Open Heart, Open Home, Radical Hospitality

This week I read chapters 13 and 14 of Open Heart, Open Home, but you can link up any hospitality related post.

Radical hospitality as defined in these chapters would include things like taking in a homeless person or family, adopting, fostering, hospice care, taking in newly released prisoners who have nowhere else to go, giving a home to an unwed mother, to refugees. Probably you can think of other examples.

Having adopted, I don't think adoption has ever struck me as an act of hospitality any more than parenting birth children is hospitable, but actually, it occurs to me that in some ways, parenting is also an act of hospitality. It's a very gratifying act, done right, it also can be a form of the sort of hospitality St. Benedict called his followers to when he said, "All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ."

Karen acknowledges that not everyone is called to radical hospitality, but also points out that surely there are more people in this world that ought to be doing it that aren't.

My parents set this example for me.  We had a series of immigrants come and live with us for short periods while they got on their feet. I recall a lovely woman from Africa (my brother mortified my mother by telling D. that she looked like she'd be good to eat, and when mother scooped him out of the room to explain why that wasn't the way to talk to people with different skin tones, he shrilly objected, "But she DOES look good to eat! She looks like chocolate!"  We had a woman from rural Ireland, who had at that time  never lived with indoor plumbing.
They were foster parents when I was young. Some children came and went. Patty stayed for two years. Mostly we had babies. For a brief period we had a young nursing student.  When I was a junior in high scohol they took in a senior high school girl from church whose new stepmother turned out to be schizophrenic and kicked her out.  Later when I was married and taking care of my own family they took in a newly released prisoner who had nowhere to go.  And later still they took in a young man who had essentially grown up in foster care without ever being given a permanent home and who aged out of the system. He still considers them his family.
They did not make a fuss over any of this. They just did it.  I am grateful for the example.  What sort of example in hospitality are your children seeing?


Before undertaking any form of radical hospitality, it's important to prayerfully examine the secret places of our hearts and root out any hint of that dangerously seductive savior mentality.


Examine your motives. Root out selfish and prideful expectations.

Here's an excerpt from a post I wrote on the situation in Haiti and the Americans who had the food, medicines, band-aids, money, blankets and other supplies desperately needed by a suffering people, but instead of offering those things, asked to adopt the Haitian children:

Help that is not what the recipients need and want most? That is NOT help. It would make you feel better, but then the focus is on yourself, and that kind of help? It's not generous.
And as an adoptive mother myself, let me also say that sometimes the desire to adopt can also be selfish rather than generous, or at least short sighted, lacking in a greater imagination.

Haiti's orphans? Before the earthquake at least, most of them had a living parent. They have been 'relinquished' for a number of reasons- grinding poverty, what amounts to coercement from well meaning westerners who offer a siren song of 'don't you love your children enough to give them away where they will have a better life,' death of the spouse and remarriage to an abusive man who doesn't want the old children around, and illness.

Were the situation reversed, would you rather have somebody offer to adopt your children, or offer to help you keep your children with you?

In a response to a chapter on radical hospitality I seem to be focusing more on what not to do, and when not to be so radical than otherwise, but it's important to weed out selfish motives.

Hospice is another form of radical hospitality she mentions. I have almost no experience with this. I do know my sister-in-law's father passed just a few days before his grand-daughter's (my niece's) wedding, and the hospice care the family received truly blessed the family. Their care didn't end the moment my sil's dad died. They came back to see his wife and helped her work on setting up skype so she could watch the wedding from her distant state, as traveling was too difficult for her.  That meant a lot to my family.

We've been blessed by radical hospitality ourselves. While traveling from our old duty station to our new one, our truck broke down, the U-joint broken. We had the money to fix it, but not the money for a motel and the truck repairs. We called a local church and explained our plight. A family there put us up while the truck was repaired- and as it turned out, they had just finished building a beautiful home and she had told their minister they wanted to be more hospitable.

What about you?  have any examples of radical hospitality to share?

You might read Luke 4:18 and 19, and also Isiah 58:7-9 What do you think they have to do with radical hospitality?

Do you agree with Karen that not everybody is called to it, but surely more are not practicing it who could be?

If you not called, how are some of the ways you could help those who are?

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