The Lost Art of Hospitality

Our homes should be more than walled fortresses.

I don’t mean this to be a finger-wagging sermon about how we’ve all failed and need to get back to the old paths. The good Lord knows there’s plenty of that nonsense about and I don’t need to contribute.

You see, it’s easy for people like me to opine about the good old days back when Aunt Bea was bustling around in the kitchen making apple pies and terrible, no good “kerosene cumber” pickles all day. And boy, if we could only go back to those halcyon days when every one knew every body, and the neighbors popped over to borrow a cup of sugar and so on and so forth. Of course, we don’t really know what the good old days were like because we haven’t lived them. Who knows? Maybe if we were magically transported back there, we wouldn’t like them very much. After all, people weren’t hankering for progress for no good reason.

All that said, I don’t think I’m imagining this problem. I do think personal hospitality is on a steep decline and the reasons for that are legion. Our lifestyles are not conducive to it, for one thing. Our economy is structured such that it’s quite difficult for a family to live on a single income. So, nobody’s home. When everyone is home, it’s after 6:00 PM and Mom and Dad have to get supper on the table, oversee the homework, wash a load of laundry and fold it before collapsing into bed, exhausted, only to get up early in the morning and hustle out the door.

That was pre-Covid. The Covid lockdowns put another nail in hospitality’s coffin. A year or two’s time of being told that seeing other people or having them in your home is a selfish act which could get people killed…will get people into certain habits that are difficult to break. In a different direction, a couple generations-worth of people being locked up at home who are not used to being there all the time, will cause people to look at their homes as glorified prisons. And who, after the restrictions were lifted, would want to be in prison? (Well, quite a number of thoroughly broken people, but that's another story for another day.)

None of the above really applies to me as I grew up with my mom at home, educating us. Home wasn’t just a nice place to eat and sleep, it was our entire base of operations. Home was life. Home was where I learned, worked, played, and home was where we received a steady stream of visitors, and more than just extended family. As for the Covid restrictions—I ignored them with relish.

At any rate, we often had church families over for Sunday afternoon lunch when I was growing up. When missionaries visited our church, we had them in our home, fed them, and sent them to a bed or a couch for a nap before the evening service. When my older siblings were attending college, they often brought friends home for Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. These were young people who couldn’t afford to travel home, some who lived on the other side of the country or even over seas. I remember one particular Thanksgiving, we had so many college kids staying with us, all the beds were full…and the couches, and some were in sleeping bags under the dining room table.

At the time, we were living in a dilapidated double wide mobile home. The carpet was old and stained, and quarters were cramped. In fact, all my growing up years were spent in little houses. We lived where we could afford. The accommodations for our guests were not fancy, the food was not extravagant, and there was a lot of close togetherness!

But, my mom was a from-scratch cook, so we ate simple but nourishing good food and had a wonderful time together. It was not uncommon for the college kids who stayed with us to call my parents “Mom and Dad Barber.”

I think this is the essence of hospitality versus entertaining, though there is nothing wrong with entertaining. Hospitality is welcoming the stranger and the friend into your home as it is, warts and all, and helping them to feel that, for just a little while, it’s their home too.

It’s sorely needed right now, overwhelmed as we are in this epidemic of loneliness. Individualism has its charms, but taken to the extremes of modernity, we end up like atomized individuals in a sea of displaced atomized individuals which don’t belong anywhere, left to create meaning all by ourselves or all by our nuclear family’s self. Surrounded with endless interactions, but without the closeness of intimacy we crave and need despite our fierce independence.

I don’t profess to know how to balance the needs of the individual with the needs of community. I suspect it will be a juggling act until the end of time. A little too far to the left and you have everyone out for their own interests, happiness, and pleasure, consequences to future generations be damned. But a little too far to the right, you have individuals sacrificing their deepest selves, their talents and abilities, to some group contract which may or may not suck the life out of them.

But I do know that individuals need to belong somewhere. Individuals, contrary to popular opinion, can’t love themselves the way they need to be loved at the level of the soul. Only other people can do that.

That kind of love is only possible when people allow themselves to know and be known by other people. And hospitality is an excellent way to foster this knowing.

Hospitality is a vulnerable endeavor for both the giver and the receiver if you think about it.

Whenever I invite someone into my home, I have to get over myself. I have to get over feelings of inadequacy, worries that my guests will discover that pile of dust and dog hair in that one corner I only notice when someone walks through the door and continually forget to take care of when no one is here. I have to disregard the intuition that someone is judging me on the way I conduct my household, and someone inevitably will. I am inviting people into my most cherished possession, the scene of all my deepest joys and sorrows. And what will they do with it?

As a guest, I have to learn to ignore my body’s feeling of awkwardness in another person’s domain. What do I do with my hands and my feet? What to talk about? How do I decline to eat that lovely casserole filled with gluten I can’t have and explain why without sounding like a special snowflake or making their efforts feel rejected?

But when both guest and host have gotten past themselves, such lovely things can happen. Conversation, care, love, friendship, a sense that we are not so alone in the world after all. And the next time you meet, things are ever so slightly different because a small bond has been forged that wasn’t there before.

How to begin this habit of hospitality? Because it will need to be an intentional habit, given the constraints of modernity and all the factors working against us.

I have begun by spending my Saturday afternoons preparing food for Sunday lunch. This gets me in the habit of preparedness. It’s easier to think about having people over for a meal if you’re, well…ready. Last minute meals are not my forte. I had a family from church over last Sunday, and I made an easy biscuit topped chicken pot pie and an apple crisp. I baked both the night before, got them out Sunday morning and put them in the oven. I programmed the oven to start preheating around 11:15, as we usually get back home around 12:45-1:00. It worked out great! I got home, and everything was heated up nicely. Literally all I had to do was put it on the table.

I hope to do this one Sunday out of every month going forward. Because, in spite of my firm belief in the virtues of hospitality, I have also gotten out of the habit for a couple of reasons. First, my husband’s political activity as I mentioned last week, and then my health problems. But now that our schedule has slowed and my health is much, much better, I intend to pursue more hospitality with gusto!

My dad, when he was alive, often quoted this passage in Hebrews concerning our home, “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Hebrews 13:2

I don’t believe I’ve had any angels come through, but there’s still time. Wouldn’t that be something. Angels or not, I hope you’ll join me in making the world a less lonely place.

The Beatles once lamented, “All the lonely people, where do they all belong?” Perhaps some of them belong around your table.

That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…

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