neighbor anyone who dearly needed help, they saved the lives of thousands of Jews. When the police asked the pastor of the community to turn in the Jews, André Trocmé responded, “We do not know what a Jew is. We know only men.” His response is profoundly illuminating. When, by acknowledging difference, we only endanger, we must only acknowledge our common human identity.

...

Because hospitality is a way of life, it must be cultivated over a lifetime. “Hospitality is one of those things that has to be constantly practiced or it won’t be there for the rare occasion.” We do not become good at hospitality in an instant; we learn it in small increments of daily faithfulness.

[quotes from Pohl]

I recently read Christine D. Pohl's book, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, and will be quoting from it in future posts as it ties in well with the themes of this site. Here's a summary of the book:

"Although hospitality was central to Christian identity and practice in earlier centuries, our generation knows little about its life-giving character. Over the past three hundred years, understandings of hospitality have shrunk to entertainment at home and to the hospitality industry's provision of service through hotels and restaurants. But for most of the history of the church, hospitality was central to the gospel and a crucial practical expression of care, relationship, and respect.This penetrating new work by Christine Pohl revisits the Christian foundations of welcoming strangers and explores the necessity, difficulty, and blessing of hospitality today. The book offers an original argument that traces the eclipse of this significant Christian practice, showing the initial centrality of hospitality and the importance of recovering it for contemporary life.Combining rich biblical and historical research with extensive interviewing of contemporary service communities -- the Catholic Worker, L'Abri,,L'Arche, Good Works, Annunciation House, St. John's Abbey, and others -- this book shows how understanding the key features of hospitality can better equip us to respond faithfully to contemporary needs and challenges." (book summary from Google books)

If you are interested in reading the book yourself, here’s the reference:
Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition
Christine D. Pohl, (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1999)

[some thoughts about hospitality]

“Hospitality means the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy.”

Henri Nouwen

"So, what does true hospitality entail? I think it’s twofold: receiving someone as they are and generously extending whatever it is you have to share. It might be a banquet, or it might be your tears. Either way, the Apostle Paul says it should be offered in love, without grumbling (1 Peter 4:8-9).
...
Diana Butler Bass, again in A People's History of Christianity, writes that for the first few centuries of Christianity—starting with the church in Acts—"hospitality was the primary Christian virtue." It was "fundamental to being a person of the way,” and it was the "main motivator for conversions" (italics mine)."

Kristin Tennant in "Hospitality Outside of Pinterest" article

"I pray that none will be offended if I seek to make the Christian religion an inn where all are received joyously, rather than a cottage where some few friends of the family are to be received."

Richard Hooker

"Can we hold a Christian identity in a way that sends us toward the other with love and hospitality rather than with fear and hostility?"

Brian McLaren in video

"The opposite of cruelty is not simply freedom from the cruel relationship, it is hospitality.”

Philip Hallie, “From Cruelty to Goodness”, The Hastings Center Report 11 (1981): 26-27

'A century ago, William Booth recognized the importance of friendship with the poor when he wrote, “One of the secrets of the success of the Salvation Army is that the friendless find friends in it.” True hospitality involves friendship which “brings to the other what no law or revolution can: understanding and acceptance.” Hospitality, while certainly being insufficient in efforts for justice and transformation, is essential, very essential.'"

Christine D. Pohl commenting on and quoting W. Booth, in Making Room, p. 84

'Jean Vanier writes that “Welcome is one of the signs that a community is alive. To invite others to live with us is a sign that we aren’t afraid, that we have a treasure of truth and of peace to share.” He also offers an important warning: “A community which refuses to welcome—whether through fear, weariness, insecurity, a desire to cling to comfort, or just because it is fed up with visitors – is dying spiritually.”'

Christine D. Pohl quoting Jean Vanier, in Making Room, p. 160

"Hospitality will not make us safe, but it will lead us to risk joining in the work of mending the creation without requiring those who are different to become like us."

"This call for hospitality provides a clue to the possibility of welcoming difference, rather than creating a "cheap unity" built on compliance to one interpretation of faith in Christ."

"Difference is the gift that challenges us to practice such hospitality by resisting oppression and working for full human life and dignity for those with whom we stand in solidarity."

 ~ three quotes from Letty Russell  (Just Hospitality)

"... the act of hospitality is fundamentally an act of human recognition and embrace. If exclusion is fundamentally dehumanizing, hospitality acts to restore full human status to the marginalized and outcast.

Richard Beck, Unclean, pp. 122-123

"Hostage-taking is just another form of hospitality."

