Diocese of Joliet's Missionary Disciples Newsletter
Diocese of Joliet's Missionary Disciples Newsletter
What Does Hospitality Have to Do with Missionary Discipleship? (Part 2)
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What Does Hospitality Have to Do with Missionary Discipleship? (Part 2)

In the final part of the series on hospitality, Sheila Stevenson, who recently retired as the director of the Office of Young Adult and Campus Ministry at the Diocese of Joliet and is a current member of the diocesan Missionary Discipleship Team, dives even deeper into the power of hospitality as she answers the question: what does hospitality have to do with Missionary Discipleship?

Click on the short audio segment above to find out more.

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Some more thoughts on hospitality:

"If there is any concept worth restoring to its original depth and evocative potential, it is the concept of hospitality. It is one of the richest Biblical terms that can deepen and broaden our insight in our relationships to our fellow human beings.”

— Fr. Henri Nouwen

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“Scholars point to a law of hospitality in biblical times. Certain customs had to be followed. Should a guest or host not adhere to the customs, it could be punishable by death. Death! Imagine forgetting to offer a cup of coffee to a guest in your home, then receiving a nice whack to the head for it. We, in our world, find this egregious and outlandish yet we can still learn from such a law. In biblical times, almost all lived in small villages or camps in which it would be an absolute shock to come upon a stranger in the routines of day-to-day life. Should a stranger come out of the desert and into the village or camp, it would be cause for alarm. Why is this person here? What is his purpose? The stranger is the other, the unknown. So, what is the response of the village elders? Kill the stranger that instant as an intruder? Cast the stranger back out into the desert to suffer without replenished supplies? These are adequate ways of protecting a group, and we may see some similarities to how the stranger is treated in our world today.

“Still, these ways remove any possibility for discovering the stranger to be a friend, someone with a shared humanity. The people of biblical times recognized this, so they determined a far better way to handle such a situation. They would embrace the stranger as a guest. Thus, the threat the stranger represents is removed. It is a hostile situation no longer. Victor Matthews, a scholar of biblical hospitality, writes, “This stranger was given new status as a guest, thereby removing the hostile overtones associated with the different and unfamiliar.”

“Accepting the stranger as a guest meant providing food, drink, and shelter. It meant fair treatment and even an obligation to offer the guest anything upon which the guest gazed for an extended time. Again, we may find this outlandish, but it served a purpose. The stranger was taken care of and became a guest, and the threat to the livelihood of the camp or village was eliminated.”

— From the Modern Catholic Pilgrim’s essay called “Why Hospitality?” https://www.moderncatholicpilgrim.com/

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“Those people coming in off the streets, coming into churches and taverns, what do they seek? Home. What truly excellent pastors can help to provide for the wayfarer is a taste of the home that is promised us with our Maker, though of course we will never feel quite at home this side of the kingdom. But the work of helping people to feel a bit less estranged, a bit more comfortable in their own skin and in the Milky Way, is the work of hospitality, and it is a task for a bar like Derek’s Columbia Room, New York’s Death & Co., or South Bend’s Tapastrie even as it is for the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. A priest who answers the rectory door and a bartender who places before her customer a cool glass of water and a menu share the obligation to look upon the congregant with love and respect and then to assess what’s the best way we might serve.”

— From an essay in First Things by Father William Dailey, C.S.C.

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