hospitality

My thoughts are turning again towards hospitality. This biblical concept usually makes me think of my teachers--my gracious parents, who spend hours preparing food in their busy kitchen, making their home warm and welcoming to all guests, host families in Thailand who were unconditional givers and taught me how to receive so many gifts, my beautiful communities at Spruce Lake, Messiah, SoJo, and now Allison Hill.

In recent years, I have sought out biblical descriptions and models for hospitality, given that it is one of the more overlooked marks of a Christian in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Thinking about hospitality has led me to believe that, while there are so many different demonstrations of it and cultural meanings attached to it, it has to do with sharing things that sustain us--family, food, celebrations.

Within the last three years or so, I’ve confronted my own selective hospitality--extending kindnesses to close friends and family, unknowingly neglecting those God has especially mandated us to care for and to invite to our banquets--the poor, the cripple, the blind, the lame, the strangers, the marginalized. In seeking out the vulnerable around me, I stumbled upon many new friends and, most recently, a loving, struggling community of displaced Burmese friends. In trying to love them and embrace a more radical model of hospitality to the strangers in my midst, I indiscriminately poured myself into them and found myself feeling more overwhelmed and less hospitable. Practicing hospitality all the time is exhausting. Well, my version of it which, I’ve been learning, is far from Jesus’ version.

Since moving to Harrisburg a few months ago, I have gone through many waves of giving and receiving with my refugee friends. Their everyday visits quickly became exhausting. My resistance to “creating healthy boundaries” (whatever that means) caused more challenges. I enjoyed a living room full of friends much of the time, and I also started to dread visits that would last for undetermined amounts of time. I love these people who have become close friends, but I also saw myself suffocating under constant connection. In practicing hospitality and contributing to the needs of others, as I saw implicit in God’s charge to welcome the stranger and adopt a more radical version of hospitality, I felt depleted. Why? I am learning, again and again, that hospitality is just as much about receiving as it is giving. I rationalized away that component for a while--after all, I love to give and bring groceries and bake bread and offer rides and babysit and make appointments...of course I will do these things. And besides, I would allow God and other good friends and family to care for me. I just didn't want to receive things from those with so many needs. With so many mouths to feed and so little income, I reasoned away my friends’ acts of kindness and felt guilty receiving what they graciously shared with me. This, when unmasked, is selfish and wrong. In seeing myself as a burden, I was not receiving and validating the worth and dignity and many gifts of my Burmese friends. In my hope to be the helper, I was robbing them of their ability to help me. Pride mixed with partial hospitality is not hospitality at all...and will decidedly exhaust.

I write these things now because there has been a decided shift. For me, it is a matter of actively laying down my selfishness and twisted perception of hospitality and need, opening my eyes to new ways of giving and receiving, and finding freedom again in the faithful provision of God who cares for us all. My Burmese friends have been my teachers not only in showing me how to be gracious, sacrificial hosts, but in how to be gracious receivers. They are the Jesus in disguise I desperately need to see to find liberation from my inclinations. Jesus, model guest and host, gave to us his body and blood and, throughout his life, received meals and expressions of hospitality from sinners and tax collectors. There has been a great deal of freedom in embracing a holistic hospitality that speaks to need and abundance and lends to a “theology of enough”. In naming my pride and tendency to only help and take care of others, I am free again to let others take care of me and remind me I am needy and impoverished, too. And a stubborn ragamuffin saved by a scandalous grace.

Well, this was a mouthful. And there are so many more thoughts on hospitality this ragamuffin wants to share....another time.