Commensality

Commensality. I introduced this word four weeks ago, on Easter, and I wanted to reflect about it with you further today. It’s from the Latin root for table. Commensality refers to the fact that who we take meals with, and how, is socially structured and recapitulates the overall social structure. I cited anthropologists Peter Farb and George Armelagos who wrote:

“In all societies, both simple and complex, eating is the primary way of initiating and maintaining human relationships…. Once the anthropologist finds out where, when, and with whom the food is eaten, just about everything else can be inferred about the relations among the society’s members....To know what, where, how, when, and with whom the people eat is to know the character of their society.”

Jesus taught a way of being – and being together – in which everyone had a place at the table, everyone would be fed, and equal.

“Open commensality is the symbol and embodiment of radical egalitarianism, of an absolute equality of people that denies the validity of any discrimination between them and negates the necessity of any hierarchy among them,”

writes the New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan.

In that Easter sermon, I mentioned two illustrations from the New Testament of Jesus teaching and exemplifying open commensality. One is the story of the loaves and fishes. Jesus takes the bread, gives thanks for it (i.e. blesses it), breaks the bread (i.e. prepares it for sharing) and gives. I imagine most of those assembled had hidden away in bags or sleeves a little food for their own use, and under the influence of Jesus’ teaching example, they bring out what have and share it around. As Jesus models taking, giving thanks, preparing for sharing, and then sharing, those gathered then follow his model. Thus community of abundance is created, replacing fearful scarcity thinking. There is enough for everyone – abundantly – when we can but learn to trust its supply and pass it around. The miracle of the feeding of the multitude is the miracle of neighborliness, of our human power to form community. And in this case it is a community of radical equality: everyone equally giving and equally receiving.

As Crossan writes:

“Took, blessed, broke, and gave have profound symbolic connotations and may well stem from that inaugural open commensality itself. They indicate, first of all, a process of equal sharing, whereby whatever food is there is distributed alike to all. But they also indicate something even more important. The first two verbs, took and blessed, and especially the second, are the actions of the master; the last two, broke and gave, and especially the second, are the actions of the servant. Jesus, as master and host, performs the role of servant, and all share the same food as equals....Far from reclining and being served, Jesus himself serves, like any housewife, the same meal to all including himself.” (181)

The second illustration I mentioned is the parable Jesus tells about a man who sends out his servant to invite people to his banquet. ‘Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’ Such a dinner would be highly disruptive of the stratified society of Jesus time – but radical equality is the point.

We may now add that Jesus’ commitment to equality also shows up in his itinerancy. The more common model in those days for a healer and teacher would be to stay in one place, set up shop, as it were, and let the sick, and those to wished to hear his teaching, come to him. Thus he could have established a small center of power and influence. We recognize today that there is a power imbalance between teacher and student, and between doctor and patient, and it is important to recognize that that power is there, so that we can also be vigilant against abuse of that power.

But Jesus takes steps to minimize that power imbalance. He stays on the move. He goes to the people rather than having them come to him.

Compare and contrast Jesus approach to another school of itinerant teachers in those days – a school of Greek philosophy called the cynics. This school began with Antisthenes, who had been a pupil of Socrates in 5th century BCE. For the Cynics, the purpose of life is to live in virtue, gaining happiness by rigorous training, rejecting wealth, power, and fame, in favor of a simple life free from possessions. Cynicism began to decline after the 3rd century BCE, but it experienced a revival with the rise of the Roman Empire in the 1st century CE, so Jesus and his followers would have been aware of them. Cynics could be found begging and preaching throughout the cities of the empire, and the influence of this tradition can be seen in Jesus and in early Christianity.

The cynics traveled around with nothing but knapsack and staff, symbolizing their complete self-sufficiency. “The Jesus missionaries, in contrast, are told precisely to carry no knapsack and hold no staff in their hands,” writes Crossan. He then asks,

“Why this striking difference? Since a reciprocity of healing and eating is at the heart of the Jesus movement, the idea of no-staff and no-knapsack is symbolically correct for the Jesus missionaries. They are not urban like the Cynics, preaching at street corner and marketplace. They are rural, on a house mission to rebuild peasant society from the grass roots upward. Since commensality is not just a technique for support but a demonstration of message, they could not and should not dress to declare itinerant self-sufficiency, but rather communal dependency.”

In contrast to the cynics itinerant self-sufficiency, the Jesus movement modeled itinerant mutual dependency.

After Jesus’ death, the open and equal table was ritually re-enacted as the eucharist, the communion of wafer and wine. But the eucharist ceremony reflects and reinforces hierarchy and authority, as a sacrament that comes only through priestly authority. Thus, writes Crossan, “open commensality has been ritualized, which was probably inevitable, and ruined, which was not.”

All of this does connects to our theme of the month for May, which is happiness, and to that connection we now turn.

What you’ll find in this month’s issue of “On the Journey” is “The Reflection” by Christine Robinson and Alicia Hawkins, which stakes out happiness as the intertwining of mood and meaning.

Mood is one of the factors. Sometimes we’re in a happy mood – and that feels good. Some of us are genetically predisposed to a sunny temperament, and are in a happy mood almost all the time. Others of us are genetically predisposed to inhabit more pensive or sadder moods. Those who aren’t so constantly happy, maybe, sometimes, find those people who are annoying. Actually, though, having cheerful people around usually helps us feel more cheerful. The more common response is to be attracted toward cheerfulness. We like to be around a little sunny optimism.

