Recently I was in a day-seminar and the subject of hospitality was discussed.  Not hospitality in the Southern-hospitality sense, with lots of great food, a clean house and a pretty table setting (although that’s fun too).  Hospitality as-in welcoming strangers.  (You might be groaning inwardly, “oh no, are we really going to talk about hospitality?” Fair enough. But hang in there with me.)

The reaction in the room was as you would expect.  Fearful.  Defensive.  Groans (like you might be doing). But the discussion went on, and as you can imagine, the conversation went to a discussion of whether we SHOULD take personal risks when welcoming strangers.  Is it right or wrong to put ourselves and those we love in danger? 

Welcoming strangers sounds nice until you talk about a stranger coming to stay at YOUR house.  Where YOUR things are, YOUR loved ones are. 

Until you are taking a personal risk. 

 I’ve thought about when I’ve opened myself up and when I’ve closed myself down.

 When I was nineteen, I was a house parent to eight emotionally disturbed girls.  Their house became my house - sort of a reverse hospitality, I guess. These were violent girls and I guess they could have hurt me or stolen from me.  It wasn’t that I was more noble than the next guy, I just never considered that.  I was young and naïve mostly. 

I’ve invited a few people who were in need in one way or another to live in my house over the years.  A teenage girl who was being abused by her parents, a single mom who was being abused by her husband, another teenage girl whose mom died suddenly, who wanted to finish out her senior year at her school before moving to another town to life with her uncle.  These were all women and it felt relatively safe to take them in.  I never thought about them stealing from me.  But then again, I didn’t really have anything of value at the time anyway. 

I realized that these opportunities seldom come my way anymore and I wonder why.  Is it because I am not opening myself up to communities that reach out in these ways?  Probably.  My husband and I have talked about taking in refugees, hurricane victims.  He’s not comfortable with it. 

And that’s OK.

I mean, real hospitality can’t be about whether or not we SHOULD take personal risks in welcoming the stranger.  It really can’t be about what’s right and what’s wrong.  When it becomes an act of legalism, we aren’t being hospitable to ourselves.  Hospitality has to start inside. Welcoming the “other” inside ourselves.  Our fear, our reservations, our recoil, our tiredness.  Hospitality has to extend to the people we live with.  Their fears and reservations as well.   If we can’t open ourselves up to the parts of ourselves that we don’t like, or the parts of our loved ones that are different than we are, what makes us think we can open up to persons outside ourselves that we don’t know and might not like?  I feel certain that when we open ourselves up to the other out of some sense of moralistic “should”, the other person can feel that.  They feel like a project or a charity case, they feel put-up-with, or endured, or patronized, not welcomed or loved in the real sense. 

Maybe if we start first with hospitality inside of ourselves.  Then, when we are ready to open ourselves up to the other, it is a genuine act of hospitality. One that comes from a heart that WANTS to bring them in. 

I’ve been thinking about when I’ve opened myself up and when I’ve closed myself down.

I’ve always thought that maybe hospitality was one of my gifts. I can practice hospitality if it means welcoming people into my home, throwing a party, feeding people, getting to know them, listening to their story and sharing my story with them. And yet, I know that I also need more than the average amount of time alone.  I have a pretty big space bubble.   I have a much harder time with hospitality of personal space and the body.  Hugging, touching, being in my SPACE.   At first, as I was thinking about this topic, I thought to myself in my typical “what should I do?” fashion: “I need to open up my space bubble and practice hospitality of my body”.  I tried it.  I wanted to crawl even further away.  I thought this was interesting to observe.

I’ve thought about when I’ve opened myself up and when I’ve closed myself down.

I wondered why body hospitality is different for me, and harder for me than other types.  I thought back to the seminar that day. As we discussed hospitality, it was no surprise that those persons with the most push-back toward hospitality were those who had been taken advantage of, hurt, or someone close to them had been hurt.  One woman’s mother welcomed a stranger into her home and was murdered.  One woman opened her home to a homeless teen and was robbed.   That makes perfect sense.  And it’s the same with the body when it has been intruded upon, taken advantage of, or worse - violated.

In nature, nothing will grow in an inhospitable environment.

Here’s an illustration from nature (because if you know me, you know that biology is my spiritual reference point for most things).   We are in a topsoil crisis in our world today.  Experts estimate that the world could have as few as 60 years of harvests left, due to the fact that we are killing our topsoil.  Deforestation, paving over the soil, and chemicals are some of the ways that we are doing this. Around the world, experts say, about 40 percent of soil used for agriculture is already considered either degraded or seriously degraded, meaning that in this 40 percent at least 70 percent of the topsoil is gone. In total, in the past 150 years, half the topsoil on the planet has been lost.   How is this related to hospitality?  Modern agricultural practices are all about making the environment inhospitable to the enemy.  Weeds, diseases that affect crops, insects.  What we aren’t thinking about is how the practice of making the environment inhospitable to the “enemies” of crops is actually, in the long run going to make the soil – the very thing that we need to grow crops at all – inhospitable.  And then where are we left?   Jesus talked about letting the weeds grow up with the crop.   It’s about grace, and hospitality.  It is a good principle to live by in nature, in our relationships with others and in our relationship with ourselves.

 The more we try to oust the part of us that feels like a threatening stranger, the more we just end up killing the part of us that gives life along with it.  And the same is true with others.  Anytime we force something upon them rather than allowing it to open naturally, we are creating an environment that is inhospitable to the growth of the very thing we are hoping for.  How can we expect anything good to bloom from an inhospitable environment that we’ve created inside ourselves, or inside our homes, with our children, spouse, neighbor, enemy? 

“Shoulds” are just that - inhospitable.

In that light, hospitality is not one of my gifts.  I have drunk deep from the “should” well most of my life.  I have been working for literally YEARS to rid myself of the “should demon” who sits on my shoulder.   And yet, maybe rather than trying to oust the “should demon” I should learn to welcome and be hospitable toward the ‘ol boy.  Give that legalistic asshole some grace for a change.     Grace is hospitality and hospitality is grace.  The opening up to giving the “other” the freedom, and the forgiveness to be a complete asshole – even when that “other” is inside ourselves.  Because here’s the deal:  that asshole inside ourselves robs us and murders us.  It steals and kills our joy, our peace, our relationships, our health.   And yet, if we don’t learn to love it and extend hospitality to it, I’m not sure we can ever extend it to our neighbor, our spouse, our child, our ex-husband or our enemy.

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