Jonathan Larson, Making Friends among the Taliban:

A Peacemaker's Journey in Afghanistan. p. 41

"Thus, the welcoming of the stranger is an eccentric encounter.

Consequently, a hospitable community will be eccentrically oriented, moving out from the center toward the edges and then past the boundaries to the area "outside" the faith community."

Richard Beck in "Eccentric Christianity: Part 3,

Welcoming God in the Stranger"

The people who feel welcomed are the people who you have set a table of hospitality for.

Doug Paul

If your church is a house, is everyone an owner? Or are some people guests? The difference is that owners can move the furniture, do renovations, etc. without having to ask anyone other than the other owners. Guest need to be polite.

adapted from Misty Irons

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Note: This page is an ongoing collection of brief thoughts about hospitality that resonate with the goals of this blog. It will be expanded on over time. Other posts will contain more extensive quotes on hospitality.

[vineyard memorial garden for lost women]

Winnipeg.

A city where nearly 50 missing women, children and transgender Winnipeg sex-trade workers had been murdered or gone missing over the previous 26 years.

Most of them aboriginal.

Word has it that there has been a serial killer at work, and on Monday, June 25, 2012, police charged a man with three of these killings.

In Winnipeg's inner city is Vineyard Church,

located in a century-old warehouse at Main and Sutherland, which backs onto the memorial garden.

The Vineyard Memorial Garden, as it is formally called. Rieger [one of the pastoral staff at the church] and some friends started it to remember first 20, and now 24, murdered and missing neighbourhood women. At first, Rieger recalled Monday, it was murdered sex-trade workers who were memorialized; now it's any woman from the area who dies violently.

It was living sex-trade workers who inspired Rieger because they kept coming to him and asking if he could drive them to cemeteries where their friends were buried. And it was these same women -- women like Jane -- who helped build the memorial garden.

Stone by stone. Name by name. Tear after tear.

It was built in way that also honoured aboriginal tradition, and in a manner that allowed families and friends to have a place close by to grieve. The plaques to each woman still have to be put in place. So I asked Rieger when it would be finished.

"Never," he said.

Quotes from Gordon Sinclair Jr.'s full article at Winnipeg Free Press.

For more, read the Vineyard Church's story about the garden.

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Christine Pohl tells this related story:

A very moving example of hospitality caught me by surprise as I visited one of the communities. Jubilee Partners has set aside a beautiful spot on its property for a graveyard. In it are buried several people who had been homeless before they died, a couple of refugees who became ill and died after they had come to the United States, and two men who had been convicted of capital crimes and were executed by the state. The quiet beauty of the place offered a poignant recognition of the humanity of people who were in many ways society’s castoffs. Their lives had been acknowledged with a simple funeral service and grave marker, arranged by a community who noticed, and cared about, their passing. This dimension of hospitality has very ancient connections. The early church took responsibility for burying strangers, especially indigent ones.

From Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, p. 167.

Added January 3, 2013.

[denying status boundaries]

From Richard Beck's book, unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality.

Given all this, and combined with the central place of table fellowship in Jesus’ ministry, it is not surprising that hospitality was a defining feature and virtue of the early church (cf. Acts 2:42-47, 4:32-37; I Tim 3:2, 5:10; I Pet 4:9; Titus 1:8; Rom 12:13, 15:7). As Christine Pohl notes in her book Making Room, these practices continued to be a distinctive feature of Christian communities during the first centuries of the church:

Hospitality to needy strangers distinguished the early church from its surrounding environment. Noted as exceptional by Christians and non-Christians alike, offering care to strangers became one of the distinguishing marks of the authenticity of the Christian gospel and of the church. Writing from the first five centuries demonstrate the importance of hospitality in defining the church as a universal community, in denying the significance of the status boundaries and distinctions of the larger society, in recognizing the value of every person, and in providing practical care for the poor, stranger, and sick.

Given the impact of sociomoral disgust upon human affairs, it is not surprising that the act of hospitality is fundamentally an act of human recognition and embrace. If exclusion is fundamentally dehumanizing, hospitality acts to restore full human status to the marginalized and outcast. As Pohl writes:

For much of human history, Christians addressed concerns about recognition and human dignity within their discussion and practices of hospitality. Especially in relation to strangers, hospitality was the basic category for dealing with the importance of transcending social differences and breaking social boundaries that excluded certain categories or kinds of persons … Hospitality resists boundaries that endanger persons by denying their humanness.

Beck, pp. 122-123 (Pohl quotes from Making Room, pp. 33, 62, 64)

And a quote from Henri Nouwen to wrap it up:
“Hospitality means the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy.”