On those relatively rare occasions when cheerfulness may be annoying, I suspect that would be because a sunny outlook feels like a challenge to the more dour outlook with which we have come to feel identified. There is more to happiness than a happy mood, and maybe sometimes some of us can get a little resentful of a someone else having a relentlessly happy mood if the other factor of happiness is not evident.

The other factor of happiness is meaning. A happy life is one of meaning. Meaning comes from a sense of contributing to a whole greater than ourselves. Fellowship and community – connection with others – is a crucial part of our well-being, and not just because of what we receive from others, but from the chance to contribute to them, to the whole of which we and they are a part.

Consider for instance Robert F. Kennedy’s words from his 1968 campaign:

“Fellowship, community, shared patriotism – these essential values of our civilization do not come from just buying and consuming goods together.”

They come from

“dignified employment at decent pay, the kind of employment that lets a man say to his community, to his family, to his country, and most important, to himself, ‘I helped to build this country. I am a participant in its great public ventures.’”

That was 55 years ago, and maybe these days it’s harder to see contribution to nation as very important in life’s meaning – and that is a loss. With that source of meaning diminished, it’s harder to feel satisfied, happy – and, indeed, our politics today is consequently dominated by anger and rage. (Of course, there was anger and rage in 1968, too, and that was connected to people being shut out from the chance at dignified employment at decent pay and the chance to be a welcomed participant in our country’s great public ventures. The dearth of contributive justice – honoring everyone’s right and need to contribute to some big “us” – plays out in a rather different dynamic today, but generates frustration and anger just the same.)

With less role for national identity, we look to other ways to contribute to something bigger than ourselves – family, faith community, possibly work community.

If a pill were to become available, as cheap as aspirin, and not addictive, without any negative side-effects, and simply by taking this pill once a day, you would be blissfully happy, would you take it? I might try it – if the evidence were pretty solid that it really was safe. But the prospect of living that way – taking the happy pill along with my daily vitamin every morning – does not appeal to me -- as long as I wouldn't need such medication to fend off depression.

I want my happiness to be real – and what “real” means when it comes to happiness, is that component of meaningfulness – that component of contributing to something bigger than me. I don’t want to be blissfully or ecstatically happy while the world falls apart around me. If the world is falling apart, I want to be engaged in shoring it up. I’d feel ashamed if I thought I was turning my back on everyone, withdrawing into a private bubble of my own bliss.

We need meaning, we need to be able to contribute. We need respect – which, in its best form, is the recognition that we are meaningfully contributing as we are able to the good of others. So happiness cannot be a matter of the pharmaceutical companies finding a more perfect anti-depressant.

On the one hand, yes, serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins are crucial, but we can’t really be happy unless our lives are real, not self-centered, self-enclosed. To be really happy we need to feel there’s a reason to be happy – a purpose we are serving, a greater good to which we are contributing – and to which our very happiness itself helps us contribute.

And that brings us back to the model of commensality, of the open table, of serving and being served. You see, what I’ve been leading up to this whole time is this: we just had a pledge drive. Rather than hoarding our treasures, we have trusted their supply and passed them around. We have manifested abundance, and manifested community, for community IS abundance.

Our annual canvass is concluded – though you can still get in your pledge, or revise it – the forms are in the lobby. And we are celebrating today the way that we come together and sustain ourselves as a community. We’re having a literal open table today at the brunch after the service, and we thereby embody together serving and being served. And the literal welcome table we lay serves for us as a symbol representing everything about us: how we sustain each other, how we stand to each other in a relation of equality, how here we contribute to something bigger than ourselves. And we know this contribution is meaningful, because we are also the recipients of others’ similar contribution, so we feel directly how meaningful each contribution is, and that must include our own.

One other thing I mentioned four weeks ago on Easter was that John the Baptist was into fasting, while Jesus was more into feasting – and the open table, for him, showed us the way to feast. Fasting is what you do to prepare – to spiritually prepare for some revelation or dispensation or post-apocalyptic vision. Feasting is what you do to celebrate what is already here. Indeed, Jesus did tell us that the kingdom of God – the kin-dom of God – is here now. The kin-dom of God is within you and among you, he said.

We meet then at the welcome table in recognition of the fact that we have never truly been anywhere else. Therefore, as it is writ in the Gospel According to Wayne’s World: "Party on, Wayne." "Party on, Garth."

Amen.

What's Your Hospitality Challenge?

Welcome the Stranger, part 3

We are not such a diverse lot ethnically, or in terms of socio-economic class. Yes, we do have members from various ethnicities and economic classes, but not in numbers proportionate to the general population. Nor are the political opinions among us reflective of the general population. Even theologically, people with conservative forms of their religion are probably going to be more comfortable somewhere else.

We say everyone is welcome in our congregation. And we do mean it. At the same time, the people likely to make us uncomfortable themselves feel uncomfortable and don’t come, or don’t come back. We don’t say anyone is unwelcome, yet we can pretty much count on it that the people who stay will be basically like us. And, of course, I understand how good it feels to be among my people, to be with the people who think like me, people among whom I can relax and be myself, and don’t have to be afraid I’ll say the wrong thing.

At the same time, we are called to connect with people who are very other.

