When I first picked up Making Room, I imagined I would be reading about inviting people over for dinner or making sure your son’s girlfriend feels welcome when she comes to visit. But Christine Pohl is concerned with the poor. I may envision potlucks when I think of hospitality, but Pohl means welcoming strangers. Christians today, she says bluntly, by and large are inhospitable: “today most understandings of hospitality have a minimal moral component—hospitality is a nice extra if we have the time or resources, but we rarely view it as a spiritual obligation or as a dynamic expression of vibrant Christianity.”
Pohl demonstrates that hospitality is obligatory, “basic to who we are as followers of Jesus.” It can be uncomfortable to show kindness to strangers, but Jesus did it, and so should we. The Bible, argues Pohl, requires the people of God to be hospitable. Hospitality first comes up in Genesis 18, with Abraham and Sarah welcoming three guests who prove to be angels. The passage, Pohl observes, is “unambiguously positive about welcoming strangers. It connects hospitality with the presence of God, with promise, and with blessing.” In Kings, Elisha and Elijah are both taken in by women who do not know them; the “guests brought their hosts into special connection with God,” and the hosts usually received more mundane re wards as well. In contrast, when Old Testament figures are intentionally inhospitable—consider the men of Sodom in Genesis 19 and Gibeah in Judges 19—they are destroyed.
Indeed, Pohl suggests that hospitality is integral to the overarching “grand narrative” of Israel’s history: “Embedded within the covenant between God and Israel was Israel’s identity as an alien and its related responsibility to sojourners and strangers.” In turn, the New Testament both builds upon and transforms earlier teachings about hospitality: “Jesus gave his life so that persons could be welcomed into the Kingdom and in doing so linked hospitality, grace, and sacrifice in the deepest and most personal way imaginable.” And the epistles are filled with reminders: Romans 12 and 15 urge believers to practice hospitality; Hebrews 13 instructs us not to neglect hospitality; 1 Peter 4 notes that hospitality should be offered ungrudgingly.
Pohl is no Pollyanna. Welcoming strangers, she writes in a section called “‘Risky’ Strangers and Worried Hosts,” can be anxiety-producing and even dangerous. What if you invite someone into your home and he never leaves? Or molests your child? Or steals your silver? Worried hosts, Pohl says, have often looked back to bygone days when communities were safer, strangers more trustworthy, and hospitality easier. It was well and good for our great-grandparents to open their homes to a stranger in need, we say, but for us it would be unthinkable.
It can be uncomfortable to show kindness to strangers, but Jesus did it, and so should we. The Bible requires the people of God to be hospitable
Such rationalizing, Pohl shows, has a long history. Martin Luther thought that the patriarchs of the Hebrew Bible had an easier time opening their door to strangers than did Luther’s contemporaries because “there was not such a large number of vagabonds and scoundrels in the world as there is to day.” Calvin wrote, “At [Abraham’s] time, there was greater honesty than is, at present, to be found among the prevailing perfidy of man kind; so the right of hospitality might be exercised with less danger.”
Pohl acknowledges that hospitality might actually have been easier for Abraham and Great-Grandma—but not because guests were more honest in the good ol’ days. If anyone is to blame for hospitality’s difficulties today, it is the hosts. In the past, hospitality
had a stronger moral claim and … households were larger. Never have households been so small, so frequently empty, and so separated from a larger community as they are today. Smaller households make the need to reduce strangeness and risk more acute. Contemporary communities of hospitality have intentionally constructed households that include more people and are more active than most in our society. This enables them to welcome full strangers with less worry about risk and danger.
Which brings us to an underlying theme of Making Room: life in community. Community, suggests Pohl, is an essential component of Christian hospitality. She points to Genesis 19 as an example of how disastrous hospitality without community support can be: there, Lot receives two guests, and that night a mob of Sodomites gathers around Lot’s house to demand Lot turn over the guests. Lot, eager to protect the safety of his guests, tells the mob they can ravish his virgin daughters instead. “Lot,” Pohl writes, “seems to show no regard for the enormous potential costs to the more vulnerable members of his own household. Lot’s story demonstrates that when hospitality is contrary to the intentions of the larger group, it can be dangerous.”
In researching her book, Pohl visited eight hospitality communities: L’Abri Fellowship, Annunciation House, L’Arche, the Catholic Worker, Good Works, Inc., Jubilee Partners, the Open Door, and St. John’s and St. Benedict’s monasteries. Even those Christians who would not choose to live in an intentional community, writes Pohl, have something to learn from them about how to “cope with the awkwardness, risk, and high demands associated with hospitality to strangers … [and how to] allow an ancient practice to thrive in a postmodern world.”
Pohl determined that contemporary communities and ancient communities share certain commonalties. In both, sharing meals together is key. (Ed Loring, of Atlanta’s Open Door community, put it like this: “Justice is important, but supper is essential.”) And, in both ancient and contemporary communities, people strive to let go of possessions and possessiveness. There may be, Pohl suggests, “an inverse relation between wealth and hospitality.” When we are concerned about our stuff, we are less likely to open our homes to strangers.
Casual readers beware: Making Room is guaranteed to challenge even the most complacent Christian. You are not likely to walk away from this book unchanged.
