Association Sunday: Radical Hospitality
by Rev. Colin Bossen, October 12, 2008
Radical hospitality is the practice of inviting in and welcoming the stranger. It is practiced with the knowledge that genuinely allowing the unknown to enter our lives changes us. Engaging with the guest expands our circle, shifts who we understand ourselves to be and alters our self-perception.
Some of my favorite lines from the Universalist poet Edwin Markham are helpful when considering radical hospitality:
"He drew a circle and shut us out.
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the will to win,
we drew a circle and took him in".
These words suggest the transformation that occurs when we welcome the other into our lives. That transformation can be profound. It can turn enemies into friends and open new vistas for our hearts and minds.
The term radical hospitality has been popularized by the book "Radical Hospitality; Benedict's Way of Love" by Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt. Homan and Pratt's book focuses on how radical hospitality is practiced by the members of Benedictine monastery in Michigan. The core message of the book is that welcoming the stranger offers us a chance to encounter the sacred. Each person has a spark of the divine within them and is capable of changing our lives. Practicing radical hospitality allows us the chance to have that encounter.
The community that Homan and Pratt describe organizes itself according the Rule of St. Benedict. The Rule of St. Benedict admonishes its followers to welcome all guests as if they were Christ himself. For the monks "Hospitality means bringing strangers into your heart." If you practice the monk's hospitality you "widen your boundaries to include those who are not like you."
The language of the Benedictines can make some Unitarian Universalists uncomfortable. Theological language is a largely a matter of metaphor. And the metaphor of Christ does not ring true with many of us. We tend to associate the word Christ with the idea of a divine savior who will come from on high to save us from ourselves and our human misdeeds. Most Unitarian Universalists object to this theology.
Christ does not have to represent a supernatural savior. It could simply be a referent to the potential, the divine spark, within all of us. Early American Unitarians recognized Jesus as someone who had realized that potential. They did not think of him as special being but as someone in touch with the divine within. There's a similar concept in Buddhism which recognizes that all beings have a Buddha nature within them.
The word Christ comes from the Greek Khristos which means anointed one. That could be anyone because anyone can be anointed. Khristos is a translation of the Hebrew word for Messiah--God's chosen or anointed one.
In Jewish theology the Messiah is the person who will bring a fundamental change in the world. When the Messiah appears time and the world as we know them will be disrupted and replaced with something better. The new world will be a place of peace and justice in which all humans have their basic needs met and violence ceases to exist.
The Rule of St. Benedict urges its followers to treat all guests as the Christ or the Messiah. In doing so the rule seems to acknowledge that each person, every stranger, we encounter may be capable of changing the world for us.
There is truth to this. In all of our lives there have been times when the chance encounter with a stranger has been transformative. Remember the time you struck up a conversation on the bus? Or met someone new in the laundry mat or the cafe? Maybe you met a person in a congregation you attend who impacted your life. Perhaps the person you met on the bus, or in the laundry or after Sunday morning worship is now your friend, your lover or your spouse. Perhaps your relationship with that person, who started out as a stranger, changed the course of your life.
I had a transformative experience with a stranger several years ago when I travelled to Chiapas, Mexico. I was participating in a delegation to build a school in a rural indigenous community. The community was poor. Before our trip we raised enough money to buy all of the building supplies necessary for the school. Conditions in Chiapas meant that we had to wait until we arrived in the community before purchases could be made. Even then we had to turn over the money to community leaders and trust that the concrete, wooden beams and other things we needed could be procured.
The community knew in advance that we were coming. They were supposed to have vendors for the supplies lined up before we arrived. But we got there it took more than four days for the materials to appear. During that time our delegation did not have a lot to do. We formed a soccer team and participated in a local tournament. We lost badly. We spent time with the community's children. We learned a little about what life was like for our hosts.
On the third or fourth day our hosts invited us to come work with them in their fields. We were to pair off. Each pair of us would go and spend the morning working with a family in their corn field. My friend Rai Sue and I were assigned to work with Marcello and his family.
Initially, there was not a lot of conversation to be had. Marcello showed us how to use a machete to weed a field. We worked side-by-side for a few hours in near silence. After awhile we took a meal break. We sheltered together in a thatch roofed lean-to for shade from the sun.