When hospitality was our theme three years ago, the issue of On the Journey back then included a list of some example of cases that have in recent years challenged the inclusivity of some Unitarian Universalist congregations. Three years later, it’s worth remembering and reflecting on that list. How welcoming would you be – how welcoming would we be to each of these? Each of these (with the possible exception of the one particularly contemporary example, which I haven't heard about actually occurring at a UU congregation) has at some point in the past for some Unitarian Universalist congregation been a stranger difficult to welcome. Some of them I think we can honestly say are not difficult for us, here and now, to welcome. Others, maybe, remain a bit difficult for us. Consider:

• A young woman with an infant in her arms who, when the baby starts to whimper during the service, begins breastfeeding;
• A Native American with long dark hair and tribal dress;
• A man from a Pentecostal background who waves his hands in the air during the singing of every hymn;
• A beautifully bedecked woman in a flowered print dress, with matching high heels and purse. She is 6-foot-four, and clearly transgender;
• A person whose gender cannot be determined, whose nametag displays a unisex name (like “Pat,” “Alex,” “Jamie,” “Riley,” . . . or “Meredith”) and who prefers to be referred to with pronouns “ze,” and “zir”;
• A person who speaks out of turn and can’t follow the hymns. He seems to be mentally ill;
• A well-dressed opposite-sex couple: the man has an American flag in the lapel of his suit, and they have their Bibles with them;
• A homeless man who hasn’t bathed in a week – and whose clothes have evidently been worn daily without being laundered for longer than that;
• A couple whose smiles reveal that neither of them have enjoyed the benefits of a lifetime of reasonable dental care;
• A woman with a guide dog;
• A man who mentions during the social hour that he has just been released from prison – where he was serving time on a conviction for child pornography;
• A person who, during the social hour, mentions the color of people’s auras;
• A service man back from Afghanistan, in uniform;
• A 21-year-old who just graduated from a West coast college and has moved here to find his first job. He knows no one in town, and he is African American;
• A woman, skin-tone consistent with being middle-eastern, wearing head covering we recognize as the Muslim Hijab;
• A couple wearing large “Make America Great Again” buttons;
• A group of Latino youth who speak among themselves in Spanish;
• A forty-year old man who comes in holding hands with a woman – and his other hand is holding hands with another woman.

Which ones are “no problem” for us – and which ones might be challenging? I’m asking that question at two levels: Which ones might you personally struggle to extend the most gracious hospitality toward? And second, knowing this congregation as you do, which characterizations on that list would some members of the congregation find it difficult to make feel welcome?

Also: which ones are “no problem” only as long as there are only a few of them, or irregularly attending? One or two cases like these each week, is one thing. But what if there were a lot, and they were here week after week after week? What if half the people here on Sunday morning fit one or more of those descriptions I listed? What if that continued to be true for a couple years, with no apparent end in sight? This place wouldn’t be your comfortable club of like-minded friends anymore. What then? Would you then become the one who, not comfortable, stopped coming?

Or would you delight in this challenge to expand your circle of “us”?

All great literature, said Leo Tolstoy, “is one of two stories: Someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town." What happens when a stranger comes to our congregation town? Are we prepared to learn what would feel welcoming to them? Are we prepared to then extend that hospitality? We lit our chalice this morning with words of Bill Schulz:

"It is the mission of our faith to teach the fragile art of hospitality."

May it be so.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Welcome the Stranger"
See also Part 1: You Were Strangers
Part 2: Defined, Yet Porous

Defined, Yet Porous

Welcome the Stranger, part 2

We are here to be in service to something. It need not be vertical. When we speak of a higher authority, or a deeper truth, these are vertical metaphors: up to the higher, down to the deeper. The something that we commit our lives to might be horizontal. I’m not so sure about a higher power, but I believe in a wider power. I stand on a level plane with the others of the community, the nation – the other beings of the ecosystem – of which I am a part.

This something – whatever it is that is the purpose we choose, or accept, for our life – it must have two features, and they are opposites: definition and porousness. Biological systems, ecological systems, and political and economic systems must all have both definition and porousness. They require boundaries -- this is what defines them. At the same time, those boundaries must be porous. For national political economic systems, for instance, the porousness usually includes trade: goods or currency going out and coming in.

Your body sustains your life through these two features. You are bounded and defined by your skin. But if you were sealed off, you’d first suffocate, and if somehow you didn’t suffocate, you’d starve. And if you couldn't eliminate waste, you couldn't stay alive. Things have to come in and go out.

Your skin itself is porous. The average adult has 7 million pores on their skin: 5 million hair follicle pores that secrete oils, plus 2 million sweat gland pores. Your pores secrete and also take in -- as the use of, for example, nicotine patches attests. You have to have boundaries – definition. And there has to be a flow through those boundaries.

(Aside about Hurricanes. Physical objects and phenomena are typically defined by their outer edges. A hurricane, however, is defined by its eye at the center. Hurricanes are definite objects -- we even give them names -- but their outer edge is indefinite. Bodily, the human self is defined by its outer edge: it consists of the skin and what the skin contains, with some vagueness at the orifices. Spiritually, the self is more like a hurricane: defined by its center, with indefinite outward extent.)

The something that we are in service to, whatever it is, needs to be defined, but not too defined. It has to let in the new – that which is not part of it – the strange, the stranger. Letting in the stranger is an essential part of life. In Leviticus 25:23, Yahweh explains:

“But the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with Me.”

The land and the trees and the water under it and flowing over it – and we ourselves -- belong to the earth, belong to all life.

Yahweh reminds his people over and over, “you were strangers in Egypt; you were strangers in Egypt; you, too, were strangers once.” And then caps it off by telling them, “and you are strangers still.”