If Christine Pohl urges readers to think about Christian approaches to hospitality, Dorothy Bass encourages us to explore traditional Christian practices of time. Bass, I feel sure, must have had me in mind when she wrote Receiving the Day—me and all the people I know who obsessively cram ever more activities into the small boxes on their Day Planners. All of us who run around filling up the blocks on our calendars think that we will have enough time to do everything we want to get done if we can just get organized. But, says Bass, mismanagement is not the problem. Our entire approach to time needs revamping, for “we find we are not so much using time as permitting time to use us.” Bass sees a deep connection between time, work, and commercialism:
However much or little we work, the time we do have is losing its shape as round-the-clock employment, shopping and entertainment blur the boundaries between one season and another, between day and night.
Are we preparing our children, she asks, “to enter an economy that intends to squeeze every minute out of them, sooner or later?” Indeed, it is the logic of the free market to squeeze and squeeze. Vacations are justified, when they are justified, by the logic that one is more productive when one works 50 weeks a year than when one works 52 weeks a year. Eventually, the Christian Right may figure out that the free market is not our friend—the market, after all, re quires people to work seven days a week. No Sabbath. No Jubilee.
Contemporary Americans, Bass suggests, have come to see time as something to be battled, something to be mastered, something to be stretched. But in the Christian tradition, time is a gift. In Receiving the Day, Bass identifies specific Christian practices that can help us more fully inhabit, and appreciate, time. She starts with a small unit of time: the day. Bass urges Christians to pay attention to the rhythms of days: “Days don’t need our notice to come and go, of course. But we need to notice the rhythms that the comings and goings of the days establish for our living.”
Most of us inhabit secular time more deeply than we do religious time. The seasons of my life, for example, are much more clearly demarcated by the academic calendar, which has governed my every move for the last 17 years, than the church calendar. It is an effort to try to train my body to live in Advent; I am much more at home with “midterms” or “winter break.”
Bass suggests that the day exemplifies the difference between the secular calendar and the Christian calendar. For most of us, the day begins at 6:30 when the alarm goes off. But in the Bible, Bass notes, days begin in the evening. The difference is not trivial. When days begin in the evening, Bass writes,
The first part of the day passes in darkness … but not inactivity. God is out growing the crops even before the farmer is up and knitting together the wound before the clinic opens. When farmer and physician awake, they will join in, contributing mightily, but only be cause grace came first. … Entered this way, morning is new, worth being grateful for even before we have put our human touches on it. … Morning becomes a time to join in the labors that have already begun without us, and evening a time to let others—and Another—take over. This simple shift in perception is a fundamental movement within the Christian practice of receiving the day. At the heart of this practice is praise of the One who created the earth and separated the light from the darkness.
Bass also enjoins readers to pay attention to the overarching rhythms of the Christian year: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Pentecost. But at the center of her teaching about time is the Sabbath. She recounts a Saturday evening conversation she had with some fellow teachers a few years ago. They all moaned about the piles of papers they would have to grade the next day; they dreaded the drudgery but had promised the students they’d have their papers back by Monday. With pictures of ungraded assignments dancing in her head, Bass recalled the commandment to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. “I could not imagine this group sitting around and saying, ‘I’m planning to take God’s name in vain’; ‘I’m planning to commit adultery’; ‘I think I’ll steal something.'” How did Christians begin to fall away from meaningful Sabbath observance, and what can we do about it?
Bass’s questions about Shabbat were particularly striking for me, since I was an Orthodox Jew before becoming a Christian. I do not regularly feel the absence of the Jewish dietary laws, say, or the proscriptions about wearing certain kinds of fabric. But I yearn, in my Christian incarnation, for the rigor of the Jewish Sabbath, a day truly set apart from the other six days of the week. To many non-Orthodox onlookers, the Jewish Sabbath ap pears un inviting, merely a long list of “thou shalt nots.” But the Sabbath for Jews is far more than a bunch of restrictions. First, there are many things one is enjoined to do on the Sabbath—like, be joyful (the rabbis urged married couples to be sure to have sex on Shabbat as part of fulfilling the joy command). Second, the “thou shalt nots” can be freeing as well as restrictive. A Hasidic man quoted in Lis Harris’s wonderful book Holy Days put it best:
What happens when we stop working and controlling nature?. … When we don’t operate machines, or pick flowers, or pluck fish from the sea, or change darkness to light, or turn wood into furniture? When we cease interfering with the world we are acknowledging that it is God’s world.
Jesus’ words about the yoke of the law resonate with me, and they include Sabbath law as well as dietary and sartorial laws. But there is something very precious lost when we forget that the Sabbath is distinct from Monday and Thursday. Bass admires the Jewish Shabbat, but she hardly urges Christians to refrain from driving or writing on Sundays. She does suggest certain ways Christians might honor the Sabbath: refrain from shopping; refrain from worrying, whether that means not paying bills till Monday or avoiding thinking of people who make you angry; refrain from your day job. Of course, she recognizes it may not be possible: you may be a nurse who has to work on Sundays. But, Bass suggests, you can “work with a spirit of joy.” Ministers can hardly take Sundays off, and for them Eugene Peterson offers a model: on Mondays, Peterson and his wife drive to the country, read a psalm aloud, and then hike in silence.
It is becoming increasingly fashionable for Christians to talk about renewing their Sabbath observance, and this trend is surely for the good. However, many Christians—and some non-Christians—toss around “Sabbath” as a synonym for “time off.” So a trip to Tahiti might be a Sabbath, or a bubble bath, or a weekend when the kids are staying with the grandparents. But although the Sabbath is intended to refresh, refreshment alone does not constitute Sabbath observance. And that may be where Bass is best: she remembers that the Sabbath is about more than just relaxing. It is about God.
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