The Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough

Oh, enough already! Haven’t we heard enough about offering hospitality? Apparently not.

Note: Book sale and “parking lot potluck” to follow the service

Opening Words

We come individually, and as families and friends, seeking an experience of community, an experience larger than ourselves. Margaret Wheatley calls this ‘sacred’. She writes that for her, sacred is a feeling:

Sacred is how I feel when I’m open to life, or rather,

how I feel when I am opened TO life.

Sacred isn’t in a special place, or ritual, or particular group of people, she says. It is more normal than that. . . It isn’t only the place that is sacred, we are.

… sacred is an everyday experience. It’s just life, revealing its true nature. And life’s true nature is wholeness; it is Indra’s net embracing every living thing, able to contain all unique expressions.

Sacred isn’t something we wait for, or even something we can make … we can only open up to it, and let life in all its infinite variety speak to us in a multitude of voices.

Come, let us experience the sacred...together. 

Story For All Ages

Reflection

Beyond radical hospitality. That’s a topic dear to my heart. Many of you are aware that my son is of part African descent. He’s a wonderful, talented person. Though he is also of European descent, it is his “blackness” with which he strongly identifies. In my opinion, this is because he encounters daily reminders that his skin is darker. And sometimes he encounters nasty racism. Often, the vicious verbal and sometimes physical attacks come without warning. This has produced a person who is always on the lookout for any sign that he is not welcome. Once he knows he is welcomed, he relaxes and it’s possible to see the warm, caring person within. 

He had a sad experience with a member of our congregation when he first came, who said she “loved his dark skin.” And I failed to tell this person she was making him feel uncomfortable, because I heard the individual’s good intentions. It was deeply hurtful to [him] because it told him his skin colour was his prominent feature. It gelled in his mind the “whiteness” of our congregation. So, I’d just like to remind people that when welcoming newcomers, please remember that they are like us. They have hopes, aspirations and involvements like ours, school, work, family and particular interests. It is those features we need to notice. And once welcomed, they are likely to introduce new ideas that will bring change – hopefully for the betterment of us all.

Message

After [service co-leader] shared with me what she was going to say, I had to change how I would begin. I had planned to begin all nicey-nice, expounding on the beauty of a community where each feel they belong, where there is always room for one more, where we are open to being changed by the other...in a word, the Beloved Community. But now I have to begin elsewhere. Now I have to begin where we are, and with the story.

The example [service co-leader] shared is a result of living a particular story. Know that this is just one chapter in our story. It’s not the whole story. For some of you, it’s barely your story at all. And know that it’s simply a story. It doesn’t define us or predestine us. It’s something that can be changed if we choose. 

It’s also a human story. Humans are, at this point in our evolution, still wresting ourselves out of tribalism...of drawing lines that determine who’s in and who’s out. It’s a story that I daresay belongs to every group formed by humankind. So, don’t take it personally. But do take it seriously.

What’s the story? Well, here are some other results that might illumine it for you.[1] 

• A white minister greets a mixed-race couple at the door, and says, “We need more people like you here.”
• A large person is asked at coffee hour, “Are you sure you want more dessert?”
• Lesbians are so often confused with one another that a typical response is, “It’s the other lesbian you mean.”
• People speaking too softly or too quickly, or without a microphone, leaving out those who are hearing impaired.
• Believing that we are committed to accessibility, but meeting in a space where the podium, the position of power, is inaccessible to someone in a wheelchair.
• Asking a visitor to use a special colour coffee mug so that they can be identified as a guest and welcomed, and then letting that visitor stand alone at coffee hour.
• Saying things like “We Unitarians all vote NDP”. 

Can you hear the underlying story in these examples? The story, whether we ever admit it or say it outloud, is that there is a certain kind of person who belongs here...a certain colour, a certain class, a certain theology or lack thereof, a certain “something”.   And if you ain’t got it, you don’t belong here. That’s the story. And I for one, do not want to stick to it. 

