You know how ideas sometimes seem to come together? When I was thinking about themes for my May talks, I was also conscious of the fact that a big event this Sunday is the pot-luck lunch for the Danish family, the Afghan refugees we're helping to settle into Canadian life, along with Reformation Lutheran Church. I knew I wasn't able to talk about the situation in Afghanistan with any credibility, and I've already spoken once about refugees and immigrants in general, so I waited, and tried to be receptive to whatever theme might suggest itself as for the day, and “hospitality” leaped up! I began thinking about the meanings and history of the word. And as usual when I think about words and definitions, I realized that this could easily become a rather dry and theoretical talk. I wanted it to be more immediate and personal, and so I added the word, “here.” Let's consider hospitality, here.

However . . . that didn't entirely remove the dilemma. Where is “here?” Is it this room? There's plenty to be said about our need to be hospitable to all who enter Founders Hall - and it's worth saying many times, but it has been said within recent memory, as we've pondered how to be a welcoming congregation. We'll revisit that at times, but today perhaps calls for a slightly different focus. Where else is “here?” Is it, perhaps, the wider community of Waterloo Region? Here's an article I found in the latest issue of Good Work News, the newsletter of the Working Centre, our Social Action focus for this year. The articleís by Sherry Grise - and as I read it you'll see that we can't quite get away from the theoretical; in fact it helps us to know what we mean by hospitality. Sherry Grise says:

Hospitality is an intercultural and ancient tradition whereby strangers are offered food, shelter and sometimes work. The word hospitality has its roots in the Greek word Xenos, which means stranger and is also the root of the word xenophobia. Xenos then can mean fear of stranger or love of stranger. There were no hospices or hostels for the poor until the 4th century [of the Common Era]. Hospitality and care of individuals in the community was the responsibility of the community. In North America we don't have to go back many generations to find a time when a bench was left by the door for travelers to sleep on.

Nowadays, most of us are comfortable with extending hospitality to family and friends, but it seems radical to consider sharing our meals or homes with a stranger. There are agencies and institutions where people can sleep at night and get a meal for free, but there is still a need in our community for adequate housing and jobs. People are trying to make a home and a living and they are running into real barriers.

At the Working Centre we try to help people find shelter and work, but we are limited by what our community is able to offer. Hospitality can be many things, such as renting an extra room in your house. Or sharing extra space in your garden. If you feel it is not safe to invite a complete stranger to supper, you can instead volunteer at St. John's Kitchen, or simply come and share a meal and talk to someone. Hospitality can also be offering work or training to someone who is having a hard time finding a job because they are still learning English, have literacy challenges, or have a disability of some kind.

I like the way the concept of hospitality has been broadened there to include all the ways in which we try to help people be “at home” in this interconnected world - and the ways in which we try to be “at home” with others, too which is often just as difficult. The concept of hospitality is being revived in all kinds of organizations these days in addition to religious institutions. A medical clinic in Florida advertises that it has created a new concept in patient care “Healing Hospitality,” which aims at creating an environment that contributes to patient care and comfort. The clinic, well known for its pioneering work in medicine, is now leading the way in patient care by merging healing and hospitality, creating an environment where patients can be more comfortable, and less stressed by their hospital experience. The clinicís leadership said,

We want a facility that feels warm and embracing; a facility that creates a comforting environment. Homelike, not clinical; residential, not like a typical hospital. It should have a simple design that allows patients to find their way around easily; for example, when a patient arrives it should be intuitive where to go to register.

The term healing hospitality resonated with everyone at the clinic. It recognized that patients come to hospitals and clinics to heal, not just to get a diagnosis or surgery or other treatment. It also set a new standard of patient service: don't just make them feel better, make them feel cared for. Can you imagine how the concept might be applicable to a congregation, this congregation?

And, by the way, a person of my acquaintance with much experience of hospital chaplaincy tells me about a study of how patients' families remember their interactions with chaplains. It mainly has to do with hospitality: not what the Chaplain said to them about preparing for their relativeís death, or the spiritual significance of their friendís illness, but whether the Chaplain let them use the long-distance phone, or provided an extra blanket for their motherís bed. We care for each other best, as so many people in this congregation demonstrate, by being hospitable to them.

