Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition by Christine D. Pohls
For a long time the idea of hospitality brought forth images in my mind of my mother scrambling to clean the house, of family and friends filling our living room, and of special food being prepared to serve them. When the Fraser family was being hospitable, it was quite a task and quite a stress. If everything wasn’t in semi-perfect condition, who knew what the guests would think of us.
But the word “hospitality” hasn’t always been attached to these cliche images. In this book, Christine D. Pohls traces the rich history of hospitality in the Judeo-Christian traditions and helps to rediscover the true meaning of hospitality as it was established in the early church: a practice of responding to the “physical needs of strangers for food, shelter, and protection, but also a recognition of their worth and common humanity.” Hospitality did not exclude family and friends but welcomed them in as part of the community being offered to the poor and the needy to whom the hospitality was being extended. Hospitality in it’s truest form is offering life-giving connections to those who do not have them– those who, for whatever reason, have been cut-off from a tight community and the relational connections necessary for survival. People in need of our hospitality include the sick, the elderly, the mentally-ill, the refugees and displaced people of the world, the addicted, the awkward, and the poor– anyone who lacks the physical means necessary to sustain themselves and their families and who lacks the relational connections necessary to be a functional part of their community.
Hospitality is so much more than having the preacher and his wife over for Sunday lunch.
Hospitality is inviting the single mother in to live with us, the immigrant to be part of our family, and the homeless man in for shelter and a meal. It’s a cure to the symptoms of social paralysis which occurs when people have no social support-network, and no one to rely on for help, friendship, or guidance.
But there is no denying that this kind of hospitality is extremely difficult and intimidating. Our lives and our societies are set-up in such a way that hospitality is almost impossible for the average person. For most of us, we are too busy to think about welcoming in a new person who will bring with them new issues, new needs, and new commitments on our behalf. We’ve decided that success is akin to busyness and have embraced a frantic life-style with tired but welcoming arms. Our lives are too self-consuming to imagine welcoming in another.
And on top of busyness, the privatization of our homes has destroyed our best space for hospitality. As families get smaller and less connected to their extended members, households become smaller and more private. When mom and dad are at work and the kids are at school there is no one in the home to be with those to whom we’d extend hospitality. We fear the possibility of a stranger harming our children and our family because there are so few eyes in our households to be watchful. Our walls are thick. Our friends aren’t likely to just pop-in. And so our houses become secluded and dangerous places for hospitality to occur.
And if the busyness and privatization of our lives wasn’t enough, the need is almost too great to think about. There are so many without that the little bit we could offer seems like an insignificant drop in an ever-enlargening bucket of need. If we take in one, doesn’t that mean that we’ll have to take in two, then three, then before we know it our lives will be over-run with the needy! To open ourselves to the practice of hospitality brings with it the fear of becoming vulnearable to a great avalanche of poverty.
But these factors must not keep us from the practice. As Pohl continually reasserts, the great generosity of God’s welcome to all people must frame our thinking about our own limits and boundaries. To the extent that the Lord has welcomed us, we also ought to welcome others. We ourselves are not God, but we do serve as his hands and feet in this world.
In the latter sections of the book, Pohl retraces the historical tradition of hospitality and outlines ways that we, as modern Christian practitioners, can live hospitable lives in the midst of our busyness, seclusion, and context of great need. Pohl discusses characteristics of welcoming space, giving some advice on how to make our personal homes more conducive to welcoming strangers, pilgrims, refugees, and the like. She also re-envisions what hospitality looks like in a technological world, addresssing the beneficial use of the telephone, the internet, and skype to help meet the necessary relational connections of people around the world. And she reminds the reader of the necessary place of celebration for any community of hosptality. Celebration “makes present the goals of the community in symbolic form”– for a short and inspiring time the ideals of joy, plenty, harmony, and relationship are lived out in a tangible way. Celebration reminds the community of the ultimate goal of their hardwork and self-sacrifice: that all people will be well fed, sheltered, and intimately connected to one another in nurturing, reciprocal relationships.
I leave you with one of the greatest peices of advice/encouragement I took from the book:
Because hospitality is a way of life it must be cultivated over a life-time. Hopsitality is one of those things that has to be constantly practiced or it won’t be there for the rare occasion. We do not become good at hospitality in an instant; we learn it in small increments of daily faithfulness.
I want to be more faithful to God by extending His generous welcome to those in need. May we, as a faithful Christian community re-initiate lifestyles of Christ-like hospitality.
