Divine Hospitality

What is the source of hospitality? How do we know what hospitality is? How do we learn how to give and receive hospitality?

A few weeks ago, I shared a bit of what Henri Nouwen has written about hospitality¹.

“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…. The paradox of hospitality is that it wants 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.²

If Henri Nouwen is correct and hospitality is, at least in part, creating space for another to be fully, truly themselves that suggests that creation itself is an act of hospitality.

John Polkinghorne, Anglican priest and physicist has some helpful thoughts about creation.

“…an English clergyman called Charles Kingsley said that God could no doubt have snapped the divine fingers and brought into being a ready-made world, that God had done something cleverer than that: God had made a world in which creatures could make themselves. And so that’s the picture that God brings into being a universe, it has great potentialities, great possible fruitfulness, but creatures are allowed to explore and bring that fruitfulness to birth. And that seems to me a very beautiful and fitting form of creation, a better world, so to speak, that a world which was ready-made.” …” I think God does respect the integrity of creation.”³

To paraphrase Polkinghorne and Kingsley, God created and continues to create a universe that could create itself. Full of potential. Full of possibility. This includes the possibility for things to not turn out exactly as God might have wished.

This sort of creation, one that creates itself, means (if you prioritize the sovereignty of God) God has limited God’s own capacity to act. On the other hand, if God is love and love is what defines God, then creating a universe full of potential and allowing it to develop can be understood as an act of love. Divine love does not coerce or control or predetermine. Divine love allows for the beloved to become and be whatever it wills to be. Creating a universe that creates itself is a generative act born out of love.

The act of God that creates the universe is an act of divine hospitality. The universe has the capacity to become and discover itself. And on earth, all creatures have the room, the space to become and to discover ourselves.

Does this mean that God does not care what the actions of their creation are? I don’t think so. I think God cares deeply about what sort of universe we inhabit and what sort of creatures we are. But by creating out of love, God necessarily gives us space and capacity and ability, a “friendly emptiness” to become. God is our companion in our becoming.

God is our companion in a variety of ways. One of the ways God companions with us is as Jesus. God comes to us in a way we can understand. God joins us in our humanity. Jesus continually invites people into new ways of being, into new relationships. Jesus shows us what is what God desires, what the kin dom of God is like.

Likewise at Pentecost, the Spirit comes to invite and guide us. The Spirit is present with us, as individuals and as communities. Over and over God invites us into the “friendly emptiness” where we can learn and explore and grow

Recognizing and receiving God’s hospitality allows us to recognize and receive the hospitality of others and to extend hospitality ourselves. As we experience the non coercive, invitational hospitality of God, we are able to notice, accept, and extend a similar sort of hospitality to others. Just as God’s hospitality is expansive and inclusive of all that is, from planets, to people, to plants, so our hospitality is to be expansive.

I encourage you to spend a little time noticing God’s hospitality and considering how you receive and then pass on that hospitality. The hospitality you extend can be to another human, but it could be to an animal, or plants, or a community. This act of hospitality may be something you normally do, but is now done with a different intention. Does doing whatever you do as an act of hospitality, rather than as a good deed or an act of kindness change how you think about it and how you feel about it? That’s an honest question and I would be interested to know about your experience, if you would like to share.

1. See this earlier post: Love in Practice. ↩︎
2. Please note this book was published in 1975 and thus uses gendered language that was considered inclusive language in its time. Nouwen, Henri, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, Image Books, Boubleday, 1975, 71-72 ↩︎
3. from On Being with Krista Tippett : John Polkinghorne “Quarks and Creation” Original Air date March 10, 2005. See also his book Belief in God in an Age of Science. Despite being a physicist and clergy, he writes clearly and accessibly. ↩︎