“All guests who arrive should be received as Christ,” says Saint Benedict in the 53rd chapter of his rule. “The superior and the community should hurry to meet them with every mark of love. They should first pray together and thus be united in peace.”
“The greatest care,” Benedict concludes, “should be shown in the reception of the poor and travelers, because Christ is received more specially in them.”
One of the many ways you delight me is by your hospitality to the guests who come to All Saints’. I see it before, during, and after Mass upstairs. I see it in the parish hall at coffee hour. Thank you!
The Rule of Saint Benedict is noted for hospitality. The Rule of the Master, an earlier text Benedict drew from, saw guests as interlopers and distractions, even potential sponges on the resources of the monastic community. Benedict turns this hostile hospitality on its head. One commentary on Benedict’s Rule said that, as guests leave, it is as if Benedict packs them a lunch, while the Master counts the silverware.
Many places strive to be hospitable. It’s good for business, whether you run a store or a restaurant or a hotel. What sets churches apart is that our hospitality is centered on seeing the guest as Christ. This, of course, is not always easy to do, which makes it all the more worthy of doing.
Last week I wrote about how our city approaches homelessness. San Francisco is beginning another wave of enforcement of the Sit-Lie laws and the prohibition of tent encampments and other forms of rough sleeping, as the Brits call it. One would neither expect nor require a municipality to espouse the Christian commitment to hospitality – of seeing Christ in the doorway sleeper or drug addict slumped outside a tent. That would tread on the important principle of the separation of church and state. Nevertheless, one would hope that the utmost in compassion is shown, even to the most derelict and difficult residents in our city.
The New York Times reported last Sunday that our mayor went to the tent encampment on nearby Baker Street, outside the DMV. She stayed across the street, the reporter wrote, kitty-corner from the police and municipal workers who displaced the street residents. That seems a lost opportunity for her to have practiced the kind of hospitality Saint Benedict exhorts Christians – monks and mayors (Christian ones, anyway) and the rest of us – to practice.
One way I will try to do better in my Benedictine hospitality when I greet the poor and travelers in the Haight and in the Tenderloin is to remember to greet them with a prayer and blessing – not so much as to foist my spirituality on a person who may not care for Christianity at all (which is rather inhospitable) – but to remind myself that it is Christ that I greet and to suggest to the person on the street that I see and value them in a way that is different from the way others do.
Might you consider doing the same, when you pass by someone sitting on the sidewalk or in a doorway or outside their tent? Make eye contact, say hello and “God bless you” or “Peace be with you.”
Guests of Benedict’s monasteries interrupt (but don’t overwhelm) the order of their day. Might we allow the people we pass to interrupt the order of our day, even just a bit as we walk on with our errand, and thus spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to them, and even to those more fortunate who may observe or overhear us? Like the tiniest of mustard seeds or a hidden dusting of yeast, our Christian hospitality will grow the Kingdom that Jesus came to inaugurate.
God’s blessings and peace,
Dan +
A postscript to last week’s column – In a reversal of fortune, the homeless woman now has possession of the apartment and the man is out, due to certain legal reasons. And the couple whose tent encampment was torn down and taken away still sleeps on the street, but without that nylon scrim of protection over their heads. For now, police activity in the Haight has diminished and street people are making their way back to their usual spots. On my Thursday night walk through the Tenderloin, I didn’t notice any difference in encampments and population from the weeks before.
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