It’s a point echoed by Thomas Long in words included in this month’s issue of On the Journey:

“We show hospitality to strangers not merely because they need it, but because we need it, too. The stranger at the door is the living symbol and memory that we are all strangers here. This is not our house, our table, our food, our lodging; this is God’s house and table and food and lodging.”

There will always be things that we call ours. I do not propose the dismantling of the system of property rights. Property rights help give us definition – a measure of security.

We can have our property rights and also recognize the spiritual truth that they aren’t real. They are fictions. They may be useful and necessary fictions, but are fictions nonetheless. The spiritual reality knows no property rights. Everything belongs to that to which we are in service, that wider context – whatever you may conceive that to be -- which gives us a reason for living.

How is your congregation living the spiritual reality that we ourselves are but strangers here, and therefore we must welcome the stranger – love the stranger as ourselves?

Through the decades, I have been with many, many groups of Unitarian Universalists – including many at CUUC – in which the question was asked, “What drew you to Unitarian Universalism?” I’ve found that two basic answers predominate.

The number one answer is some variation of: “At last, hallelujah, I found a place where people think like me.” A number us love this place because, we report, we can be ourselves here. We can be understood by people who share our assumptions, our values – and our prejudices.

The number two answer is the opposite – variations on the theme of: “I love how different people are here. I love the diversity I find – everybody’s got different ideas. It’s very stimulating.”

So we have one prominent answer that's about definition and another that's about porousness. The first answer affirms who we are, supports the definition we give ourselves. And the other prominent answer invokes change and growth into something different – strange and new ideas.

The fact is we do have a fair degree of theological diversity: we have Christians, Buddhists, humanists, pagans, Jews. Some of us are vehemently agnostic – finding it particularly important to emphasize not knowing – and most of us are at least nominally agnostic just in the sense that we’re polite enough not to claim that we’re certain we’re right (even if secretly we feel pretty sure we are). Some of us put the emphasis on what we do believe, and some put the emphasis on what we don’t. We are a diverse lot, theologically.

NEXT: Not Such a Diverse Lot Ethnically or Socio-Economically

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Welcome the Stranger"
See next Part 3: What's You're Hospitality Challenge?
See also Part 1: You Were Strangers

You Were Strangers

Welcome the Stranger, part 1

Reading: "Dwell in an Artist's House"

Leo Tolstoy said:

“All great literature is one of two stories: A man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.”

One may wish that it had occurred to Count Tolstoy that women go on journeys, too – and their stories have as much literary potential. Still, one sees his point. In either case – embarking on a journey or a stranger coming to town – it’s about the encounter with something new, something different, and what that encounter does to us. This is the compelling subject of literature and of life.

Without that encounter with the stranger – whether we head out or the stranger comes to us – life is a flat unchanging monotone. To open ourselves to the stranger – whether it is a human being who “isn’t one of us” or a part of yourself that you haven’t gotten to know very well – that you tend to repress – is to open ourselves to life.

Life is strange, as many have observed. More to the point, life is strangers – one stranger after another – from without and from within – met on our journey, or intruding into our town.

Hence the Torah, the central and most important part of the Hebrew Bible and which Christian tradition knows as the first five books of the Old Testament, urges hospitality to strangers. Exodus 22:21, in the King James Version, reads:

“Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

The original Hebrew word is geyr (gare) -- a guest; by implication, a foreigner:--alien, sojourner, stranger. The New Revised Standard Version and the New American Bible translate geyr as “resident alien.” The New International Version and the New Living Translation say “foreigner.” The English Standard Version says, “sojourner.”

But the Jewish Publication Society – the JPS -- translation of the Torah is arguably the one we should use to properly honor the fact that this was originally Jewish scripture long before being appropriated as Christian scripture. JPS uses the same word the King James Version uses: "stranger." So let’s go with that. I’ll be using today the most recent “New JPS” translation of 1985.

“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

What does this mean for us, today? You may be skeptical -- and I share that skepticism -- about treating this ancient text as a moral authority. After all, the sentence immediately before that says:

“Whoever sacrifices to a god other than the LORD alone shall be proscribed”

– that is, put to death. And I don’t think we are inclined to view that as a moral imperative. Still, there is this emphasis about strangers. The point keeps being repeated. Exodus 23:9 makes the point with additional appeal to empathy:

“You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Leviticus 19:33 makes the stronger point that not only should we not oppress but should treat them as citizens and “love them as yourself.”

“When the stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Why would the Hebrew people want to emphasize this point this way? What human truth, what psychological or spiritual need, were they tapping into?

When they made it a rule not to sacrifice to other gods, they were saying, “look, we’ve got to stick together here. We are surrounded by Assyrians, Phoenicians, Philistines, Moabites, Hittites, Ammonites and others who will slaughter and enslave us if we can’t stick together and be loyal to each other. All of us sacrificing to the same god, is the most powerful effective way we have of doing two things: (1) expressing our loyalty to the group through demonstrations of dedication to the group’s symbolic authority figure, and simultaneously (2) enhancing and strengthening that loyalty.”

That’s why I think that part is in there. Group loyalty and cohesion was essential for survival. Leviticus also prohibits planting different crops side by side, prohibits wearing cloth woven of two kinds of material, and imposes extensive dietary rules. Why? Because having some restrictions that we all share helps foster group cohesion and loyalty -- even if, or especially if, those restrictions are entirely arbitrary.

