Hospitality

Christian hospitality is not simply good manners, it is an entire way of encountering strangers: receiving them as Christ, as St Benedict says. It takes a peculiar imagination, of course, to hear a knock on the door and know it to be Christ—an imagination rooted in prayer, in a person who knows the hospitality of the God who welcomes truly, even up into his own trinitarian life. So Christian hospitality, as mutual reverence, has a profound contemplative dimension. (Which is also why, for St Benedict, guests cannot linger indefinitely. There must be space for silence.) And Christian hospitality does not require a home or a table or an abundance of food, since it is primarily an open invitation to enter into life together.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 21st, 2007 at 1:53 am by Brian Hamilton and is filed under History, Theology, Tradition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Related YAR posts

If you found this post interesting, you might like to read these posts as well:

Leave a Reply

Note: Please take the time to edit your comments for spelling, punctuation, succinct communication and paragraph breaks.