Hospitality

In this week following Mother's Day, I’ve been reading lots of blogs about mothers and motherhood. As I get closer to thirty I spend more time considering what kind of mother I would like to be. It’s really gotten me thinking about the most important qualities of a mother.

At the same time I’ve been learning a lot about religious orders and visiting a few in my area. One of the strongest characteristics of these religious orders is a vow of hospitality. They live in such open communion with each other and the divine that they must extend that communion to the world. This means extending hospitality to everyone who comes to them, as well as those they have never met. I have had the privilege of experiencing this hospitality. It is an amazing and powerful experience.

I think hospitality is also the mark of motherhood. A mother is quite literally a vessel of hospitality as the embryo makes its home in and takes its sustenance from her very body. Whether your motherhood is biological or adoptive, it is the opportunity to open oneself to the endless possibilities of feeding, sheltering, and caring for those in our care.

Hospitality isn’t an easy virtue to develop. It requires sacrifice, commitment, and the desire to encounter the “other”, as children truly are. You can’t plan or train or manage them into being clones. They represent their own individual persons that you are simply host to for a time.

I hope to develop a hospitality that will enable me to encounter any situation with an attitude of love. Here’s a quote from Carter Heyward about love and I think this love is necessary for the development of hospitality.

Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet
feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn
toward." Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually
beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies.

Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. People working today on behalf of women, blacks, lesbians and gay men, the aging, the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. I think also that sexual lovers and good friends know
that the most compelling relationships demand hard work, patience, and a
willingness to endure tensions and anxiety in creating mutually empowering
bonds.

For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic
lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not
love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called "love." Love is a choice
-- not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be
present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity --
a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and
broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human
family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or
as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh.

Passion for Justice