But the one about strangers is different. It is in fact the opposite of “let’s be insular and protective and loyal to each other.” It’s precisely because this requirement of hospitality goes against the grain, that I think these passages about strangers are particularly important. It speaks to a spiritual need greater than survival itself – for it speaks to why we should bother to care about whether we survive.

This is part 1 of 3 of "Welcome the Stranger"
See next: Part 2: Defined, Yet Porous
Part 3: What's Your Hospitality Challenge?

Challenges of Hospitality

Hospitality and Race, part 2

The work of radical hospitality is to do all we can to learn “What does this guest need?” For whites, this would include reading books by black authors, seeking out essays by black writers about their experience and understanding.

This isn’t about abandoning your own needs, erasing yourself for the sake of others. Putting the question “What does this guest need?” at the center of your life includes treating yourself as one such guest. It’s not always clear to us what our own needs are – as opposed to our passing impulses. And it turns out that developing those skills of attuning to other people’s needs also helps us better attune to our own needs. It’s about caring for everybody – and caring for self counts as part of caring for everybody.

It isn’t about reciprocity. It might not be reciprocal – but hospitality isn’t about reciprocity. Hospitality is a gift – and a gift isn’t a gift if you have to have something in return.

Hospitality across cultural and racial lines is our vital challenge. For the white folks, carrying out hospitality requires keeping in mind the enormous privileges whiteness has conferred. In the book Centering: Navigating Race, Authenticity, and Power in Ministry – one of this year’s Common Read books for Unitarian Universalists – Rev. Adam Robersmith, a Unitarian Universalist who identifies as ‘of multiracial heritage’ writes:

“When is there ministry to ask people to meet me where I am as a person of color? To ask you to see me for what I am and meet me there?”

Given the history of accommodation in this country, it’s the less powerful who have had to accommodate the more powerful. Those of us more privileged are the ones positioned to meet others where they are – and not demand or expect reciprocity.

The idea that whiteness is better permeates our culture. The superiority of whiteness gets into the heads and messes with the minds of white people, black people, and all people. When the African American activist and scholar Cornel West addressed the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly a couple years ago, I was in the audience. Aside from the fact that he mentioned Richard Rorty, the philosophy professor unknown, I’m sure, to the vast majority of the people in the hall, but who was my mentor – so that was a thrill -- the part of Cornel West’s talk that most stayed with me was when he said:

“I've got a lot of vanilla brothers and sisters that walk with me and say, Brother West, Brother West, you know, I'm not a racist any longer. Grandma's got work to do, but I've transcended that. And I say to them, 'I'm a Jesus-loving, free, black man, and I've tried to be so for 55 years, and I'm 62 now, and when I look in the depths of my soul I see white supremacy because I grew up in America. And if there's white supremacy in me, my hunch is you've got some work to do too.'"

When Cornel West, activist for racial justice, said he had white supremacy in him, he didn’t mean that he supported Richard Spencer, David Duke, or the KKK. He just meant that the idea that whiteness is better infects even him – and infects everyone who grew up in this culture.

Let me ask: Does that ring true to your experience? In what ways have you received the message, whether you are white or not, that it’s better to be white? How do you handle that? The division hurts us all.

Martin Luther King, Jr said no one is free until we are all free. And as LoraKim said last week,

“We all are trapped. Our work for freedom is undoing the core oppression for our co-liberation.”

So let me also ask: Does that ring true? Whether you have been the "beneficiary" of racial prejudice or not, have you felt the hurt? Have you felt the pain of the divide created between us by awareness that some of us are systematically granted privileges denied to others?

Even the most privileged of us have sometimes felt like the outsider, like we didn’t belong. That gives us a basis for beginning to imagine what it would be like for that experience to be a much more pervasive feature of life. Can you get in touch with such a memory – a time when you were an outsider?

The challenge of hospitality is steepest when there are cultural differences – when the words and gestures that would make you feel welcome aren’t the ones that work for the other person’s culture. What is your experience with that? When have cultural differences posed particular challenges for you in feeling welcome, and in being welcoming? Indeed, what does being welcomed really mean to you? How do you know when you’re welcome, and when you’ve succeeded at truly welcoming someone else?

The work of radical hospitality is the work of wholeness -- for each of us, for all of us.

* * *
This is part 2 of 2 of "Hospitality and Race"
See also
Part 1: The Circle of Hospitality

The Circle of Hospitality

Hospitality and Race, part 1

Circles. Symbols of protection, inclusion, wholeness. The legendary King Arthur made his table round to indicate the equality of all the knights at the table. His round table was, of course, too small -- only the nobility had a seat. We've expanded table since medieval times -- and still have more expanding to do.

The writer and teacher Starhawk speaks of community – that deep “longing to go home to some place we have never been.” It exists somewhere, and it comes to us in circular images: “a circle of hands” that “open to receive us. . . . A circle of healing. A circle of friends. . . . where we can be free.”

Truly welcoming of others into our circle is difficult. The protective appeal of the circle is that we get to be inside, protected from what is outside. I understand that. Moving into our greater wholeness and healing requires that our circle be ever-expanding, ever-more inclusive. That’s kinda hard – hard the way that joy is hard.

Hospitality takes time, and hospitality is risky. You might get taken advantage of. Or you might be unwittingly facilitating someone’s self-destruction. There’s a time, say, for offering someone a beer, and a time for resisting that impulse, and we don’t always know which is which. We risk getting it wrong.