Marcello offered us some his pozol, a traditional drink made from corn mush, and I offered him some dried cranberries I had brought from the United States. Neither of us had ever had the other's food before. We spent about an hour in conversation and took turns telling each other about our lives. Marcello spoke of his family's long involvement in the struggle for indigenous rights and land. He expressed gratitude for the solidarity that they received from groups like ours.
Marcello was very interested in my vegetarianism. He asked me why I was a vegetarian. In my broken Spanish I told it was because I liked animals. He replied that he too liked animals. "Me gustan todos los animales," he said. "I like all of the animals." And then he began to list each type of animal in the area. As he mentioned an animal he would inquire as to whether my friend and I ate it. He let us know that he ate all types of animals.
We returned to the field and worked for another couple of hours. The most eventful moment involved Marcello killing a rat with his machete. Just as the sun began to get too hot, and Rai and I felt that we were ready to collapse from exhaustion, Marcello told us that it was time to quit for the day.
He invited us back to his home for a mid-afternoon meal. We graciously accepted and we walked with him to the small complex of simple wooden buildings that he and his extended family shared. Marcello's wife greeted us at the door of the small thatched roofed hut that served as the family's collective kitchen and dining room. We quickly learned that we were to be served chicken soup with tortillas.
Marcello and his family were by no means wealthy. When Rai and I visited with them in the morning we counted ten chickens. We returned in the afternoon we counted nine. After a quick discussion, in English, we decided that we were going to eat the chicken. Marcello and his wife were pleased.
Marcello and his family expressed their hospitality by sharing one of their chickens with us. Giving us some of the little meat they had was their way of thanking us for our work with their community. We expressed our gratitude for their hospitality by going outside of our normal bounds and doing something neither of us ever did, eat meat.
Human connections with people like Marcello are one of the things that ultimately led me to help start a human rights and indigenous solidarity organization. That organization, called CASA, operates centers for education, witness and solidarity work in Chiapas and Oaxaca. To date we have hosted over 100 volunteers. Our volunteers comes from around the world and they have done everything given legal and medical trainings to indigenous communities to help build infrastructure and create art projects.
I doubt I would have returned to Chiapas after my first visit there if I had not had an experience with people like Marcello and his family. Their willingness to welcome me and my friend into their community helped me to understand the conditions under which they lived and the struggle that they fought. This inspired me to want to work with their communities to improve their situation. It also helped me to understand that communities very different from my own have much to teach me and suffer from some of same economic forces that my own do. The hospitality that I experience in Chiapas was transformative.
One of my favorite stories about hospitality stems from the idea that there is a Messiah within us all. It's called "The Rabbi's Gift." Though it was collected by the storyteller William White, I first heard it from Rob Hardies, the senior minister of All Souls, Unitarian in Washington, DC.
Once there was a monastery just outside of a small town in France. The town was quaint and quiet. The monastery had been there for hundreds of years. No one really remember when it was founded and quite a few people had even forgotten it existed.
Over the the last few decades the number of monks in the community had been steadily decreasing. The monks that remained rarely ventured down into town. The townspeople thought about the monks less and less. Few young men considered joining the religious community. As the monks became more insular their community declined even further.
Finally there were only five monks left. They had grown bitter and hostile. Each blamed the others for the monastery's coming extinction. Brother Frank decided that everything was Brother Tom's fault because Tom never smiled at guests. Brother Tom was mad at Brother Frank because Frank did not keep the floors clean enough. They were both mad at Brother Ted because he seemed to have forgotten that he was supposed to be responsible for weeding the garden and the grounds had grown inhospitable. Brother Jonas, the Abbot, was just bitter with everyone. No one could do anything to his satisfaction.
One day a Rabbi came to the little town. He was travelling from his remote village to Paris and needed a place to pass the night. When he arrived it was late. All of the inns were already full. At the last one he visited the innkeeper remembered the monastery and directed the Rabbi to it.
He knocked on the gate of the monastery and was greeted by a very grumpy Brother Tom. Tom told the Rabbi that he was welcome to spend the night with terse and unfriendly words. Tom showed the Rabbi to the dingy guest quarters and left him to pass the night. Before he went to sleep the Rabbi met a couple of the other monks and found them to be as unpleasant and sour as Brother Tom.
In the morning before he left the Rabbi asked to speak with the Abbot. The Abbot grudgingly granted his request and accompanied him to the monastery's gate. Right as he was about to leave the Rabbi turned to the Abbot and said, "Friend, I have great news for you. The Messiah is already among you. I have seen him. He is one of you." And then he left.
