“Making Room”

Suggested scripture: John 6:1-15

“There is a boy here who has five barley loaves, and two fish.”  This familiar story from John’s gospel is a story of Jesus’ miracle. It is also a story of hospitality.

Hospitality is about inviting another into a space that offers safety and shelter. It is a willingness to create time and space for another. It can be as dramatic as Mother Teresa making space for the dying of Calcutta, or as simple as being willing to give someone your full attention for a few minutes. Hospitality is about making room.

The Bible is full of stories about hospitality.
            Abraham and Sarah offer hospitality to three strangers who turn out to be angels.
            Naomi and Ruth offer hospitality to each other.
            The Samaritan offers hospitality to the stranger wounded on the side of the road.
            Jesus offers hospitality to the woman about to be stoned.
These are stories of people offering safety and shelter.
These are stories of people making room for one another.

I think of hospitality as making room because hospitality, like the spiritual path, is about surrender and emptiness. I discover that when I am full (of myself, of worries, of my busyness, of anger), then I cannot make space for another who comes to me for safety and shelter. I need to empty myself if I am going to make room for another in my day or my heart or my dreams or my attention.

There are many ways to practice hospitality. Some welcome people into their homes. Some offer emotional shelter. Deep listening is a form of hospitality. Some nurture and tend: hospitality to the children, the elderly, those needing care. Some work on justice issues, reminding society of its need to offer hospitality to the marginalized. Some see to it that the church is a place of welcome, of shelter. Some offer hospitality to the dying.

In our gospel story, I picture Andrew, eager to help, speaking with excitement: “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish.” I imagine his next sentence is timid, embarrassed; he’d gotten scornful looks from the others, so he backtracks: “But what is that among so many.” We’re all in favor of hospitality, Andrew, but this is the real world.

In the film Sister Act, the Mother Superior agrees to house in her convent a woman who has witnessed a crime and therefore is in danger. But when she opens the door and sees Whoopi Goldberg in her fullest nightclub singer street self, she slams the door on Whoopie’s face. The Monseignor whispers to the Mother Superior, “You have taken a vow of hospitality to all in need!” And Mother Superior says, “I lied.”

That’s how I often feel.

If I offer hospitality to the marginalized, it is going to take up a whole lot of my time.
If I offer hospitality to someone of another race or religion or class, the constant effort to understand each other is going to wear me out. Remembering to make room even for people I loves is just about more than I can handle as it is.

But still, there it is: the need to make room for the other, in our families, on our planet. Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arch, worldwide communities for people with disabilities, says “To love someone is not first of all to do things for them, but to reveal the them their beauty and value.” That’s hospitality.  (Quote from page 16 of From Brokenness to Community by Jean Vanier.)

Let’s look at some of the places where me might make room…practice hospitality.

We make room for another when we listen. When was the last time someone really listened to you? We listen when we turn off both the tv and the cell phone; when we refuse to spend the time thinking up what we’re going to say as soon as it’s our turn; when we give our full attention to the other. Few things say “I love you” as much as this. We have emptied our schedule and made room. We have emptied our mind, which would prefer to be full of its own ideas and come-backs, and made room.

Hospitality is an issue in the life of our nation and world, although we don’t always use that word in our political context. How will we deal with illegal immigrants? What should we do about the growing privitization of water? What about out government’s response to terrorism? How do we hold together our fear and our desire to practice hospitality?

I notice that the more afraid we get, the more we give ourselves permission as individuals and as a nation to give up our deepest values. No one will blame us if we live out of our fear instead of our faith. No one will blame us if we join with everyone else and live out of an ethic of suspicion instead of an ethic of love. But it seems to me that the more violence confronts us, the more crucial it is that some among us continue to practice hospitality.

The film Gandhi captures a powerful moment in Gandhi’s life. A Hindu leader comes to the bedside of Gandhi, pleading that he end one of his long fasts. Gandhi reaffirms his determination to end his fast only when the Hindus and Muslims cease fighting.

With hatred in his eyes, the Hindu leader vows to fight on. He tells Gandhi how the Muslims killed his little boy. In turn, he captured a Muslim boy and killed him. He breaks down then, and admits, “I have been living in hell.”

Gandhi reflects for a moment, and then says softly, “I think I know a way out of hell. Go and find a boy like your son whom the Muslims killed, take him into your home as your son, and raise him as a Muslim.”

Gandhi knew biblical hospitality, the radicalness of it, the toughness of it, the power of it to heal.

Here’s another place we can make room, though you may never have thought of it this way. Marriage or committed relationship is another form of the spiritual practice of hospitality. In a marriage or union, we make room for another. We make room for him to be different than we are. We make room for her to make mistakes. We make room for the other’s dreams, even if they are not our dreams. Marriage is about promising another person that they will, within this relationship, always have room to be.

Hospitality is about making room for God, too. We make room for God when we get our own stuff out of the way now and then, when we stop all the distractions, when we sit in stillness and silence. Once I was obsessing about my contemplative prayer practice. Was I doing it right? How about a different technique? Did I need to read another book about it? Maybe if I bought one of those meditation pillows….And then in the midst of my obsessing, I seemed to hear Jesus saying to me, “Oh, honey, all I want is to sit on the porch swing with you.”  That’s hospitality: making time, making room, sitting in the shelter of each other. That’s prayer.

And have you ever thought about how often we fail to offer hospitality to ourselves, especially the parts of ourselves that we prefer not to welcome: all the emotions you don’t like, the fears, the depression, the shame, all those parts of you that you don’t want to be there. Hospitality means to make room for them. That doesn’t mean they get to run the ship! But they get acknowledged.

The ancient Persian poet Rumi wrote about this:
            This being human is a guest house.
            Every morning a new arrival.

            A joy, a depression, a meanness,
            some momentary awareness comes
            as an unexpected visitor.

            Welcome and entertain them all!
            Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows
            who violently sweep your house
            empty of its furniture,
            still, treat each guest honorably.
            He may be clearing you out
            for some new delight.

            The dark though, the shame, the malice,
            meet them at the door laughing,
            and invite them in.

            Be grateful for whoever comes,
            because each has been sent
            as a guide from beyond.  
(from page 109 of The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne)

So there are all these places where we are called to make room, all these opportunities to practice hospitality:  in deep listening, as a nation, in marriage or relationship, with God, to all parts of ourselves, to the person facing us at any given moment.

And it’s hard. If you are in a relationship, you know that. It’s hard. If you’ve ever tried to challenge government policy, if you’ve ever worked to welcome the marginalized, well, it sounds great, but it’s hard. If you’ve ever tried to make room for another when yu are really too busy to listen, if you’ve ever tried to accept the ugly parts of yourself, if you’ve ever tried to be faithful to your prayer practice, you know: hospitality is hard.

I struggle with this in my life, and so I am encouraged by the monk who acknowledges that though at the monastery they have learned to accept all who come to them as Christ, there are times when, as yet another guest walks up the their door, they think, “Oh Jesus, is it you again?”

When we practice hospitality, we are always moving between our limits and God’s grace. There are limits on our capacity to care, not to mention the issues about safety and boundaries. But the loaves and fishes story encourages me. I don’t have to tend the whole crowd. I just need to offer what I can, and the rest is up to Jesus. I just need to offer what I can.

The measure of how successful we are about this business of making room, the way to test how faithful we are to the practice of hospitality, is very simple. After any encounter, we simply ask ourselves: Did we see the Christ in them? Did they see the Christ in us?

©2009 Janice Jean Springer