Hospitality as Faith

At the very core of Gospel life is the practice of hospitality. We are called not only to see Christ in the other but to personally to reach out. To deny others, particularly the lowliest and most difficult of others, is, we are told, to deny Christ.

I recently read Christine Pohl's work on Christian Hospitality, Making Room. A practical and thorough guide not only to the practice of hospitality but its subversive nature, it nevertheless left me somewhat uncomfortable as rather than acknowledge the necessary risk in reaching out to others as a necessary and indeed core element of hospitality, it concerned itself with alleviating such risks. So while it drew at length on the work of Dorothy Day among others, it failed to acknowledge how Day and her Catholic Worker houses of hospitality refused to be deterred by the risks arising from their work.

I am reminded of Deitrich Bonhoeffer's remark in The Cost of Discipleship that when Christ calls us he bids to follow him and die, or John Howard Yoder's in The Politics of Jesus that our journey of discipleship does not end at the foot of the cross but on it. The risk of hospitality is not a problem, it is the point.

Nor can we legitimately insulate ourselves from this through the creation of institutions specializing in hospitality. The point of engaging the other is not to transform her or him but ourselves. We cannot have this done for us by others. This is a point that Ivan Illich made so poignantly in has later work, and that others drawing on his work, particularly John McKnight, have made so clearly since.

So it was somewhat concerning to see a radical faith site such as The Jesus Manifesto discuss hospitality recently with such an emphasis on risk. Yes, in reaching out we will meet sketchy and perhaps even dangerous people. We need not approve what they do, but we are called to avoid judging, condemning or shunning them. The world already has an abundance of this. The Church is called not to reinforce this but to transcend it.