Hospitality

BreakPoint WorldView » November 2008

For most of my growing up years I was pretty sure hospitality was a sophisticated word that meant hosting fancy dinner parties and letting important out-of-town guests stay in my perfectly appointed bedroom for a few days. Only after living with a very generous “host family” for a full year as part of a postgraduate fellowship did I come to gain a much fuller understanding of what a sustainable life of hospitality looked like.

What struck me most was how little hospitality had to do with “entertaining”, and how much it had to do with allowing others into the mundane and sometimes messy details of everyday life. Admittedly, describing hospitality like this is much like saying Lake Michigan is a rather large pond. It is also much more than that. In Scripture there is no doubt that Christ’s call to practice hospitality is a radical one that commands our care of the poor and the widow and the orphan and the alien. It is a call to open our eyes to the abundant needs around us and to meet them with whatever means we have available to us.

BABY STEPS
Yet, it also means starting somewhere. For me, thinking of hospitality as a series of choices and habits that foster a transparent life and home helps me to feel less daunted by the prospect of inviting any one person into my home on any given day. But, like any true discipline transparency also takes work, and in order to live transparently enough to keep an open home requires patience to make and keep commitments, courage to be vulnerable, and wisdom to seek counsel

THE TIME FACTOR
Trust is essential for the growth of any friendship, and long-term, intimate friendships require commitment that won’t falter amidst the petty struggles of comparison or fade as life’s inevitable tragedies occur. Yet, it can be hard to know exactly how or where to find and build the types of friendships that can do that effectively.

Most people who know me well will attest that my best friend Susan is as much a fixture in my life as, say, my husband or my two children. Yet, as I was sorting through some old cards the other day I was surprised to find a note from my wedding shower from four years ago that indicated Susan had been out of town and had to miss the shower. This struck me as odd because Susan and I both stood in one another’s weddings; we have each attended (at the side of our respective husbands) the birth of the other’s children; we are godparents to those same kids and so forth. But this little note served as a much-needed reminder that it wasn’t always this way.

In fact, when we first met we weren’t even particularly drawn to one another. But over a series of circumstances and events we found reason to start building—slowly and at times painfully—more and more trust and shared life so that now, 6 years later, we have a wonderful fortress of friendship.

Certainly, that isn’t to say that all relationships take years and years to develop—many can develop quickly into meaningful friendships or partnerships that play a significant role in convicting, encouraging or challenging the growth of a person. But more often than not it takes time to identify a friend who might be similarly committed and it takes time to let the friendship be tested and proven before you can even know how or whether to invest deeper. Weeks and months, even years may go by before you see the fruit of your commitment, but it is worth the wait if we trust that Christ does indeed call us into a community of faith. And as such, we are called to bear witness and uphold others in very practical ways just as we committed to do as witnesses in the wedding or baptism ceremony when we said “we will.”

CRACKING THE PRIVACY CODE
Yet as Lauren Winner writes in her book Real Sex, “Individualism and autonomy are so essential to the modern story that even Christians have trouble parsing the relationship between ourselves, our bodies, families, homes and our communities.” And, as Rev. Dr. John W. Yates II states candidly, “the greater value we place on privacy, the less likely we are to practice hospitality.” So where do we even begin to crack this code of privacy that governs so many of our homes?

First it is important to recognize our tendency to confuse entertaining with hospitality. As Karen Mains writes in Open Heart, Open Home, “Entertaining has little to do with hospitality. Entertaining says I want to impress you with my beautiful home, my clever decorating, my gourmet cooking. Hospitality, however, seeks to minister.”

But secondly, I believe, we have to allow ourselves to be a little embarrassed. Vulnerability is a tactful word and a broad-reaching word, but at times it can mask the plain and simple, elementary-school-style embarrassment we have all been taught to avoid as mature adults. Sure, I might feel “uncomfortable” or “regretful” of something I’ve done, but rarely will I admit to feeling downright embarrassed that I am as sinful and petty and superficial as I really am. But as Ashworth says, “Our willingness to let others see our imperfections and to receive them in theirs opens the way to honest exchange. It’s risky. Facades crumble, and we are exposed as the vulnerable, still-on-the-journey-but-haven’t-arrived-yet people that we are. But we are also able to offer the grace of a true home.”

Hospitality is many things, but in the fragmented and disconnected culture we live in at least one part of its practice must include developing habits that challenge the fears and secrets that privacy or busyness may hide in order to create homes that are truly open for service in the care of others. By starting small and setting realistic goals that we are patient and intentional to pursue, seeds can be planted for a life of rich intimacy that will help us develop an ever clearer eye for seeing the needs of others and being less distracted by ourselves.

Kate Harris is a strategy consultant for The Clapham Group, a boutique consulting firm based in Washington DC, and an affiliated project, The Wedgwood Circle, LLC, and is the mother of two small children. She currently resides in Oxford England while her husband is pursuing a graduate degree in business.

Ashworth, Andi. Real Love for Real Life : The Art and Work of Caring. Wheaton: Shaw, 2002. 62.

Den Herder, Susan L. "Culturally unpopular, personally difficult, critically important: Mentorship." COMMENT 30 Mar. 2007.

Winner, Lauren F. Real Sex. Grand rapids, MI: Brazos press, 2005. 58.

Yates II, Rev. Dr. John W. "Hospitality and Strangers." Sermon Series. The Falls Church, Virginia. 27 Jan. 2008.