Toolkit #10 Seeing with Right Eyes, Another look at Hospitality

Hospitality is a key to Benedictine spirituality. Hospitality is the center of what it means to be a Christian. It is the quality of disposition of receiving and treating quests in a warm, friendly and generous way. Radical hospitality then is extreme and thorough care of the other. It is ingrained within us. It is indiscriminate love for the other and it is the center of what it means to be a Christian. When Benedict wrote of hospitality, he stressed the importance of welcoming the outsider, the poor, the pilgrim. Radical hospitality creates sacred space where the guest is free to be alone, to enter silence, to rest or to pray. An open heart is a stance of availability and looking for God in every single person. I believe that Benedict would say we are all headed toward God – that we live our lives with purpose with a radical position that everything matters – and live – all life and any life, is holy ground. At its best, hospitality puts an end to injustice. It is a spiritual practice. For Benedict and for us, we can find God in other people – and we just can’t ignore people when God is looking out their eyes at you.

In the tiresome, the invalid, the rebellious – we are faced with God. This kind of radical hospitality is about saving lives. It prevents us from living desperately or indifferently. It requires us to have open hearts and a widening of our boundaries. To be hospitable is to wait with the other – wait for deep places to open in the our hearts. Sometimes we need to be hospital toward ourselves. .

Some years ago, I had the privilege of traveling with my husband on business to Jamaica. I spent lots of time on the beach, walking, thinking, praying, being. It was a peaceful place to be. The voices of those who lived on the island were lyrical…I just loved their voices! And the art – it was so abundant, everywhere. Even on the beaches, artists were selling theirs carvings, paintings, and other creations. On the next to last day, I was approached by an islander with the most wonderful song-like voice. He was selling just one thing. A very beautiful conch shell. He wanted $20 for the shell. Now it was a beautiful shell, but $20 is a lot of money, especially in Jamaica, for a shell. He showed me the intricacies of the shell, it’s beauty – how he had polished half of the shell. The other half was covered with barnacles – and was a sight to see – and not necessarily a thing of beauty either. I worked hard to negotiate for a more reasonable price, but he held firm. It was $20 or no shell. I left, no shell.
My last morning, I walked out on the beach for a last glimpse of the ocean, and while there, the man with the shell approached. Truthfully, I was hoping to see him. I had not let the thought of the shell leave my mind. Now really, what else would I spend that $20 buying? Negotiating once again, he assured me that the price was the same. It had been very hard work polishing that shell (actually only half the shell). As you can probably guess, I bought the shell. It is quite beautiful. I bought it as a reminder…the half covered with the debris of the bottom of the ocean, that is how the world sees us. The beautiful half, where the color and luster and real beauty of the shell shines through, this is the way God sees us!
Friends, may we begin to see ourselves and each other, the way God sees us. May we live with hospitable hearts, making room for the beauty of the other in our lives and in our living. May it be.

Your thoughts???

Toolkit #7 Benedictine Spirituality and Hospitality

Today is primary election day! There were many volunteers at my local polling center. They were assuredly free of agenda other than creating a safe and welcoming place for me and many others to vote. As I left, I was thanked for my service and given a sticker! Did I just experience a bit of hospitality?

From The Rule of St Benedict:

As our lives and faith progress, the heart expands and with the sweetness of love we move down the path of God’s commandments. Never departing from his guidance…we patiently share in Christ’s passion, so we may eventually enter into the Kingdom of God.


“All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me.’”
The Rule of St. Benedict 53:1


“Once a guest has been announced, the superior and the community are to meet the guest with all the courtesy and love.”
The Rule of St. Benedict 53:3

“Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received…”
The Rule of St. Benedict 53:15


Benedict’s life as we know it:
Benedict (c. 480 – c. 547) is known as the founder of the western Christian monastic movement. Perhaps most well known for his “Rule”, a guideline for monks living in community. His “Rule” became one of the most influential framework in western Christendom and is still used in monasteries and convents today. There is little written about Benedict’s life. Rather we have a spiritual portrait of his gentle and disciplined life given to us by Pope Gregory in his Dialogues . As a young man, Benedict left Rome and became a hermit for three years living in a cave above the lake near Subiaco (today known as Affile), some 40 miles from Rome. During these years, Benedict matured, and was invited to become the abbot of a monastery left without leadership. Benedict agreed, but the experiment failed with the monks trying to poison him. He then returned to a life lived in solitude, but many were drawn to learn from his character and perceived holiness. As they came, Benedict built them monasteries, 12 in total each housing 12 monks. With each of these, he gave his “Rule”, the manner by which each person was to live and each house was to run.

