Hospitality
My earliest memory of the idea of hospitality was that it
was a foreign notion. Care of the stranger had no high place in any
list of virtues that us Ferrys were supposed to develop. Trouble enough,
those times, in looking after one's own.
My world was one of clannishness, boundaries, kith and kin,the taxonomy
of in and out. The home my parents made was always full of people
- strange some of them, stranger to me often enough that one would think
that our home might qualify as a hospitable place But not strangers
to my parents - all these visitors had credentials that made them not strangers.
"This is Patty-on-Sally's nephew's boy from Dunfanaghy just now come to
the States.", there would go my bed for a week, or, "This is Fr. Quigley,
your brother Jimmy's teacher from Saint Charles; his mother's from Tyrone.",
dinner would be special this night. "Get John the milkman a drink;
it's hot today." "Tell Tony to bring his grinder inside, it's too
cold to do these knives outside."
If we are to understand hospitality as some kind of openness to the
stranger, to the alien, to the unknown other, then ours was not a place
of hospitality. Everybody invited in was connected, known, related.
The notion of stranger never got attached in my mind to any nearby breathing
person. Make no mistake - I was well taught about 'the others', the
dangers they posed, the malevolence rife among them, the inferiority of
their ways. I was taught that when out among them act courteously,
do no harm, be civil unless provoked, but beyond that the others had no
claim on me. These others had names; the English, anyone who didn't
speak English, publics, Protestants, Jews, Republicans, heathens (whatever
they were), the Colored, bankers, Italians, the rich, Masons, communists,
Orientals, shanty Irish, and palookas.
As an young man I would challenge my folks' construction of the social
world and then the values that were its foundation. "Oh yeah, Dad,
well Al Ryder's colored and he's not like that." His answer given
in a tone unmistakenly conveying disbelief that any son of his could be
so dense, "Al Ryder is our neighbor. We've known him for years."
"How about Uncle Tom Jensen, Dad, he's a Protestant?" "Joey, the
man's your uncle." Only recently have I been able to gain an understanding
of what I used to think were non-answers to my questions. If my father
recognized a relationship to someone (brother, friend, neighbor,
parishioner, countryman, workmate, relative, etc. ) then that person was
not named with any of the names that were used for 'the other', and not
treated as a strange other. I grew up in this world in which everyone
who was real (living, breathing, standing there) was related. The
other existed as ideas, cautionaries, not as persons. These ideas
(the English, the heathens etc) served my father to teach me who I was,
what that meant and required, and who I was not. It served not at all to
guide my actions toward anyone I knew or would come to know.
Of late the stranger has come closer to me. Most of the people
I see each day, I've never seen before. I buy gasoline from strangers.
Strangers read my water meter. I buy food from people whose name
I don't know; I go to a doctor who doesn't know my name and I work
at a place called My Brother's House where half the people are strangers
to me and I to them; so many of the daily transactions of my life
are with people I don't know. I do use the tools my folks prepared in me
to destroy the stranger by finding or making the relation. The name
'My Brother's House' states a belief requiring great effort to make real.
I have had to revisit the notion of hospitality to guide me through
these strangerhoods in which I live. Our rituals of hospitality find
a way to include the stranger as friend, and grants us a way to respect
the otherness in our closest companions and the brotherhood of strangers.
The root word of hospitality in Indo-European is 'ghosti'. That word
comes down to us through our germanic language heritage as 'guest' and
through our latin heritage as 'host' - we are, each of us, one another's
guest as well as each other's host.
The Biblical story of Abraham shows him and Sarah being hosts
to the divine visitors coming as strangers and then the guest, revealing
himself as Creator of all the world is become the host. He, as hospitable
as Abraham had been, offers the covenant.
The Greek had within their ideas of hospitality that both parties in
the ritual of hospitality were the stranger. The Greek word 'philoxenia'
equals 'love for' and 'xenia', stranger, the outlander, the other,
the unknown, Both participants in acts of hospitality are understood
and named 'Xenia'; both are stranger to one another. 
I suppose I am looking for a theology of practical action, some ethic
to guide me here. I accept that I'll never get to know the toll collectors
on the Ben Franklin Bridge, the name of the kid at Burger King that gives
me lunch, many of the men who come, stay briefly, and move on past My Brother's
House, or the tellers at the bank before they are all replaced by electronic
cash machines.
I feel that I live in a world of strangers. Live in, pass through, work
in places more truthfully called strangerhoods than neighborhoods.
And I don't see that my Dad's wisdom suits well enough to carry me through.
I'm wondering with what to replace it. As we proceed along a trajectory
of social change that seems to include more dependence upon strangers for
the satisfaction of our needs and wants, or, said another way, as we move
toward global mutual interdependence, what is that we are going to owe
one another besides dollars? I am confused when the president asks us to
go to war to free Kuwaiti innocents, but speaks not of our own citizenry
wandering the streets bereft of anything called home. Are the Kuwaiti
victims less or more my kin than the wanderer I pass on the streets? Is
their relief more or less my worry?
Where and how we are to be with one another? Is it useful or even proper
to use the language and ideas of universal brotherhood to guide us through
a landscape of increasing strangerhood? Or should we learn to accept
the temporariness of so many of our relationships and try to discover what
beauty and goodness and justice is possible in a place where the stranger
is each of us, and hospitality guides?
(image: St Francis by El Greco)
Joe Ferry
Bethesda 1990
