What does it mean to create a welcoming environment? How do we welcome each other, even if we don’t understand or know everything about each other? On the cusp of National Coming Out Day, let’s talk about the concept of hospitality, of giving, and of understanding.
Hospitality is a pretty slippery concept, even though it seems straightforward. I didn’t realize until I started researching it just how different the concept can be across different cultures and different times. Mostly it seems to depend on who you mean to extend hospitality to: is hospitality for family? Friends? Guests? Strangers? While the concept of hospitality encompasses all this, it does seem like hospitality to family versus hospitality to, say, refugees, are on different levels from each other, entailing almost entirely different things.
Many, many people have tried to define hospitality and give it some foundation in the study of philosophy. Derrida, Levinas, Kant. Emmanuel Kant’s description is particularly compelling, I think: to him, hospitality is a natural right, possessed by everyone, by virtue of their “rights to communal possession of the earth.” Basically, we are all welcome on this planet, because we are all OF this planet. The argument is so simple: if you are from this earth, you have rights to the things on the earth. It’s then easy to extend that to any person and then, to any animal, any plant, anything.
Kant was an interesting guy, a philosopher who thought and engaged deeply with the world, while never leaving his hometown of Konigsberg. For him personally, he probably had trouble conceiving of a place where most people wouldn’t know each other, nor care about one another. The urban life of today would have been almost unthinkable, I imagine. He was very like another group of people we’ll talk about a little later.
Kant was an agnostic, but was raised in a very strict Protestant household. He grew up surrounded by the Christian idea of what hospitality meant, which of course came mostly from the Greek and Levantine idea. There’s a line in Hebrews that gets right at the heart of their concept of hospitality, and which was our opening words this morning: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels without knowing it.”
The reason this so perfectly illustrates the Christian concept of hospitality lies in the word “strangers.” In the Classical world, strangers were often seen as problems. In Greek myths, strangers are often the gods in disguise, and if you weren’t careful, those strangers could and would curse you or kill you for the wrong sort of hospitality. The Torah and Bible spend many, many passages telling people, over and over, that strangers should not be reviled, but welcomed. This suggests that they *needed* to say it a lot to get the point across. Hospitality is a virtue, but one that extends almost specifically to strangers and outsiders in the Judeo-Christian literature. The original word, ger, specifically means an immigrant or emigrant—a person who left their actual home and came to a new place. There was no real concept of a stranger who came from the same place as you. I wonder how different our modern interpretations of the Bible would be if the line was “be not forgetful to entertain refugees, for thereby some have entertained angels without knowing it.”
One of the early Church fathers, John Chrysostom (Chrysostomos means “golden-mouthed”, he was quite a speaker apparently), extended the concept of hospitality further than it had been in pre-Christian times, when it was a sort of obligation to be performed, but not much joy inherent in it. As Archbishop of Constantinople in the 5th century AD, Chrysostom preached constantly about the power of giving, as a form of elevated hospitality “What good is it if your Eucharist table is overloaded with golden chalices when your brother is dying of hunger? Start with your brother and then with what is left, adorn the alter.” To Chrysostom, charity should be like hospitality—personal, and also transforming both the giver and the recipient. He called it “washing the hands of your soul.” By performing hospitality, both the giver and the recipient are changed for the better.
Islam, the other Abrahamic faith, is embedded deeply, first and foremost, in the culture of the Bedouins. For the Bedouins, hospitality was not considered voluntary as it was in the Classical world, or even in the Bible. There was no *entreaty* to be nice to strangers. This is because the very idea of turning someone away from your food and water, in the desert, would very likely mean that person’s death. Hospitality in a place like the desert was a necessity, not a luxury.
I wanted to use Moses as my example here because in modern movies, Moses receives such lifesaving hospitality in Midian from the Bedouins. And Moses is the most important prophet in Islamic tradition beside Mohammed, so I thought that there would be a great moralistic story in the Qu’ran about hospitality. However, in the Qu’ran, Moses isn’t saved from death, he’s actually just in search of a job, and helps the daughters with their flocks because he’s hoping to find work since he just got exiled. It’s a lot less exciting, but probably a more realistic retelling of Moses’ story. What person of Egypt would walk into the desert unprepared at all for traveling? It would be suicide.
However, the actions of Muslims would be the same, no matter if Moses was dying or healthy. Welcome the traveler with generosity. In fact, karam (generosity) is an integral part of hospitality; and the Islamic ethical system is deeply rooted in these basic ideas. Hospitality cannot exist without generosity; one necessitates the other. And the word “stranger” actually isn’t even in the Qu’ran. In early and medieval Islam, it was not a known category. Instead people were referred to as travellers or often, guests. The softly pejorative term of stranger, which always denotes someone other, wasn’t part of those early teachings. This reminds me of our old philosopher Kant, who never left his hometown and who saw everyone as deserving of hospitality because of their shared citizenship on this earth. There are multiple commandments in the Qu’ran to give shelter, feed others, look after people who need help. There are no strangers. The reasoning went that God’s giving knows no limits, and the faithful must always try to emulate God.
Now, generosity and giving may reflect God’s nature, but the actual practice of hospitality definitely has limits. We can’t do *everything*. And there are obligations of both host and guest. As Dr. Mona Siddiqui put it, “This is because hospitality is real, not an ideal.” It’s time-consuming. It’s emotionally, and sometimes physically, demanding.