Here might also mean the world of education. In the academic sphere, as well as in health services, the concept of hospitality is being revived. In a recent article titled “The Academy and Hospitality,” John Bennett, an administrator of a secular U.S. college writes of extending oneself in order to welcome the other by sharing and receiving intellectual resources and insights. He notes that, organizationally, being hospitable is usually associated with hotel and restaurant management programs rather than with goals for every program, school, or institution. Instead of modeling hospitality, disciplines and departments may contain deep ideological and personal divisions. Departments and schools often struggle with each other over resources or prestige, and many institutions seem to be locked in competition for students and standing. In fact, in academe the concept of hospitality has lost much of its original power. But as theologian Henri Nouwen observes, "if there is any concept worth restoring to its original depth and evocative potential, it is the concept of hospitality." Bennett says,

. . . intellectual hospitality involves welcoming others through openness in both sharing and receiving claims to knowledge and insight. The sharing is marked by considerateness toward others and recognition that others' distinctive individualities and overall experience are inherently relevant to their learning. The receiving is marked by awareness that however initially strange, the perspective of the other could easily supplement and perhaps correct one's own work or even transform one's self-understanding. Hospitable educators know that adverse evidence may have been overlooked, that the potential for self-deception always accompanies the desire to support one's position, and that different and even foreign perspectives can provide breakthroughs in understanding ......... being intellectually hospitable means being open to the different voices and idioms of others as potential agents for mutual enhancement, not just oppositional conflict.

“Even foreign perspectives can provide breakthroughs in understanding.” That leads to considering another area that may be “here,” another area in which the concept of hospitality may be particularly applicable, and that's especially worth our consideration today, when we're celebrating the settling in Canada of refugees from far away, from Afghanistan via Pakistan. Tahar Ben Jelloun, an award-winning novelist and author of Racism Explained to My Daughter, uses his own experience to illuminate the experience of the Other in his adopted land, France, and everywhere. A Moroccan who emigrated to France in 1971, Tahar Ben Jelloun draws upon his own encounters with racism along with his insights as a practicing psychologist and a gifted novelist to elucidate the racial divisions that plague contemporary society.

In a modern France where openly racist leaders such as National Front spokesman Jean-Marie Le Pen have made significant strides toward broad popular acceptance, Ben Jelloun's book is more topical than ever. His appeal for tolerance -in both public discourse and the law -is a passionate yet reasoned argument that racism simply does not make sense in the multicultural world of today. Here's a review of his book, French Hospitality:

French Hospitality confronts issues of international resonance: the relationship of a formerly colonized people to their onetime colonizers, the encounter between Islam and the modern Judeo-Christian West, and the status of the non-European minorities in Europe today. Underlying these issues is a heartfelt nostalgia for simple, traditional North African hospitality as practiced since time immemorial by a relatively poor and unsophisticated society. Ben Jelloun supplements this rather noble ideal of generosity and welcoming by borrowing the philosophical concept of hospitality . . . in order to illustrate the moral conception of a nation's unconditional acceptance of foreigners. Isn't the belief in welcoming strangers a fundamental mark of civilization? In a political climate where increasingly repressive immigration laws are a national trend as well as an international phenomenon, he contends, it is not surprising that racism has gained a foothold.

With his elegant and imaginative prose, Ben Jelloun shows us both racism's face and the immigrant's heartbreak; but he also evokes the wind of freedom and the ideal of hospitality, and with this gesture offers a kind of hope in extricating ourselves from racism's recidivist incoherences.

We've considered that the “here” of hospitality may be our local community or region, academia, health services, or immigration policy. I suggest to you now that “here” is perhaps most importantly the place where we meet together to enrich our spiritual life, Unitarian House as a whole, beyond the bounds of this particular hall. Hospitality is, after all, essentially a religious, or spiritual, act. I discovered that a couple of church people in the U.S. have written a book very applicable to congregational life, called Hospitality: Life in a Time of Fear, apparently produced in response to the tragic events of September 11, 2001. The authors, Steve Clapp and Fred Bernhard, want to show that the answer to fear is not turning inward but turning outward, and their book explores how hospitality can pull us through the loneliness and fear of our time, how hospitality can help us cope with increased security measures, how hospitality affects family life and friendships, and how hospitality affects what we do in the workplace and community.

As the authors say, and as few of us would deny, we live in a fearful time and have learned to lock our cars, homes, hearts, and minds. But we can find the courage to reach out to others and to keep fear from overwhelming our lives. Hospitality, Clapp and Bernhard suggest, is not just another self-improvement program. True hospitality is rooted in the spiritual life and transforms the way we view ourselves and other people. Our tendency to spend time only with those we already know limits us and keeps us from receiving all that life offers. We need to see the unknown person not as a stranger but as a guest providing the opportunity to enrich our lives.

