“Hospitality is one form of worship,” the rabbis wrote.
Hospitality in a culture of violence and strangers and anonymity has become the art of making good connections at good cocktail parties. We don’t talk in elevators, we don’t know the security guard’s name, we don’t invite even the neighbors in to the sanctuary of our selves. Their children get sick and their parents die and all we do is watch the comings and goings from behind heavy blinds.
“In India,” Ram Dass writes, “when people meet and part they often say, ‘Namaste,’ which means: I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides; I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace. I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us.…‘Namaste.’” In Benedictine spirituality, too, hospitality is clearly meant to be more than an open door. It is an acknowledgment of the gifts the stranger brings. “By a bow of the head or by a complete prostration…Christ is to be adored and welcomed in them.”
For the Benedictine heart the reception of the poor is an essential part of going to God. We cannot be too busy, too professional, too removed from the world of the poor to receive the poor and sustain the poor. Anything else, Benedict warns in a society that is by nature class-structured, is not hospitality. It is at best more protocol than piety. Those who can buy their comforts or demand their rights are simply receiving what they can get, with us or without us. Those who have been thrown upon the mercy of the world are the gauge of our open hearts.
It is an important distinction in a culture in which strangers are ignored and self-sufficiency is considered a sign of virtue and poverty is a synonym for failure. Hospitality for us may as much involve a change of attitudes and perspectives as it does a handout. To practice hospitality in our world, it may be necessary to evaluate all the laws and all the promotions and all the invitation lists of corporate and political society from the point of view of the people who never make the lists. Then hospitality may demand that we work to change things.
The fact is that we all have to learn to provide for others while maintaining the values and structures, the balance and depth, of our own lives. The community that is to greet the guest is not to barter its own identity in the name of the guest. On the contrary, if we become less than we must be then we will be no gift for the guest at all. Parents must parent, and all the good work in the world will not substitute for that. Wives and husbands must be present to the other, and all the needs in the world will not forgive that. Balance and order and prayer in the life of those who practice Benedictine spirituality are keys to being a genuine support in the lives of others. Somehow, we must take on the needs of the world with a humble heart. As Edward Everett Hale said, “I cannot do everything but I can do something, and what I can do I will do, so help me God.”
–from Rule of Benedict: Spirituality for the 21st Century (2nd Edition) by Joan Chittister (Crossroad)