Benedict’s Messages:
Hospitality to the stranger
Gratitude
Devotion to God
Obedience
Keeping Silence –silence is an expression of his humility.
Humility
Prayer known almost entirely as Lectio Divina – God is more interested in the purity of our hearts than our words. Prayers should be short and pure
There is no spirituality separate from the “rest of life”
Work of the community (the community must be self supporting)


Benedictine Spirituality:
It seeks to fill the empty and heal the broken
It is attention and awareness
It is reading and praying the scriptures, particularly the Gospels
Listening is the key – to the Gospels, the Rule, one another and the world around us.


From Benedict we are called to serve one another in love. The monastic image is that we are all travelers – all a little lost – and all looking for Rest. Someone once said that the opposite of cruelty is not simply freedom from the cruel relationship, it is hospitality. (Homan and Pratt, page 5) Hospitality puts an end to injustice. According to Benedict, hospitality is a spiritual practice.

“All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me.’”
The Rule of St. Benedict 53:1

“Once a guest has been announced, the superior and the community are to meet the guest with all the courtesy and love.”
The Rule of St. Benedict 53:3

“Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received…”
The Rule of St. Benedict 53:15

This was a hospitality offered during historically violent times during the fall of the Roman Empire. Homan and Pratt write, “Monastic hospitality creates sacred space where the guest is free to be alone, to enter silence, to pray and rest. No one is compelled to fill up the guest’s spare time or set an agenda for him or her. Hospitality is living openhanded.” Benedict instructs us to have an open heart, to present ourselves in a stance of availability and to have a curious seeking for presence of God which is all around us.

For today: Practice the discipline of hospitality. Notice where you were welcomed and where you were welcoming. Notice the absence of hospitality.

Resources:
Pope Gregory, Dialogues, Book Two, 593.
Homan, Daniel and Pratt, Lonni Collins; Radical Hospitality, Benedict’s Way of Love, Parcelette, Press, Massachuetts, 2002.

Toolkit #4 Benedictine Spirituality

OK, the truth is I am an extraverted contemplative. I am not even sure those two words can officially be used together. And the older I become, I find I am becoming “more so”. The thought of living at a monastery or retreat center is very appealing. Not wearing wool habits or copiously copying manuscripts or being totally alone. But I desire space, and long spells of quiet. In fact, I work at a place on 100 acres with a lake, and houses, a picturesque 100 year old chapel, and ancient trees that can almost tell stories. I have a wonderful Healing HeArts Studio to lose myself in. But I also work with lots of other folks who work – with their doors shut! I am forever peeking out in the hall for someone to talk to. There you have it – an extraverted contemplative.

What I have determined is that though I once desired the lifestyle of a monk, I really don’t want to escape my life. I want, to live my wild and precious life as Mary Oliver expresses in her poem The Summer’s Day.

I don’t want to endure my life. I don’t want put off my life. I want to embrace my life as a great mystery that is being unfolded. I work at it, really I do. I spend time in prayer. I work with a most wonderful spiritual director who excels at stretching me. But there are other things I want to do: I want to put a warp on the loom and create cloth. I want to spend time with my grandgirls and see the world and therefore God in and through their eyes. I want to make collages. I want to spend much time alone and in prayer in my womb of a study. I want… But my world is fast, full of lots of details that consume me. So often when I finally get into bed, I wonder where my day has gone. When did I let go of the ribbon of hope that the day promised?

Joan Chittister is contemporary Benedictine and perhaps the leading authority on Benedictine spirituality. This is what she says about prayer:

“Prayer is a long slow process….little by little, one gospel, one word, one moment of silence at a time, we come to know ourselves and the barriers we put between ourselves and the God who is trying to consume us.
The contemplative does not pray in order to coax satisfaction our of the universe. God is life, not a vending machine full of trifles to fit the whims of the human race. God is the end of life, the fulfillment of life, the essence of life, the coming of life. The contemplative prays in order to be open to what is, rather than to reshape the world to their own lesser designs.
…The contemplative prays in order, eventually to fall into the presence of God, to learn to live in the presence of God, to absorb the presence of God within…the contemplative is the seeker who can go down into the self, down the tunnel of emptiness, and finding nothing but God in the center of life, call that Everything. Most of all, the contemplative is the one who, looking at the world, sees nothing but the presence and activity of God everywhere, in everyone.”

Today, practice Benedictine Spirituality by being still, in the presence of God so that you might absorb the presence of God within.


Resources:
Chittister, Joan; Illuminated Life, Monastic Wisdom for Seekers of Light, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 2000.



The Summer Day
-Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
The one who has flung herself out of the grass,
The one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
Who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
Who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
Into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
How to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
Which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?