The Heart of Hospitality: a book review, Cathryn flowers Ritchie

Book Review: Radical Hospitality

Cathryn flowers Ritchie

If you read Radical Hospitality, your definition of hospitality will not only broaden, but you will experience a paradigm shift that makes hospitality more about who you are than what you do. The authors, Father Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt, write tenderly and truthfully as they present The Rules of St. Benedict as a life style for all Christians. Though they are not reformed presbyterianst (my leanings) but they will reform your view of body life and what it means to be "community.

After reading this book in the spring of 2004, I longed to experience a Benedictine Monastery, to see how they lived out The Rules in their environment. Within months I had that opportunity when my father passed away. My family was invited to stay with close friends (Benedictine sisters) they'd known for 20 years. My mother had volunteered with the sisters for over 30 years and my father was their (3 sisters wo were sisters) fishing guide. After he developed Alzheimer's they continued their relationship. During the difficult days of my father's funeral the sisters cared for us: food, housing, listening hearts and prayers. I felt like I'd come home. My time in the monastery with these women was as sweet a retreat into community and caring as I've ever experienced. Jesus was there.

St. Benedic based the Rules on Jesus' teachings. He gleaned from the scriptures lessons on ministering to strangers and that is the premise of this book. "Benedict teaches us that if we close ourselves to the stranger, we close ourselves to the sacred. If we lock our doors and bolt our gates, we are forbidding God to come to us."1

We have been told that we will be less, as individuals and as a church, when we don't have the poor among us. The poor are not only those who are poor in possessions, but also those poor in spirit, in mind , in soul. But do we really believe that and live it? "Benedict teaches us that if we close ourselves to the stranger, we close ourselves to the sacred. If we lock our doors and bolt our gates, we are forbidding God to come to us" 2. The 'stranger' is not only those we don't know but they are also those who we know but we don't open our heartsto.

I'm continually learning hospitality is not merely opening my home for friends to come to dinner. It can include that, but it is more how we relate and connect to every friend or stranger that crosses our path daily. Often we miss the divine appointments God has for us as we excuse ourselves: "no time", "no room", "too uncomfortable for me", "not my gift".

When people consider hospitality they often believe they need to have the decorating skills of Martha Stewart or the culinary gifts of Wolfgang Puck. The authors remind us,

"Benedictine hospitality is not about sipping tea and making bland talk with people who live next door or work with you. Hospitality is a lively, courageous, and convivial way of living that challenges our compulsion either to turn away or to turn inward and disconnect ourselves from others.

Hospitality is not optional to a well-balanced and healthy life. It meets the most basic need of the human being to be known and to know others. It addresses the core loneliness that we avoid with the bustle and haste of our hectic lives. There is a big loneliness at the center of every person. It is universal. There's a reason for the loneliness. It is meant to lead you somewhere. Even if you are unconscious of it, the big lonely is driving you homeward." 3

Page after page, Father Homan and Lonni draw sweet pictures and poignant (but not sentimental) stories of the truth about connecting with intimacy.

As Christine Pohl (Making Room) said, Protestants encountering strangers are acutely aware of being 'Jesus' to them; what Protestants lack, and what the Benedictines encourage, is seeing Jesus in the stranger. We must see God's image in the stranger and realize our lives will be richer and fuller if we look to see what the stranger has to offer me rather than what I have to offer him. The stranger in our midst is where we will find Jesus' face (Matthew 25).

The authors define hospitality: "When people are bent over with the weight of suffering, they need from us only our presence. If we give them that, truly give them that, we become for them the presence of God in a most tangible way. That is hospitality".4

This book is a tender gem. It causes me to long for Home and even to believe that we can experience than Home even now.

1. p. xviii

2. p. xxii

3. pp. 9-10

4. p. 196