I know, I’m pushing you. This is not the story we want to live at the Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough. Certainly such exclusive practices don’t happen here. Yet [service co-leader] tells us they have, at least once.   And Martin Luther King Jr, the great proponent of the beloved community, said that injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. Just so, one act of exclusion compromises the safety of the whole community, because if one person can be excluded, so can you. So can I. It’s hard to build community in the shadow of exclusion. 

Breathe. Listen. Try not to let any judgment or blame or excuses stop you from hearing. Lay down your sword and shield, invite the judge to leave the room, and listen...just listen. Practice non-attachment. Just listen to the story; look hard at it. 

Do you recognize any part of it...a story that this community is of a certain ilk, and that newcomers need to match us in order to fit in? Is there room here for different ethnicities, disabilities, mental illness, teenagers, toddlers, those who have served prison sentences, people who vote differently than you do, people with financial difficulties, who use different religious language, who smoke...

Just look at the story. Is it ours? [Service co-leader] said she recognized good intentions behind that one innocent remark. And it’s true, when we are less than welcoming, it’s rarely intentional. We don’t mean to be exclusive. But still, it’s part of our story. It’s in our nature, part of our human penchant for tribalism. And overcoming nature takes serious intentionality and practice.

Sure, we practice being welcoming....that’s simply a cultural expectation. In a civilized society, it is plain good manners to be welcoming to our guests. And we want to be nice. Right?

Sometimes, welcoming is seen as a tool on the path to growth. If we welcome people warmly, if we can help them to feel at home here, perhaps they will stick around, come back, and in time contribute to the work of this community. And the best way to do this is to invite people to join us. (So put this on your calendar...Sunday, November 7 is a special “Invite a Friend” Sunday.)

And, we also talk about welcoming as an aspect of who we are, or who we want to be. We are a “welcoming congregation”...which in UU parlance means that we intentionally welcome, and invite into community with us, those who identity as LGBTQ. These are people who are often excluded in society, and most particularly in religious communities. And we want to be a religious community that is grounded in the inherent worth and dignity of all people. 

But hospitality, and especially radical hospitality, is something more than being welcoming. It is more than opening our doors. It is opening our hearts. 

In every act of hospitality there are at least two sides...a relationship. Interestingly enough, the Latin root, hospes, can mean both guest and host, which implies that when we are in true hospitality, we are in a reciprocal relationship...giving and receiving... opening and entering... knowing and being known...

And so, hospitality inherently contains a degree of tension. There is the host...and there is the guest. One person belongs; one is visiting. One person has the power; one is at the other’s mercy. Radical hospitality begins when we push back against this tension, and work to get hospitality to ‘cross its own threshold’[2]...to become the guest rather than the host, and the host when we are the guest. Radical hospitality uses that tension to upset expectations and alter the course of the relationship. 

You all know what radical means. I know you do. Radical implies extreme. Radical means pushing the limits. Radical is ‘out of the ordinary’...and in this case, the ordinary is our human way of defaulting to that Sesame Street game...”which of these things is not like the others?” We’re really good at that game. 

In fact, sociologist Robert Putnam did a study of diverse vs. homogenous groups who live in the same area. He found that people who live near people unlike themselves, tend to ‘hunker down’. Their general level of engagement, even with their own group, decreases. He found that the level of trust and interaction is greatest when people are with others that are most like themselves. His findings were so disturbing to his progressive spirit that he spent years checking his data...collected from 30,000 interviews. He concluded that it’s true, in the face of diversity, most of us retreat.[3] 

And so, this story is larger than the Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough. It’s the human story. But how do we alter it?   Well, in the field of spiritual development, greater maturity is understood to be related to an increasing tolerance of difference and ambiguity.[4]   And so, it follows that we might look to becoming more spiritually mature. Who better to guide us than the monks? 

The term ‘radical hospitality’ was made popular by Father Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt in the book “Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love”.[5] The core message of the book is that welcoming the stranger offers us a chance to encounter the sacred. They write:

"When we speak of hospitality we are always addressing issues of inclusion and exclusion. Each of us makes choices about who will and who will not be included in our lives...Issues of inclusion and exclusion, while personal, are not just personal. Our entire culture excludes many people. ...All of our talk about hospitable openness doesn't mean anything as long as some people continue to be tossed aside...