Imagine that at the center of your life were the question, “What does this guest need?” Everyone in your – circle – of direct awareness is a guest. And suppose your central question as you encountered each one was: What does this guest need? Yes, that would be risky: meeting people’s needs takes up your time, and you could get taken advantage of – not to mention the risk that you might get wrong what they really need. Even so: to live in the space of that question – always having our radar up for where the need is, and going toward the need we discern – is a life of healing.

The payback is the growing, softening heart. Deep down, we humans don’t crave safety. What we ache for is acceptance, and acknowledgment of our worth. Therefore, embrace others as worthy guests, even if they don’t meet our needs. Even if they scare us.

To embrace the worth in the other, even when their actions don’t meet our needs, is a radical notion. It might change your world into one in which you don't have to be smart or witty, deep or cultured, beautiful, young, healthy, enlightened, or handy. All you have to do is open the window of your heart and let the outer light in -- and let the inner light out.

Radical hospitality isn't safe or cozy. Commitment to radical hospitality is challenging. Having a good intention does not complete the work. Meaning well is only the necessary prerequisite for beginning the work. The work itself involves developing skills, constantly building the emotional and social intelligence to attune to needs, continuously learning about cultures different from your own so that you can adapt, meet them where they are. The work is learning about the impact of our words and actions will have regardless of our intention.

I do not come from landed gentry, but the concept of a gentleman was not entirely absent from my upbringing. I remember at one point when I was a teenager and had committed some social blunder from which I was on the outs with my classmates, my father said to me: “Son, a gentleman is a man who never gives offense unintentionally.”

Ah. So a gentleman might mean to give offense – might choose to insult someone – preferably with great cleverness. A gentleman can be witheringly insulting, as the one who said, "Meeting you has made me jealous of all the people who haven't." Or the one who said, "There may be no end to your good taste. There also may be no beginning." The gentleman has the skill to give offense with wit, and to never give offense when he doesn’t mean to.

Those put-downs might elicit a chuckle -- as long as they aren't directed at us -- but they're mean. They are decidedly inhospitable. If that's the gentlemanly ideal, I think we can do better. Indeed, it is an ideal that grew out of privilege, and patriarchy, and is problematic in a number of ways -- and my parents lives modeled a greater concern for equality and fairness than for aristocratic manners. I mention the aphorism about gentlemanliness only because of the larger point my father was making to me when he quoted it: I have an obligation to know what will give offense. And if I don’t know, I need to find out.

Here are some examples of microaggressions that Fordham students identified as being a part of their lives.

• Asking a multiracial or apparently brown person, “So, like, what are you?”
• Saying “So what do you guys speak in Japan? Asian?”
• Saying, “You don’t act like a normal black person, y’know?”
• Saying, “I never see you as a black girl.”
• Making the Mexican student the automatic first choice for the role of Dora the Explorer in the high school skit.
• Assuming Mexican heritage necessarily means one speaks Spanish.
• Telling a person who might look white, but who identifies as a person of color, “No, you’re white.”
• Finding it weird that a person of color likes the music of a white country-western singer.
• Saying to a person wearing a head covering, “So what does hair look like today?”
• Referring to person of Chinese ancestry as a China doll.
• Assuming that the one black person in the room can be relied upon as the voice of all black people.
• When a student is seen next to her parent, asking why to skin tone difference between them is so great.
• Saying, “You’re really pretty for a dark-skinned girl.”
• Asking, “Why do you sound white?” Or saying, "You are so articulate."

That you intended no harm is insufficient. It's true that you can’t always know what other people will be sensitive about. But you can find out most of what may hurt others' feelings, if you try. The work of radical hospitality is to do all we can to learn, “What does this guest need?”

* * *
This is part 1 of 2 of "Hospitality and Race"
See also
Part 2: Challenges of Hospitality

Hospitality Is Risky

There are good reasons that hospitality is difficult. It takes time and we’re all so busy. Doing, um, work. So we can buy things. Things we’re just as happy without. And so we can earn respect. The respect of the kind of people whose respect is earned that way.

Hospitality takes time, and hospitality is risky. You might get taken advantage of. Or you might be unwittingly facilitating someone’s self-destruction: there’s a time for offering someone a beer, and a time for resisting that impulse, and we don’t always know which is which. We risk getting it wrong.

I'm asking you to imagine that at the center of your life is the question, “What does this guest need?” Putting that question at the center doesn’t mean we will always know the right answer to that question. But to live in the space of that question – always having our radar up for where the need is, and going toward the need we discern – is a life of healing. The payback is the growing, softening heart.

The risks are worth it. Deep down, we humans don’t crave safety. What we ache for is acceptance, and acknowledgment of our worth. Therefore, embrace others as worthy guests, even if they don’t meet our needs. Even if they scare us. To embrace the worth in the other, even when their actions don’t meet our needs, is a radical notion. It might change your world into one in which you don't have to be smart or witty, deep or cultured, beautiful, young, healthy, enlightened, or handy. All you have to do is open the window of your heart and let the outer light in -- and let the inner light out. In that light, you can see and be seen; love and be loved.

It is revolutionary, risky, and world-rattling. Radical hospitality isn't safe or cozy. Commitment to radical hospitality is challenging. I want to be real with you about not only the good intention, but the skills, the emotional and social intelligence, that it takes to simultaneously maintain boundaries while tearing down walls.

