hospitality flowers
spring 2023
Our faith is for those who don’t believe, I am more convinced by the day. The world is less divided between believers and non-believers than between those who have hope and those who rely on them.
The above amaryllis plant bloomed in April, after six months of careful tending by our friend Aaron each Monday, when James opens his doors for hospitality to our neighbors. It’s an extremely apt and on-the-nose image for the gift that hospitality is and the fruit it can bear.
I have been thinking, though, of how differently a life hospitality demands you live. Starting with the Good Samaritan, and going all the way until today, to live a hospitable life means that you must open yourself up to disruption. Your day, your schedule, will be interrupted by the distress or discomfort of others. So many of us live outside the factory, but we are still governed by the clock instead of by the rhythm of community. And community has its own rhythm, but it’s more flexible, and allows more space for hospitality and surprises.
The other thing I’ve been thinking about hospitality is that you can’t really practice it until you’ve committed to discomfort.
I think one of the pieces of American culture I wrestled with (and, of course, still do) was the confusion of the Good Life with comfort. We also confuse comfort with capitalism. Comfort means being able to have everything I want, without much discernment of what it is that I actually want. Living in a capitalist society means that we are surrounded by things to want and messages telling us we want them before we’ve even begun to ask these questions.
New York Magazine’s viral sensation, "The Dream Life Calculator” made me think about this. Mostly because, while reading, you realize people (at least the ones interviewed by the magazine) are not very good at desiring. What is good to want and why do I want it? Is not a question we spend enough time asking. And, “What do I desire most?” an even better question. “Where can I find people who desire the same thing?” the best yet.
I have given away a lot of things over the past year and a half: a lot of clothes, some of which I’ll remember with fondness and wonder why I gave away. Some things I actually miss and regret accidentally losing, like my prescription orthopedic inserts (in an extremely sexy turn of events, I developed arthritis in one of my toes at the age of 25). I gave away a couple of sweatshirts and a pair of boots I would like to take back. I loved my desk, and I don’t have it anymore.
But even though I loved those things, I would rather have the freedom that comes from not-having-things. Even though it would be easier to have a car, I would rather face the discomfort of finding ways to travel without it. Even though I like what my credit card can buy me, I would rather be limited by my financial state at any given moment. A lot of intangible happinesses mean giving up tangible goods. The thing is, no one around us talks a lot about intangible happinesses, so we end up talking about tangible ones.
Another question that things cloud is: “what do I want and what do I need?” When the line between wants and needs are blurred, discomfort cannot be endured. This is the chief fruit, I see, of suburban living.
On May 27, I walked 24 miles to the Shrine of Maximilian Kolbe in Marytown, outside of Libertyville, Illinois, north of Chicago. I needed that walk (I did, truly, need it, although I carried a lot of things on my back I did not need). There is nothing like a pilgrimage for learning discomfort, attention, and sifting through your inner world.
The walk, unlike last summer’s pilgrimage, was not rural or wild, but on bike lanes through suburbs outside Chicago. I saw a coyote and two deer, and thought about where animals are supposed to live when concrete and highways are everywhere. I’m not trying to be a tree-hugger, I am simply asking a question about space and logistics and wondering if any construction gurus have thought about that or considered the impact on humans when all the creation we’ve been tasked to care for runs out of space to live. Honestly asking if any of the concrete pourers on this earth have considered that it’s not natural or good for us. I am currently salty about construction, because I am at Tantur, and it is surrounded by construction fence, concrete upturned, and general developmental chaos.
I digress. I walked on pilgrimage through the suburbs, and I kept thinking of how unnatural these pseudo-communities are. When else in the history of the earth did houses take up so much space and so much land get used for living on and nothing was produced there? There are yards filled with green lawns that have no use, as far as I can tell, except that they demand a lot of water and pesticides to keep clean, pesticides that get into the water supply and poison our water and the animals who use it, and particulates that get into our bodies and destroy them from the inside out with diabetes, cancer, et alia. The concept of living in a suburb is so new and it is such a strain on the earth and such an unnatural way to live, demanding a lot of unnatural practices—shopping at supermarkets, watering and grooming a useless lawn, needing a car to get places—it’s a wonder no one has considered stopping to ask if this is a good way to live and the way we want to live tangibly in order to achieve the intangible happiness we need to survive. All we know is that it is comfortable.
I think we punish the poor—often without knowing it—because we are distressed that their discomfort mars our comfort. We cannot return to our comforts or continue on with our previously scheduled activities knowing they are suffering. Which is, well, good. But nothing in our lives has trained us to ask what is good to do and to do that, only formed us for comfort. But to suffer with those who are suffering, and to carry their pain as our own is the entire point of Christianity, if I understand it correctly. We are part of the mystical body of Christ, not an individual island floating in the cosmos. Heaven is not a suburb, it’s a city. We will not occupy it alone. How can we walk by our brothers and sisters suffering and not answer the call to make some of their suffering our own? Isn’t that the entire concept of Christ’s salvation that we believe has saved us? So I suppose I wonder: do we actually believe in Christ and in his salvation?