Practicing Hospitality

Issue No. 2 Oct./Nov. 2007

I want to take the opportunity to share with you some things that Kelly and I have been doing this semester to try to love Kenyon students by being hospitable and creating space for them to freely speak, move, and be. This is an endeavor that we’ve been pursuing for awhile, but because I just recently read Henri Nouwen’s book, The Wounded Healer, I will include quotes about hospitality from it at the end of each of the following paragraphs.

We now live within walking distance from campus, which makes us much more accessible than last year when we were a ten-minute-drive away. We have been able to have students over to our apartment almost every single week this semester! Sometimes it’s for things like Bible Study preparation, or for discussions of a book I’m reading with a student, but many other times it’s to have open discussion about whatever the student is thinking about. As the weather gets colder, we offer students tea or hot chocolate to drink while they’re here. We welcome them into our lives to know us better, and we intentionally try to carefully listen to them. Someone once said that the closest thing to feeling loved that many people experience is being listened to. “Hospitality is the ability to pay attention to the guest. This is very difficult, since we are preoccupied with our own needs, worries and tensions...”

In Sophomore Bible Study (SBS) we are sharing our stories with each other. We’re modeling our sharing after the structure of the Un-Game, which calls for thoughtful listening by everyone. Over the remaining weeks before Christmas Vacation, each SBS participant will share their faith journey, and how they have currently come to be at SBS in order that we may know where each other is coming from, learn how to listen to each other better, and to just overall know one another better. I hope that this will greatly benefit SBS, and I pray that it will strengthen
the entire fellowship at Kenyon. “Hospitality becomes community as it creates a unity based on the shared confession of our basic brokenness and on a shared hope...Community arises where the sharing of pain takes place, not as a stifling form of self-complaint, but as a recognition of God’s saving promises.”

Lastly, the Freshman Bible Study (FBS) leaders and I asked the freshmen for suggestions for topics or scripture to study for FBS. As usual, there were many great suggestions, however, unlike past times that I’ve done this, there were a few faith questions written down in addition to study topics. All of them were questions that most Christians ask themselves at some point, and these were all questions that I asked after accepting Christ during my college years. Two of the questions asked, for example, were: “What happens to people of other faiths?” and “How can we reconcile the condemnation of homosexuals with unconditional love?” So the last Monday night of October, during the time that we normally meet for FBS, I gave them my answers referencing many biblical passages. I told them that my answers were not “canned” answers, but they were the answers that I came to after much discussion, prayer, and contemplation. I also told FBS that my answers should NOT be the end of their conversation about these things but just the beginning. I’m so grateful that FBS felt comfortable to ask these tough questions. Too often, some Christians feel like they are not able to ask questions, because they think that if they don’t have everything perfectly figured out they have somehow failed. Jesus calls us to follow him (Matt. 16:24). He does not say that we have “arrived” once we acknowledge him as Lord and Savior, but in fact that we have just begun a journey. Practicing hospitality and creating space allows for real questions and real conversation, and it allows all who enter in to be themselves and be loved where ever they are in their journey. “The paradox indeed is that hospitality asks for the creation of an empty space where the guest can find his own soul.”