Clapp and Bernhard tell us that hospitality can help us reclaim a sense of community in the neighborhoods where we live, in the workplace, with those with whom we do business, and even with some persons we may encounter only once. They say we need to discover what hospitality can mean for the poor, for race relations, for those struggling with drug and alcohol problems, for criminals and crime victims, and for others in our society who are hurting. They claim, moreover, that hospitality should be at the heart of the faith community and has the power to transform congregational life, as people are helped to deal with their fears and reach out to others. Well, all that is quite a come-on for a book, and I might even buy it if I can find it at a discount sometime, because I'm pretty well sold on the authorsí final assertion: that in a society filled with both rational and irrational fear, we are called to embrace the stranger. Hospitality is not always safe, but it is not an option for a congregation which affirms the worth and dignity of all persons. It is not always safe, but it is mandatory, not an option.

Let's assume, just for a few moments, that we can take this mandate seriously. What might it mean to us as a congregation? Here are some possibilities:

As caring hosts, we need to provide the kind of acceptance and the opportunities which respond to the needs and comfort level of our guests. While our culture teaches us to fear strangers, we also know that our best friends were once strangers to us. Life is transformed when we see the stranger as potential friend.

Children belong as fully to the congregation as do their parents. This means looking at the facilities and the life of the congregation from a childís perspective. The physical facilities can be part of our congregationsís welcome or can be a barrier to participation by new families. Teenagers are struggling for identity and coping with a multitude of pressures. Our hospitality should offer them a safe place to be themselves and to grow in themselves and their relationships.

Well, how are we embodying those possibilities? How are we going about being hospitable as a congregation? Here are just a few of the things I see us doing:

Weíre inviting new people into our midst ñ and they're coming! With word-of-mouth, invitations to neighbours and friends, our web site, our advertising, we're encouraging people to see us as a welcoming place. And most of those who come, come again, which is wonderful. Tell your friends ñ tell them that this is a place trying to be hospitable and eager to provide the kind of acceptance and the opportunities which respond to the needs and comfort level of our guests. If you're a newcomer, tell those of us who've been here longer what would help you to be more comfortable and feel more accepted, or what you think might help your friends.

Weíre trying to be open to those whom our culture teaches us to fear ñ the different, the odd, the poor, the needy, the sick and difficult, all those who seem strange. Weíre trying to see strangers as potential friends. Please make it known that at the First Unitarian Congregation of Waterloo, you don't have to fit the “norm” or the average to be accepted. Please know that we welcome differences and diversity and hope to be hospitable to them.

Helped by our Director of Religious Education, the childrenís teachers and their parents, we're paying careful attention to the hospitality needs of our children. There's going to be some extensive work going on this summer to improve the hospitality we offer to our youngest friends ñ and we're going to be hosts to a whole new group of youngsters in the Fall, when a preschool rents our space during the week. This is hospitality, here.
Our teenagers now know that once a month they can come for an evening of Movie and Pizza. Low-key, no heavy morals, just some easy-going hospitality. If you haven't volunteered yet to be part of this, you may want to consider it.

Every Saturday, a local group called “Food, Not Bombs” uses our kitchen to prepare the vegetarian food which they serve, freely, to people in need in the Kitchener area. Weíre proud to play a small part in making this humanitarian effort possible, simply by making our facilities available. Itís painless and easy ñ but then, no-one says hospitality has to be difficult ñ and it participates in a more far-reaching hospitality, here, in our region.

We'll soon be welcoming pagans, and perhaps a Buddhist meditation group, and continuing to welcome our Womynspirit Circle, on a regular basis, because we believe that there are many ways of putting into practice the Principles which we hold dear and that all of those ways belong in our space. Itís hospitality, here.

Weíre starting to get ready for hosting the annual gathering of the Central Region of the Canadian Unitarian Council in late October. This used to be called the Cluster Meeting; its name is changing along with the structure of the CUC as we enter our new stage of independence and autonomy as a national movement. What a privilege it will be to host the first gathering under the new structure! This is hospitality here!

And today, especially, we're celebrating our ecumenical partnership with Reformation Lutheran Church in extending hospitality to the Danish family, who have so much to offer to Canada and to us, by way of increased understanding and appreciation of each other's ways. Thanks to Mag and Jack Horman, and to all in this congregation who've worked with refugees in the past and are going to attend the luncheon today. This is hospitality, here.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this reflection, itís paradoxical that words from the Greek stem “xen” bear on the one side the concept of 'foreign,' 'alien' . . . and on the other side that of "guest." I hope we can keep in mind, through all our current hospitable activities, and as we seek to increase and extend them, that every call on us to be a host is also an opportunity to be the guest of those who can enrich our lives with new understandings. As UUA Past President Bill Schulz said, may we practise the fragile art of hospitality in all our activities here. And as a good book says, may we not be forgetful to entertain strangers, “for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” So may it be.