Dr. Siddiqui literally wrote the book on hospitality, in 2016. Titled “Hospitality and Islam”, she places the concept of hospitality within the universe of Islamic theology. A recipient of the Order of the British Empire, she is a professor of interreligious studies at the University of Edinburgh. Having lived her life between Karachi and the UK, her perspective on what “hospitality” means is certainly more nuanced than the average person’s. She has a story about receiving hospitality that illustrates beautifully some of the concepts in her book:
“When I was an undergraduate in the 1980s studying French and Arabic, I went to Cairo for the first time as part of my year abroad. After arriving at my pre-arranged accommodation in a relatively poor suburb of the city, I had to wait outside for a while as keys and rooms were being sorted out. I stood there with my new suitcase and new expectations and looked around anxious and curious at the dust, animals, and poverty around me.
“A young woman with a small child was watching me as she squatted near the doorstep of my flat. She stared at me for a while and after some time I saw her get up, find a large piece of cardboard, dust it clean and place it on the doorstep. She patted on it, beckoning to me to sit down and take the weight off my feet. I smiled at her nervously, knowing that she had made a special effort for a new guest in the neighbourhood. I was neither friend nor enemy, but a stranger to whom she had reached out. I was unknown to this neighbourhood and they were unknown to me.
“Later on, as I was getting settled in the flat, two young children came up and spoke to me in the local Arabic dialect. I couldn’t understand what they were saying and became slightly impatient at their repeated visits and knocking on the door. That evening I discovered that they had been sent by their mother, the same woman, to ask if I needed anything because I was a guest in their midst. I felt ashamed and ungracious.
“I could recall many such experiences. But it is important to press deeper, to recognise that that hospitality is fundamental to the spiritual life. It is not only expressed in acts we perform and gifts we give — it is, more importantly, a state of mind. A generosity of spirit lies at the core of human hospitality, making hospitality the virtue which defines humanity itself.”
Going back to Dr. Siddiqui’s initial quote, which is that hospitality can be demanding, can feel demanding because it is real, not an ideal, we are put into a kind of quandry. That woman who kept sending her kids to make sure Siddiqui was okay, she was taking a lot of time out of her no doubt busy day to care about a stranger. Hospitality can define your humanity, but it is also sometimes hard and uncomfortable. It is not an airy concept like “reflection” or “spiritualism”, which you can achieve by being alone with your thoughts. Hospitality requires us to act, in order to be practiced. We have to prepare to unsettle ourselves, and then actually unsettle ourselves, in order to help another person. The evangelical pastor, Brian McLaren, compared the willingness to work with the actual act of work when he wrote that the Christian “witness” is Christ-centered but ultimately weak. Witnesses only watch. What is needed is a “withness”, not a witness. Talking and working with people, not just standing by and watching what happens with empty hands.
So how do we create environments like that within our own lives? I say “lives”, not “spaces” or “communities” because that’s really what it comes down to, for me. Where do we make time for others out of our own lives? It’s one thing to give someone space, to tolerate their presence or actions, or even to give someone food or water as the Bedouins would, but it’s another thing to welcome that person into your life, where they will take up your time and your energy, even if just in some small way.
Tomorrow, October 11, is National Coming Out Day. This “holiday” of the LGBTQ community has been observed since 1988, when a few leaders within the community decided that instead of responding defensively to what was at the time a rampant anti-LGBTQ sentiment, they would instead put a positive “spin” on the concept of coming out of the closet. In 1988, this was riskier than it is today. Today, National Coming Out Day has a sort of celebratory air but at first it was understood that the people who used the day to come out, either privately or publicly, were sometimes risking their very lives to make that choice. Even today, the choice to make a public proclamation can be a double-edged sword, still a heavy decision. As Preston Mitchum said in his 2013 article “Don’t Disparage the Closet”, “focusing so intensely on coming out places the burden on the individual to brave society rather than on society to secure the safety of the individual.” Allies and friends want to participate in the celebration of someone’s announcement, but then we must also create a safe and welcoming space for those people to exist without fear. Luckily, that’s what Unitarian Universalism is about. From the first principle to the seventh, our imperative is always be focused on not just making space, but making time. Making time for justice, making time for peace, making time for truth, making time for encouragement and community. Making time for someone to feel safe enough to speak their truth.
One of my best friends came out to me on national coming out day, 1998. He had never said it out loud to anyone before, but he didn’t need me to do anything that I couldn’t handle: I just needed to support him, to listen, to give him the time he needed and the room to be fully himself.
And to me, that’s hospitality: making someone feel safe, feel welcome to a bit of your time and a bit of your life. Hospitality then, even with its spiritual roots, its divine mandate, is really so, so simple. Make time. Create room. Care about another person’s reality and offer your time and self to make their reality just a bit better. You don’t need God overhead, chiding you to be hospitable. Just your heart, open and welcoming. And when we all do this, we won’t need a National Coming Out Day, because we’ll have accepted each other for who we are already.
In the meantime, as we work towards that kind of world, we can all follow Desmond Tutu’s gentle advice and remember that we are made for beautiful things, made to “tell the world that there are no outsiders.” We all belong inside the circle of care.
