Hospitality Revisited

During the weeks preceding Grandma's anticipated visit (now cancelled for health reasons) our family had much discussion about which bed she would occupy.The guest bed is not much of an excuse for a bed at all, being one of those sofa beds which relies uneasily on a thin mattress, metal rods and springs for its supposed comfort. Because the mattress can't really pad the rods and springs, sleeping on this bed is something of a penance, maybe not as bad as a hair shirt, but getting there.

With a clean house and lots of sparkling windows on offer, it seemed a shame to provide a bed upon which Grandma would lie and most assuredly not sleep.

The only person who really wanted to try it out was Annie, who still thinks of sleeping on sofa beds instead of her own bed as an adventure. She thinks the dips and curves are cozy, and she gets around the metal rods by sleeping at an angle, which she is still small enough to do.

That left her bed for Grandma, in a room which is far from clean and which houses a hamster, two hermit crabs, and two fish. I figured Grandma would adjust to the bright pink walls and maybe even the general air of untidiness, but I couldn't see her sleeping through the night with a hamster periodically exercising on a noisy wheel and an air filter for the fish tank whirring loudly enough to fall outside the boundaries of white noise. The hermit crabs are pretty harmless unless you get up close and whiff their fishy aroma.

We finally decided that yes, we could clean the room, and then temporarily relocate all the boarders to one of the bathrooms, where the door would be closed at all times so the three cats couldn't get in.

One more problem solved in our effort to welcome Grandma. Or so we hoped. When you are expecting company you can never perfectly prepare, and mostly the company you expect know that. They know that you will likely not anticipate every need that might arise. One couple we entertained when we were much younger, took the mattress off the pull-out bed, placed it on the floor and happily slept soundly all night long. It was only in the morning when they produced their own organic herbal tea for breakfast that I began to take offense.

In Barbara Pym novels, a suitable selection of books is always left by a guest's bed, carefully chosen with that particular person in mind. A Norwegian grammar book, the collected sermons of John Henry Newman, and a stack of parish newspapers laid out for a visiting Anglican rector for whom the host has scant regard, or a limp volume of the Poems of John Dunne for an old school friend. Few houses I've visited have offered hospitality in quite that form, though the most recent guest room did have a machine which would make a variety of soothing background sounds. Providing bird song, or the sound of ocean waves to guests is my idea of hospitality. I suppose if you had an Anglican vicar visiting for whom you felt only slight fondness you could provide Cd's of Hymns Ancient and Modern.

As I said, it's difficult to welcome even the most loving family members, never mind friends and relative strangers, with any certainty that you have offered just what they might need. Being human, we all mostly understand that, and we do our best whether we are the invited or the invitor, to be gracious and kind and non- critical. Hospitality is not the same as hotel service. It is more a humble offering of self to be received with a corresponding degree of humility.

Beyond the obvious preparation of home and hearth,hospitality is a matter of the heart, the opening up of heart and mind and soul to the active presence of something more. Christians will identify this as the Holy Spirit, the constant current of quiet wisdom and guidance and love which, if allowed to enter, will take over where the material cannot go, into realms of tolerance and understanding and virtue.

I suggested in my previous post that we could probably all benefit from spiritual housecleaning from time to time, dusting off virtues so that the Holy Spirit might be our guest. By this I did not mean that we are in any way responsible for the presence of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, if we allow the Holy spirit to penetrate deeply into our interior lives, it is by virtue of the Holy Spirit himself! Embedded in the mystery of human action is the truth that no human activity can on its own do what God himself does. The most we can say about how we control our own spiritual lives is that we are asked to ready ourselves for the workings of the divine in our human hearts and souls through prayer, prayer motivated by the Holy Spirit, prayer which opens doors to guidance from somewhere outside ourselves but which translates into thoughts and actions done by our selves. I suppose it's a way of saying that the Holy spirit himself readies our hearts for his coming!

To be sure we can cooperate with this flow of divine love by attending mass and confession, and spending time in adoration. A difference in the way I understand all of this now, as compared with earlier protestant days, is located in the word cooperate. I see now more clearly that the small portion of good done at my hand is really tied to what I allow God to do. I have the means to prevent God from acting. I can be stubborn, proud, lazy, and act in any number of ways which are not at all virtuous. Or I can hold out my hands and allow God to act through me, displaying virtue which is always a gift and never a product of my own doing.

So it is that when guests are expected we - all of us- can do all the cleaning and polishing we like. But if we are to cultivate the habits of hospitable living we will, in prayer, listen more and more to the promptings from the Holy Spirit and allow him to be our guide. I rather like the thought that this can be done while mopping the floor and sweeping underneath beds. These simple tasks allow time for reflection and prayer as long as the back stays free from pain and the knees continue to bend with flexibility.

I am truly sorry that Grandma won't be with us this week, as we had planned, but for the opportunity to encounter God in the midst of all the preparation I am truly thankful. Perhaps next time company is coming I will be even less tense and more prayerful, and God willing I will even have a decent spare bed to offer!