This week's guest author is Cassandra Farrin, Marketing Director of the Westar Institute and the Editor of Polebridge Press.
Hospitality between I and Thou
A Meditation on Bishop Spong’s Thesis #9: Ethics
I need to speak candidly with you about hospitality, perhaps the most iconic of Christian values and one of the easiest to go on attributing to the historical Jesus in spite of how much else has been stripped away from his biography. We need to discuss this because of the scary things people have been saying about refugees, about Black men, about what can be done to women. Because of the people who are bleeding in the streets.
Perhaps, like me, you’re often afraid to be hospitable.
You were hospitable and you were hurt. Or you were hospitable and someone else got hurt.
You were hospitable and then, as a result of your hospitality, you became responsible for something or someone so precious that you could no longer afford to let just anyone through your door.
You were hospitable night after night, until you became too weary to get up and answer the door.
Sometimes, you were the one knocking.
The decision to open the door can’t be dictated in advance. To paraphrase Bishop Spong’s ninth thesis on ethics: Once we give up ancient codes like the Ten Commandments, our morality is no longer decided for us. It must be forged in the space between rules-of-thumb and real life. In The Folly of God, John D. Caputo describes this space as that which “calls” to us or that which we “are called” to do, without a clear subject:
If we could identify the caller, assess the credentials of the source, evaluate its authority, we would get on top of it, make it our own. The call would come from an ontological caller ID. … If I could say this is God or biology or culture, there would be an end to it. My mind would be put at ease. … [But] that would deprive the call of its uncanniness, of its riskiness, of its madness and folly. (91)
Caputo warns us that the risk of hospitality is irreducible. He says the person on the other side of the door really could be the person we most fear and it really could also be the person most dreadfully in need of our help. Each time, we have to decide whether we’re going to take the risk.
And it doesn’t get easier, because the risk is renewed with each new knock at the door.
Namsoon Kang of Brite Divinity School complicated this to yet another level at the Spring 2016 session of the Seminar on God and the Human Future (a recent successor of the Jesus Seminar). In recounting the story of Lot, who offered hospitality to angels, Kang observed that sometimes hospitality to the other requires the sacrifice of the familiar. In Lot’s case, he handed over his daughters to his neighbors to be raped in the angels’ stead. We must not forget this liability as well.
I agree with Caputo and with Kang that these risks are real, and yet at the same time let me grant us all a modicum of relief. Habits and other rules-of-thumb exist for a reason. Habit is not always a sign of moral weakness; it can simply be common sense. What I’m trying to say is: Don’t feel guilty for preprogramming 9-1-1 into your phone and handing it to your sister before you open the door.
But, let’s still open the door, as often as we can bear to. Speaking as a foster and now adoptive parent, I can tell you from direct experience that hospitality can also lead to love.
There’s a recent, haunting poem by Anya Silver I want to share with you before I conclude. “In the Sanatorium” (2014) opens in an Austrian sanatorium with one dying German confessing his sins to another:
Under orders, he had taken enemies of the state,
shoved them between two stopped trains,
and burned them to death. Then swept away remains.
Could he ever be forgiven for such a sin?
Unbeknownst to the confessor, the man in the bed beside him (the narrator’s father) was the son of one of the men he killed. But this is not a tale of hospitality, for when the father might have spoken, he turned his head away. Forget forgiveness; he doesn’t even breach the pain. The narrator, having inherited this unresolved moment, concludes:
Riven, six more decades, between two ghosts:
one wasted from coughing, pale; one burning.
Both beyond any word he might have spoken.
Now it is the narrator’s turn to decide her next move: How will this memory haunt her? Will it push her toward hospitality in her encounters with others, or will she also turn away (out of a natural fear, and who can blame her)? As the poet does, I’ll leave you with the question, but also with a lovely, non-apocalyptic image that I learned from Jeffrey Robbins, who in turn inherited it from Catherine Malabou: Rather than imagining our world apocalyptically like a phoenix that dies in a burst of flames but comes back perfectly out of the ashes, we might imagine it instead like the salamander, who may lose his limbs and retain scars, yet regrows the limbs, lives with the scars, and keeps going.
Hospitality is like that, I think. We end up with the scars, but we also receive gifts we could never have counted on in advance. I think of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables (the book, not the musical) who, after robbing the bishop who first showed him hospitality, was dragged back by the police only to be given back all that he stole and more. “Don’t forget, don’t ever forget,” the bishop said, although Valjean remembered promising no such thing, “that you promised me to use this silver to make an honest man of yourself.”
Now, what is often forgotten about this story is that in the very next scene Jean Valjean steals a coin from a little boy by slamming his foot on top of it when the boy drops it. Only after the little boy leaves does his petty theft fold together with the bishop’s pardon, leading him, for the first time in nineteen years, to cry and shout, “I am a miserable bastard!” The rest of Les Misérables is the story of a very honest and good man who time and again outdoes himself in showing hospitality, resulting in much discomfort and yet also much love.
In this world, is this not the closest thing we have to a miracle?
Cassandra Farrin is the Marketing Director of the Westar Institute and the Editor of Polebridge Press. A US-UK Fulbright Scholar, she has an M.A. in Religious Studies from Lancaster University (England) and a B.A. in Religious Studies from Willamette University. She is passionate about books and projects that in some way address the intersection of ethics and early Christian history, and in that spirit has hosted the
Ethics and Early Christianity blog since 2013. Her poetic retelling of the Nag Hammadi text “On the Origin of the World” will appear in
Rape Culture, Gender Violence and Religion: Christian Perspectives (forthcoming; eds. Emily Colgan and Caroline Blyth).
Read the essay online
here.
