Kirkepiscatoid

Today’s readings are about hospitality...how hospitality changes things one person at a time, even things like racism. She cites the Rule of Benedict, where all are taken in and welcomed—the poor, the pilgrim, the rich, the deprived, the young, the old.

Reflection questions:

1. Would you describe yourself as a hospitable person? Why or why not?

Mostly I would say I am fairly hospitable, but sometimes I would say that some of that is the 55% extrovert in me and that I might actually APPEAR more hospitable than I really FEEL. The 45% introvert side of me kind of wants to not be bothered. However, I do think I for the most part, try to create an atmosphere of “acceptance” for people because I know what it feels like to feel marginalized. One of my friends tells me “I treat people like they are the most important person in the room.” He says that is why I’m open to diversity in ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc., simply because I see one person who is “the most important person in the room.” But I admit I struggle between that side of me that is easy to be hospitable vs. the part of me that wants to be left alone. I can only handle being any extroverted activity so long before I have to back out a while.

2. Reflect on those times in your life when you were received with true hospitality. How did it make you feel?

I am thinking about my recent trip to Iowa City to help with the floods. The group they put me with, they took me right in. I was “one of the gang.” They made me feel “at home”--like I had known them forever. I’d best describe it as a “comfortable” feeling.

3. Meditate on receiving every person—rich and deprived, young and old, with “the same warmth and the same care, the same dignity and the same attention.” In what ways would this change your life?

Wow, tough question!

I think in some ways it would make me feel “less bound up in myself.” I have a tendency to feel, for lack of a better term, “spiritually constipated.” it is literally a sense that something inside of me WANTS to come out, and my guts are rumbling like it NEEDS to come out, but “nothin’s movin’!”

I say this because when I give in other ways—financially, or give the gift of my time and energy—those forms of “giving” have a real sense of “release”, not just of my soul, but physically. I think if I could be more hospitable, this would also create another form of “release.”

What I am discovering in middle age, is that I have bottled up a lot of stuff for many years and measured my strength in terms of how well I could “keep it all in”. It became a wrestling match, where “winning” = control. I am seeing now that a person cannot keep all that stuff in forever and expect the bottle it’s kept in to have any sort of reliable integrity. There has to be release. There has to be a sense of “what needs to be released somehow.” I am just now getting on the learning curve about such things!