Sheila Stevenson, who recently retired as the director of the Office of Young Adult and Campus Ministry at the Diocese of Joliet and a current member of the diocesan Missionary Discipleship Team, is someone I consider an expert in being hospitable.
She has the kind of heart and faith that radiates joy and welcoming. All that is why I asked her to share about the importance and power of hospitality in missionary discipleship. I’ve covered this topic before in a previous post.
But I think this subject is so important in today’s world — which can be so inhospitable, in words and deeds — that it’s worth diving into again.
In the audio segment above, Sheila talks what’s changed in Church world because of the pandemic, and how pastoral Church leaders can adjust their mindsets about hospitality in these unsettling days.
She emphasizes how it’s the little things that make a difference in hospitality.
Check for part 2 of her audio talk in two weeks’ time.
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“God calls each of us to be hospitable, to help those in need. By helping them we are indeed helping Christ. As Pope St. John Paul II stated:
“Welcoming Christ in the brother and sister tried by need is the condition for meeting him perfectly and ‘face to face’ at the end of the earthly journey” (Homily for the Jubilee of Migrants and Itinerant Workers, June 2, 2000).
—From the Vatican Information Services, from June 2, 2000
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The Catholic Hospitality Training Institute, an outreach of St. Paul Evangelization Ministries, explored the gifts of connecting, comforting and mercy with participants as ways to foster a culture of hospitality in their parishes. Sheri Wohlfert, a Catholic wife, mom, speaker and teacher based in Michigan, represented the institute. She trained staffers from parishes the first day and parishioners in general the second day. The training focused on four areas: the call to holiness, sharing, serving, and building Christ’s kingdom on earth. …..
“Our hope is that people continue to see how prayer and relationships can produce so much fruit in our efforts to evangelize,” said Tasha Havercamp, who directs St. Paul the Apostle’s Evangelization & Mission team with her husband Michael. “Hospitality is less about offering refreshments and more about discipleship.”
— From an article in the Catholic Messenger: http://www.catholicmessenger.net/2019/09/radical-catholic-hospitality-transformation-begins-from-within/
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“We do it by seeing Christ and serving Christ in friends and strangers, in everyone we come in contact with. While almost no one is unable to give some hospitality or help to others, those for whom it is really impossible are not debarred from giving room to Christ, because, to take the simplest of examples, in those they live with or work with is Christ disguised. All our life is bound up with other people; for almost all of us happiness and unhappiness are conditioned by our relationship with other people. What a simplification of life it would be if we forced ourselves to see that everywhere we go is Christ, wearing out socks we have to darn, eating the food we have to cook, laughing with us, silent with us. ….
“For a total Christian the goad of duty is not needed — always prodding him to perform this or that good deed. It is not a duty to help Christ, it is a privilege. Is it likely that Martha and Mary sat back and considered that they had done all that was expected of them — is it likely that Peter’s mother-in-law grudgingly served the chicken she had meant to keep till Sunday because she thought it was “her duty”? She did it gladly: she would have served ten chickens if she had them. If that is the way they gave hospitality to Christ it is certain that is the way it should still be given. Not for the sake of humanity. Not because it might be Christ who stays with us, comes to see us, takes up our time. Not because these people remind us of Christ, as those soldiers and airmen remind the parents of their son, but because they are Christ, asking us to find room for Him exactly as He did at the first Christmas.”
— From Dorothy Day’s booklet called “On Hospitality”
The Importance of Hospitality during a Pandemic, Part 1