The Guest

Today I read this wrenching and probing poem by Wendell Berry. Like all of Berry's work, it hits too close to home and challenges my feeble attempts to follow the way of Jesus daily. This is especially challenging as we move into the season of Advent and remember that our God is always coming, sometimes as a pregnant young girl looking for a room, sometimes as a "guest" encountered on the street, sometimes in our neighbor, and sometimes in the form of family, who no matter how close always remain strangers and guests to us....

God, as you continue to come into your world and walk into our lives, give us the grace to see you and the strength to refuse "to remain strange" to the threshold of our heart and a seat at our table.

The Guest

Washed into the doorway
by the wake of the traffic
he wears humanity
like a third-hand shirt
—blackened with enough
of Manhattan’s dirt to sprout
a tree, or poison one.
His empty hand has led him
where he has come to.
our differences claim us.
He holds out his hand,
in need of all that’s mine.

And so we’re joined, as deep
as son and father. His life
is offered me to choose.

Shall I begin servitude
to him? Let this cup pass.
Who am I? But charity must
suppose knowing no better,
that this is a man fallen
among thieves, or come
to this strait by no fault
—that our differences
is not a judgment,
though I can afford to eat
and am made his judge.

I am, I nearly believe,
the Samaritan who fell
into the ambush of his heart
on the way to another place.
My stranger waits, his hand
held out like something to read,
as though its emptiness
is an accomplishment.
I give him a smoke and the price
of a meal, no more

—not sufficient kindness
or believable sham.
I paid him to remain strange
to my threshold and table,
to permit me to forget him—
knowing I won’t. He’s the guest
of my knowing, though not asked.

- Wendell Berry

The Meal that Makes Us Family and Friends

This morning before leaving the house, I set out bread and wine, trying to get our table ready for our small group to gather after worship. Against my inner prodding, I didn't take the time to reset the table with placemats and cloth napkins. I felt alright about it at the time. It's early, and I wanted to have some time to pray in silence this morning before going to a meeting with my leadership and finalizing some things for this morning's class. After reading this quote from Nouwen, I think I made the wrong decision.

We all need to eat and drink to stay alive. But having a meal is more than eating and drinking. It is celebrating the gifts of life we share. A meal together is one of the most intimate and sacred human events. Around the table we become vulnerable, filling one another's plates and cups and encouraging one another to eat and drink. Much more happens at a meal than satisfying hunger and quenching thirst. Around the table we become family, friends, community, yes, a body.

That is why it is so important to "set" the table. Flowers, candles, colorful napkins all help us to say to one another, "This is a very special time for us, let's enjoy it!"

I'm also thinking about the Eucharistic table, the table of the Lord. In a little while I will gather with a group of people for worship, which, against our Protestant focus on the sermon, is centered and grounded at Table. This morning, as every Sunday, we will be welcomed to the Table of the Lord, to come and feast from the overflowing abundance of God's creative goodness and life-giving hospitality.

Yet, the table that sits front and center in our midst is cold and sterile. The focus is not bread and wine, but metal trays that conceal the sacred, rather than drawing us into the welcome of God. The small, lifeless crackers and the plastic, individual shots of juice seem to turn us inward, disconnecting us from one another more than drawing us more fully into a shared life, a body. In many ways, our table changes Nouwen's final line to something a bit different. The stacked trays do remind us that this is a special time, but I'm not sure that they invite us to "enjoy it!"

So, I'm struck this morning by the messages that are at times latent and others explicit in our our worship. As we gather at the table of the Lord this morning, are we becoming friends of God? Around the table are we becoming family, friends, community, a body with one another? How is our experience shaping our life together with the Triune God and with one another?

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 health life. It meets the most basic need of the human being to be known and to know others (Homan and Pratt, Radical Hospitality, 9).

A Rabbit, a Frog, and a Lesson on Hospitality

A new genre has been added to my reading repertoire of late: children's books. There are few things that I love more than reading books. Add a cute little daughter saying "Let's read a different book now, daddy," and I melt. The dense theology texts go back in the backpack, and we grab another Theodore Geisel or Stan and Jan Berenstain special.

As a family, we spend far too much time at the Lake Orion library and bring home crates of books at a time. One of the books that is on our frequent check out list is Sandy Asher's Too Many Frogs. The book is fun, creative, aesthetically wonderful (illustrations by Keith Graves), and one of the most accessible lessons in the Christian tradition of hospitality that I've seen.

It begins with a simple declaration of Rabbit’s quiet, calm, uninterrupted life:

"Rabbit lived by himself in the hollow of an old tree.
He cooked for himself.
He tied up after himself.
And at the end of each and every day, he read himself a story.
It was a simple way of life - no fuss, no clutter. And Rabbit liked it."

Then, just as he's sliding back into his recliner to read a new story, Rabbit hears a "knock-knockety-knocking" at his door. With that knock, Rabbit's tidy, “no fuss, no clutter” world is intruded by Froggie. The rest of the story is a walk through Rabbit's struggle to learn to live with this new intrusion by the other, to find a new way of welcome and of grace, especially when it shatters his expectations and preferences of how his evenings might go. After much inner turmoil and outer struggle, Rabbit realizes that Froggie’s intrusion is an offer of grace, a chance for Rabbit to discover "a different way of life. And Rabbit liked it."

The story reminds me of the reality of hospitality as a Christian discipline. It is an offer of grace that is full of intrusion. It has little to do with the Southern Living or Martha Stewart kinds of plans and preparations. These guests are often not invited, stumbling into our no fuss, no clutter lives and wreaking havoc. It has to do with an openness of life, one that struggles to allow the grace of welcome to tip the scales, rather than mistrust and fear. It is about discovering that our thoughts and perspectives are provisional and that the other just might have something to offer. This kind of hospitality is never easy, but, if we take Scripture seriously, when we open our lives and welcome the intrusion of strangers and guests, we might come to discover that it's been God's hand "knock-knockety-knocking" at door.

I hope that N and I can show radical hospitality and truly welcome the gift of strangers, expecting to encounter the presence of God in them. Most importantly, I hope and I pray that N and I model for MJ the hospitality of God that is at the heart of this little book. (Hmm... reminds me of the importance of a story-formed morality, but that's gonna have to wait for another day.)

Continuing Communion...

In light of the post on commun(ion/al) yesterday, I thought that this latest essay by Sara Miles in NPR's This I Believe series was amazing. The essay, called "Strangers Bring Us Closer to God" is about the power of the Eucharistic experience to transform her worldview and mode of living in the world. (Interesting when praxis/experience leads and transforms our belief which then transforms our praxis experience....)

A few excerpts:

That first communion knocked me upside-down. Faith turned out not to be abstract at all, but material and physical. I’d thought Christianity meant angels and trinities and being good. Instead, I discovered a religion rooted in the most ordinary yet subversive practice: a dinner table where everyone is welcome, where the despised and outcasts are honored.


But I learned that hunger can lead to more life—that by sharing real food I’d find communion with the most unlikely people; that by eating a piece of bread I’d experience myself as part of one body. This I believe: that by opening ourselves to strangers, we will taste God.