Dear Friends,
Thanks for carrying out another successful Spaghetti Dinner! I was reminded of it on the following Tuesday at my regular dental checkup. The dental assistant who was cleaning my teeth said that she had come to the Spaghetti Dinner for the first time. She had been invited by friends who were familiar with the dinner and there were nine of them in their party. She said that she loved the dinner. She thought the food was great and the portions were huge. She loved it that the food was brought to you at the table and that everything was done so promptly. Most of all, she said she loved the fact that everyone who was working at the dinner was so positive and happy. She said that made her party feel welcome and at home. She is putting the next dinner into her calendar for the spring!
That sense of hospitality is so essential for any business and is at the heart of being a Christian Community. If Christians who claim to love one another do not have a great sense of hospitality, then no one will want to be a part of that community. They will see them as hypocrites, they proclaim love but do not live love. The fact that our guests felt your hospitality and felt welcomed, cared for and at home speaks volumes about your effort to live out the teachings of Jesus. Good work friends! Hospitable Catholic communities have a future.
Too often today, our world is filled with discussions of distrust and suspicion, of fear and anxiety. In a world of terrorism and war, school shootings, road rage, political extremism, and pervasive anger and discontent, it is no wonder that concern for safety and security frequently triumphs over hospitality to the stranger. We no longer have any sense of trust. It is no wonder that we are encouraged to build walls around our communities, along the borders of our country, and even around our hearts.
Is that the kind of community a church should be? While it may be understandable that people have fear and anxiety, those feelings are toxic for the hospitality and generosity that enables us to see the poor, the homeless, the hungry, immigrants and refugees and prisoners, not as dangerous threats, but as Christ’s presence among us.
Fear teaches us to pull back, to become wary and disengaged. And fear, fueled by anxiety, teaches us to attend to our own needs before ever considering the needs of others. In a culture of fear, the open hand of hospitality easily becomes the clenched fist of hostility. How important it is in our times to discover once again the loving, generous work of God in our midst.
Our weekly gathering for worship and Eucharist is the greatest instructor into the way of hospitality. At the Eucharist, God is the host who gathers us in order to feed us. Worship is the hospitality of God because at worship God welcomes us into the divine life, nurtures us, forgives us, and blesses us. At the Eucharist we retell the stories of God’s hospitality to the people of Israel and hear about Jesus reaching out to and healing and feeding strangers. Jesus sits down at table with people he does not know, people who were known to be public sinners and offers them a lavish forgiveness.
St. Thomas Aquinas famously defined charity as a life of friendship and fellowship with God through which the friends of God model their lives on the expansive love of God. If to love someone is to make a place for her or him in our lives, then God is the exemplary lover because God makes a place for all of us in the divine life. Since God makes a place for us, let us make a place for others.
Peace,
Fr. Damian