Love. Christians, for the most part, agree that we are commanded by Jesus to love God, love others and to love ourselves1. Love is our guiding principle. As the writer of 1 John says, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them… We love because he (God) first loved us…The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also”.2
Our difficulty is figuring out how, exactly, to do this3.
The ancient concept of hospitality may be the practical framework that allows us to love as God desires us to love. Hospitality is not a fixed set of rules for any and all situations. It is a way of being in the world. This makes the practice of hospitality flexible and adaptable. It doesn’t give us detailed instruction about what to do, but rather tells us how to do the things we do.
Henri Nouwen has a helpful way of describing hospitality4. Hospitality is a “fundamental attitude toward our fellow human beings”. He writes about the movement from hostility to hospitality. He wrote this book in 1975 and sadly hostility and fear are still very much present in our world and our lives. Many of us wonder what we can do about the hostility and fear present in our current times.
Nouwen suggests, “Maybe the concept of hospitality can offer a new dimension to our understanding of a healing relationship and the formation of a re-creative community in a world so visibly suffering from alienation and estrangement.”5
“Hospitality, therefore, means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines. It is not to lead our neighbor into a corner where there are no alternatives left, but to open a wide spectrum of options for choice and commitment…It is not a method of making our God and our way into the criteria for happiness, but the opening of an opportunity to others to find their God and their way. The paradox of hospitality is that it want to create emptiness, not a fearful emptiness, but a friendly emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves as created free; free to sing their own songs, free also to leave and follow their own vocations. Hospitality is not a subtle invitation to adopt the life style of the host, but the gift of a chance for the guest to find his own.”6
How do we, as we go about our daily lives, create space for strangers, friends and ourselves? How do we create this “friendly emptiness” in our places of work, our churches, our neighborhoods? How do we take this with us as we go into the grocery store or the oil change shop? What does this look like with respect to the environment or how we govern ourselves?
These are questions worth considering and over the next weeks and months we will come back to them. I am interested in hearing your thoughts.
- Mark 12:30-31 Matt 22:36-40. Luke 10:25-28, and John 13:34-35. If it’s repeated, it must be important. ↩︎
- 1 John 4:16,19,21. It is worth your time to read the very short First Letter of John ↩︎
- This post builds on this post. ↩︎
- What follows is from his book Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, Image Books, Doubleday, 1975, excerpts are from Chapter 4 “Creating Space for Strangers” ↩︎
- Nouwen,67 ↩︎
- Nouwen, 71-72 ↩︎
Conversation in Faith 