Sometimes we’re up for making the initial opening, but aren’t equipped for the follow-through. I was struck by one example of a family whose heart was, or seemed to be, in the right place, but who just didn’t have the skills and resources to pull it off well.

Tanya and Tracey Thornbury of Montevido, Minnesota, were among the many Americans who, in August 2005, felt it was their duty to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. Over the Internet the Thornburys made an offer to open their home to hurricane refugees. They were put in touch with Nicole Singleton, an impoverished 33-year-old single mother of six children, ranging from age 3 to 16, and Nicole’s mother, Dot. The Thornburys, with three children of their own, welcomed Nicole and her children into their home. Tanya Thornbury bought Nicole a bathrobe, pajamas, sandals, helped her find a fob, offered to help make financial decisions about the federal aid. The Thornburys accepted the doubling of their electricity costs and tripling of the natural gas bill. They were good and generous people.

Then problems arose. Nicole’s mother, Dot, refused to live by the rules of the house, allowed her grandchildren to watch violent, inappropriate movies in the presence of the Thornbury kids. The guests wanted to download rap and hip-hop music on the internet, and Tanya said no. Nicole had a boyfriend just released from prison that she was surreptitiously corresponding with – and she revealed to him her new address, which made the Thornburys nervous. Tensions and quarrels began. Six weeks after it began, the merger was over when the Singleton family moved to a donated house in Minneapolis.

From the Thornburys’ perspective, they felt keenly the sting of ingratitude. Tracey Thornbury vowed, “I won’t help anyone again for the rest of my life.” (from Robert Emmons, Thanks!)

Sometimes gifts bring joy. At other times they come with pride, and, the gifts can evoke envy, jealousy, and thus greed, and even hatred. Receiving a gift can place one in a position of inferiority – in which case resentment is be more likely than gratitude. Hospitality requires our humility. It also requires skills and tools.

Among the tools that might have been helpful for the Thornburys and Singletons is a covenant. With a neutral third-party facilitator to help them develop their covenant, they might have been able to clarify what to expect of each other and of themselves. Clarifying expectations at the beginning can be a huge component of creating the space within which hospitality can work.

Congregational life affords a way to sharpen our hospitality skills and habits. Before we're ready to welcome strangers into our individual homes, we can warm up the hospitality muscles by welcoming them more graciously into our collective home, our congregation.

Congregational hospitality may be a little easier in some ways, but it raises challenges of its own. Newcomers might be different from us. If we were to make them feel at home, they might, you know, actually, feel at home. And stay.

We would have to change to be hospitable – to meet their comfort needs. I might need to stretch the way I preach and pastor. They might connect better with different music in worship. They might have different ideas about child-rearing, or what should happen at a committee meeting. Hospitality is inconvenient. It will change us – and transformation is always inconvenient to the interests of the person that we were.

It’s also what we’re here for.

Hospitality is job one. This being human is a guest house.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Radical Hospitality."
See also:
Part 1: This Being Human is a Guest House
Part 2: Jesus, the Dalai Lama, and Hospitality

Jesus, the Dalai Lama, and Hospitality

If you are brand new to Unitarian Universalism, bring your hospitality. If you have been a member of one of our congregations for sixty years, you have a special responsibility to demonstrate hospitality for the newer folk.

Radical hospitality goes beyond coffee and donuts and a greeter at the door. It is an orientation of our being that sees everyone as a valued guest.

In Luke, Jesus says: when we are to have a dinner, do not invite your friends or the rich folk.

“When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.” (Luke 14: 12-14)

Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. We are here to serve.

I was at a talk once by Sharon Salzberg. She's a spiritual leader and teacher who, in the course of her training and travels, has had occasion to spend a fair amount of time with the Dalai Lama. They’ve gotten to know each other. She spoke of how the Dalai Lama seems to have an almost-magical radar for suffering – and he goes to it. Once, she said, she had had an accident and broken her leg, and was attending an event on crutches and cast. She reported that the room was full of a hundred or two people gnoshing and talking. The Dalai Lama entered, paused just a moment, then made his way straight to her. He was drawn as if by a magnet to wherever the need for care was greatest. So with a room full of various dignitaries and spiritual leaders, he went right to where the injury was. He held her in the embrace of his gentle attention, and said, “What happened?”

Hospitality is responding to the need. It can start with seeing a coffee cup that needs refilling. In its radical form, hospitality goes to the greatest needs. So Jesus, being the radical he was, told us that it’s not about tending to your friends, tending to the wealthy who can help you get or remain wealthy. It’s about the the poor, the crippled, the blind, the hurt, the outcast.

Go to the need. Go to be with it in care. Love the stranger into the family of belonging.

This is a radically anti-consumerist approach to congregational life. On the consumerist model, the members of a congregation are essentially customers. They pay a percentage of their income – and get a product, a service, in return. They get to see a nice show on Sunday morning, nice classes for the kids, a minister to talk to when you’re troubled. Fee for service. The radical hospitality perspective is completely opposite. The building and grounds legally belong to the membership, but spiritually a congregation belongs not to its present members. It belongs to those who aren’t members – not yet, and maybe never will be – but who need it.

Our message to visitors, first-time or any-time, is: We belong to you. Maybe you only need us for one day, one hour. Or maybe for a couple weeks. Or maybe for the rest of your life. Doesn’t matter. We belong to you. One way of putting that is to say, the church is not ours, it is God’s. Another way is to say, we are not here for our own self-interests. There is something beyond, or deeper, or higher, or wider, than gratification of our own passing impulses. There is a love not encapsulated within our own tastes and pleasures, and we are here to serve love.

