Hospitality

Be hospitable to those you don’t know.  Welcome strangers into your midst.  Start a conversation with someone waiting in line with you.  Ask someone new in your community to come over for dinner.

Bill Boerman-Cornell
"Ten ways to be a better Christian community" in catapult magazine

Hospitality

The practice of hospitality is a good example of what can be lost when we forget a story.  Although hospitality was a significant practice in earlier centuries, its recovery has involved a deliberate effort to find it and tell the story again.  We have had to be intentional in connecting ourselves with sources that empowered previous generations of Christians.  Recognizing the importance of hospitality to Chrysostom or Calvin is not merely a historical exercise; it allows us to participate in the wisdom and the experience of a tradition.

Christine Pohl
Making Room

Christ in each stranger

Recognizing the face of Christ in each stranger is the personal formula for healing. And the structural counterpart is that of seeing the world monastically, in which common ownership is the primary right. If the goods of the earth belong to God, then we are stewards rather than owners, called to see that they are used equally by and for all.

W. Paul Jones
Teaching the Dead Bird to Sing: Living the Hermit Life Without and Within

Hospitality

Christians have always been hosts and guests, natives and strangers, citizens and sojourners.  In our contemporary world of strangers, tourists, and nomads, Henri Nouwen proclaims, 'When hostility is converted into hospitality then fearful strangers can become guests....Then, in fact, the disctinction between host and guest proves to be artifical and evaporates in the recognition of newfound unity. '

In a time of hate-filled extremism, some Christians still long for a world of nonviolent love, of reconciling peace.  Of human wholeness, of true brother and sisterhood, in God's compassion.  For them, hospitality opens the way to practicing peace, doing a tangible thing that can change the world.

As Martin Marty, a noted Lutheran theologian, says, 'In a world where strangers meet strangers with gunfire, barrier walls, spiritually landmined paths, the spirit of revenge, and the record of intransigence, it sounds almost dainty to come on the scene and urge that hospitality has a strong and promising place.

Diana Butler Bass: Christianity for the Rest of Us, HarperOne, published 2006

The Henri Nouwen quote comes from Reaching Out: the three movements of the spiritual life (New York: Doubleday, 1975) pg 47.
The Marty Martin quote comes from When Faiths Collide, pg 128 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005)