"But calling hospitality a moral issue does not tell us the whole truth about hospitality either. A moral issue can become bogged down in legalisms, and hospitality is no legalistic ethical issue. It is instead a spiritual practice, a way of becoming more human, a way of understanding yourself.  Hospitality is both the answer to modern alienation and injustice and a path to a deeper spirituality."

They also write:
“Hospitality is a lively, courageous, and convivial way of living that challenges our compulsion either to turn away or to turn inward and disconnect ourselves from others.”[6] 

A lively, courageous, and convivial way of living...sounds good, doesn’t it? And I think it’s all about that tension. When we recognize it, when we see ourselves playing the Sesame Street game, we can use that tension, like an elastic, to spring ourselves into a new position, a new relationship. In that new relationship, we see that there is no host and no guest, or at least, they are one in the same. If in fact each person has inherent worth and dignity, then each person is already on the inside, already a member, already part of the community, even when they’re here for the first time. So the guest could as easily welcome the host.

Parker Palmer, the renowned Quaker educator said that “the essence of hospitality...is that we let our differences, our mutual strangeness, be as they are, while still acknowledging the unity that lies beneath them.”[7] I think this is radical...to let our differences be as they are...to co-exist in difference...while at the same time acknowledging what unites us. Again, as I stated earlier, in the field of spiritual development, greater maturity is understood to be related to an increasing tolerance of difference and ambiguity.[8] So, it is radical, and more spiritually mature, to look beyond what are always skin-deep differences and to engage with that which is holy in the other. Another educator, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier has said that it is in the presence of dissonance that our compassion and our passion emerges.[9] We notice our differences, and rather than excluding, we draw the circle larger. 

It seems simple, but why is this so difficult? 

Again a quote from Father Dan Homan: “Hospitality requires not grand gestures, but open hearts. When I let a stranger into my heart, I let a new possibility approach me....I begin to stretch myself open to the world and this opening of my heart could change everything.”[10] Our number one challenge is this fear of change.

I mean, think about it. We can say that we’d love for there to be more young adults in our congregation. But if we continue to offer services that don’t speak to them, why would they come? Radical hospitality means giving up the familiar. We can say that we need more young families. But young families mean more children, and more children mean a greater need for Religious Exploration, which means a bigger budget, more teachers, more space. Radical hospitality means creating that space.   We can say that we’d like to be a more racially diverse community. But that means that some of our language and our culture has to change to be more inclusive. Radical hospitality requires us to go into unfamiliar territory.

But more than that, radical hospitality, just as every spiritual practice, is meant to change you. I mean, why practice something that will keep you exactly as you are? Engaging with the other allows the unknown to enter our lives and that will changes us.   It expands our circle. It shifts who we understand ourselves to be. And this happens only through intentionality and practice.

Why do something that’s so hard when we’re comfortable as we are?    Beyond radical hospitality refers not to doing more than radical hospitality, but rather to a vision for what lies beyond the practice of radical hospitality...for it is there that the land of the beloved community lies. In that land, we are all known. We all belong. We all listen with the ‘ear of our heart’ to the other, and we are all heard. In that land we are each cherished. We continually open ourselves to the possibility that something new might happen, that we could be transformed in ways we could never have imagined. 

And so I close where I had intended to begin, that is, by wondering if Resonance had been singing today, if they would have sung a piece called Meditation #1, written by Jane Perry, the music director at Ottawa First. It’s one of my favourites. The words are:

Gathering together in community, breathing in the silence of a peaceful spirit
Breathing out together and in love responding, we are welcome here. 

It’s a lovely vision of what lies beyond radical hospitality. A place where we breathe in and out together as human beings responding in love to one another, knowing that we are all welcome. 

Some might call that holy ground. 

Blessed be. Amen.   

Closing Words