That night after the evening meal the Abbot shared the news with his fellow monks. "The Rabbi said that the Messiah is among us and that he is one of us." The monks began to digest this information.
Brother Tom knew that he was not the Messiah so, he thought, one of the other monks must be. He could not figure out which one. He decided that he would have to change his behavior towards all them. He did not want to offend the Messiah.
Brother Frank realized that Tom was a kind man underneath his grumpy exterior and suspected that Tom might be the Messiah. He stopped glowering at Tom whenever he passed him in the hall.
The Abbot, Brother Jonas, had no idea who the Messiah was so instead of scolding the other monks for not doing their jobs well enough he started to help them with their work. This improved everybody's mood and soon the monks were on good terms again and the monastery was a happy place.
The Brothers realized that they neglected their grounds and buildings over the last years and started to work to fix them up. They spent time in town buying new building supplies. When he townspeople noticed that the monks were always friendly they began to visit the monastery. Some volunteered to help rebuild the outbuildings that had fallen in disrepair. Young men started to join the monastery again. It became a beloved and respected part of the town's wider community. It was the place where people went whenever they needed to renew their spirits.
When Rob told his congregation this story they had been behaving a bit like the monks in the monastery. After a bitter fight involving its previous minister, All Souls had fallen on hard times and the congregation had shrunk considerably. A lot of people had done very hard work to turn the congregation around and make it a more welcoming vibrant place. One of the things they did was call a new minister.
Rob was this minister and on his first Sunday with the congregation he decided to tell them a story about radical hospitality. It was a story which embodied both the congregation's recent troubled past and its hope for the future.
The Tuesday after Rob's first sermon was September 11th, 2001. In the weeks that followed All Souls was flooded with visitors, people seeking solace in an uncertain world. After all of the hard work that they had done the congregation was able to open itself up to this influx of strangers. The members had begun to treat each other better and many of the visitors felt welcomed into the community. After many years of decline All Souls began to grow again. Today it is one of the largest congregations in the Unitarian Universalist Association.
The stories of All Souls and "The Rabbi's Gift" are good for Association Sunday. At it's core Association Sunday is a day about radical hospitality. It is a day when we as a congregation dig into our pockets and offer up a financial thanks to the Association for its work in spreading and supporting Unitarian Universalism. We give to the Association because it in turn gives back to us through material support and inspiring stories like the transformation of All Souls. These things help us be more hospitable to strangers and spread Unitarian Universalism.
This particular Association Sunday is a good day to think about radical hospitality. The world is experiencing an economic crisis. During such a time it is likely that many people will turn to religious communities to find solace, comfort and hope. If we prepare ourselves to be gracious hosts, to welcome the strangers that may come, we might encounter people who will change our lives and our community.
We will all benefit from such exchanges. In uncertain times the less isolated and insular we are the more able to face our fears we will be. It is easy to get disheartened when we think we are alone or that other people are not experiencing similar challenges. Practicing radical hospitality will allow us to see that we are not alone and that our challenges are not unique. Learning that others face the same problems we do is the first step towards solving those problems. The larger the circle of our community the more capable we will be of working together for our individual and collective betterment. Who knows what we might be capable of if we truly practice radical hospitality.
All of this begins with the act of welcoming the stranger. But before we welcome the stranger we must invite the other into our circle. I hear people from time-to-time wishing that the congregation put more effort into publicity and bought more advertisements. While such sentiments are laudable they are not the best way to invite the stranger. The best way to invite the stranger is with a simple personal invitation. That is a first step along the path of radical hospitality and begins the process of transforming the stranger into the friend.
Not everyone will accept our invitations. Still, I imagine most of you know someone you could invite to visit the Society. You may have a friend who you have told about this congregation which you love. Why not invite them to come with you some Sunday?
No matter how we invite the stranger in the real challenge is to make guests feel included. This is not as hard as it sounds. It simply means talking to visitors during coffee hour, inviting them to join one of the lunch groups afterwards and trying to include them in the community's activities. It means that instead of talking with your friends or about congregational business at the start of the coffee hour you make an effort to greet and connect with the newcomer. Let them know you are excited that they are here and that they are welcome.
As we consider this let us return again to Edwin Markham's verse:
"He drew a circle and shut us out.
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the will to win,
we drew a circle and took him in".
In the hopes that we have the love and the will to draw the circle wide enough I say Amen and Blessed Be.