In a manner of speaking, it is a fee for service deal after all -- only, the service we're talking about is not the service you get. It's the service you give, the service we give which your financial contribution helps enable this congregation to offer to others.

To get ourselves into that welcoming state of being requires making time, making space, slowing down, and listening to one another. Listening is a healing art. There are books you can read, seminars and trainings you can go to, skills to build for the practice of the healing art of listening. And they’re great. For right now, though, I just want to ask you simply breathe into those words for a moment:

Listening is a healing art.

Do you feel the opening, the spaciousness that comes from that orientation?

Go to the need, go to the other, the stranger, the visitor, the guest. Ask, “what happened?” – or just “how are you?” “What is your quest?” – and listen. That’s giving the gift of hospitality.

What we get in return is that hospitality to others helps make ourselves whole, free from the self-preoccupation and narcissism that flesh is heir to. Hospitality asks, “May I know you better and break down my judgment and categorization of you so that my tight little heart stretches a bit?” In the stretching we make room for the deep longing of our hearts, to build and live in a world where no one is excluded, where all are heard, where no one’s tears go unnoticed.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Radical Hospitality."
See also
Part 1: This Being Human is a Guest House
Part 3: Hospitality is Risky

This Being Human Is a Guest House

"This being human is a guest house." I love that line. It’s from the 13th-century Persian Sufi Muslim poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi. Here's his poem:

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy. A depression. A meanness. A momentary awareness.
They come, these unexpected visitors.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
They may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought. The shame. The malice.
Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond. (adapted from a translation by Coleman Barks)

Rumi is telling us: living means being a house for guests. Visitors come. Our job – our only job – is to be a good host.

At any given time, wherever you are, the space around you is a house. You’re the host for whatever enters yours space. Some of the visitors are pleasant – charming even. Others might seem obnoxious. Rumi’s examples are feelings.

Be welcoming and hospitable when joy arrives. I don’t always do that. How about you? I’m too busy to pay her any attention. Or I’m so distracted I don’t notice her in the distance headed my direction, and I don't unlock the door, turn on the vacancy sign, and get some cookies in the oven with a wafting aroma to entice her in. So all I get is a glance at my closed front door as she passes by. Or she does come into the parlor, but I don’t relax and enjoy my ebullient guest: I don’t en-joy. Maybe I think my house – my life, my being – is too shabby an accommodation for such an exalted guest. If I subtly or secretly believe I don’t deserve a grand visitor, I probably won’t be very good at making her feel comfortable.

Be welcoming and hospitable when sadness arrives. I don’t always do that, either. You? I don’t want sadness moping around the place in his drab gray overcoat, out of season and out of fashion. I offer coffee – whatever stimulant is at hand – and I fish for a compliment: “How is that coffee?” I ask. He says, “meh.” I don’t need this, I think. “Maybe you’d be more comfortable at an accommodation down the road,” I say.

Or anger comes knocking. When anger comes for a visit, I find it hard to maintain a good host's balance. A good host is interested and engaged, but not too interested -- attentive while also self-defined, comfortable in his own skin, nonanxious. Anger storms in the door, marches over to the thermostat and turns up the heat. I might try ignoring her -- pretending that it's not getting hot. If another guest were to ask, "Is it getting hot in here?” I'd say “No, not at all. I’m not hot.” That's not being attentive to the reality. Or, alternatively, I might try indulging her. If she asks to change the soft background music to some raucous station, I say "Fine.” If she then asks to turn the volume way up, I say, "Yes, yes.” I join her is some arm-waving, head-banging dance of wrath. You know that dance? That's not being self-defined and nonanxious. Good hosts know not to ignore the spoiled children guests, and know not to indulge them either.

This being human is a guest house. The essential skill – the one skill that sums up everything important in life – is hospitality: the skill of knowing how to be attentive and interested and engaged while also not indulging. It’s being a nonanxious presence: Fully present, yet without taking on the anxiety or reactivity of your guest. What our guests most need is our gracious, calm attention.

This being human is a guest house. My job – really, ultimately, my only job – and yours, too, as best you’re able – is hospitality to whoever comes. Hospitality to the visiting emotions prepares us for hospitality to experience generally -- any experience, including the hospitality to other people.

At Community UU, this month we're exploring hospitality in our Journey Group. That’s where the real growth and deepening is slowly nurtured.

"Radical hospitality” means hospitality that goes to the root, hospitality that transforms everything we do, hospitality as Job One -- and as the foundation of every other job. The radical goes beyond social norms. Radical hospitality goes beyond social norms to love others into the family of belonging. Radical hospitality is a spiritual practice, and spiritual practices need a group. Your individual work to be hospitable supports and strengthens our collective, congregational practice of hospitality, and the shared collective practice supports and strengthens the individual hospitality you carry with you out into all aspects of your life. My Job One – what I believe is your Job One – is also our Job One. Every time a congregation of religious liberals gathers, it gathers to practice, to teach by example and to learn, the gentle art of hospitality -- what William Schulz calls the fragile art, when he says the mission of our faith is

"to teach the fragile art of hospitality; to revere both the critical mind and the generous heart; to prove that diversity need not mean divisiveness; and to witness to all that we must hold the whole world in our hands." (SLT #459)

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Radical Hospitality"
See also
Part 2: Jesus, the Dalai Lama, and Hospitality
Part 3: Hospitality is Risky