Quick Book Report - Radical Hospitality
Jul 22nd, 2008 by learningumbrella
Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love by Father Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt
This is a really lovely little book. It’s not a guide to giving a good party, but rather to living with your heart open and extending your love to everyone. Through discussions of Benedict’s Rules, personal anecdotes of the monastery and the monks who live there, and powerful calls to examine your own heart, this book tries to bring more compassion and acceptance to how we all are with each other.
Hospitality is born in us when we are well loved by God and by others. Hospitality is the overflowing of a heart that has to share what it has received. It takes a whole person to open up, it takes a secure person to be available, it takes a strong person to give yourself away. (page 20)
Hospitality includes cooking the meal, and reading to the kid, but it demands that you let the people you are serving into your heart. Only in opening yourself wide to another are you transformed by the power of love. (page 20)
“The home of the brave” is a wonderful ideal, but it is no easy thing to become. Brave people take a risk with the stranger. Brave people offer up their hearts, again, after they’ve pieced together the fragments of a broken heart. Brave people don’t let themselves off the hook when something has gone wrong inside of them. (page 9)
The Benedictine is not merely gracious; he is available. He does not observe human pain from a distance; he gets up to his elbows in it. He can wait with you while you try to make words. There is a deep, open place in his heart where others can come and go. This is Benedictine hospitality. He does not have to attach himself to every person who passes through this open heart of his, however; he can love them at the moment and let them go on. (page 25)
The image of preparing a table, or preparing a place, is a good overall image for hospitality. In genuine hospitality we work to make our entire existence a welcoming table, a place prepared for others to be at ease, to receive from us comfort and strength. (page 109)
This is truly powerful stuff to ponder. My family and I have recently discussing how to step forward from our current state of cocooning-for-self-preservation, and have realized that hospitality is something that is sorely lacking in our lives. I will have to check this out…
BTW..you do know there were no posters at all, nor had the rumor spreader even been near the church. It truly is a blessing in disguise!
Interesting. I remember a guest priest at our church talking about radical hospitality in his sermon. It was quite an interesting idea.