In the days and even weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, we’ve heard all about love: from the movies and shows popping up across our preferred streaming channels, from the shelves of grocery stores and other shops, and even from the ads that follow us around the internet and the commercial world. It’s not really possible to miss the approaching holiday – or the suspicion that popular culture sees romance and love as effectively the same thing. It’s made me think, lately, about how we show love to each other. About what this really looks like in our daily lives and how the Benedictine way of life sheds light on our expressions of charity, friendship, and affection. In particular, it’s brought to mind the hallmark of hospitality. In an ineffable nutshell, Benedictine hospitality calls us to welcome each person as Christ. It’s a statement I’ve heard time and again on Belmont Abbey’s campus, but I know I’ll never exhaust the full depth of its meaning. To receive another as Christ is, in part, to see in their need the very poverty Christ embraced for our sake. But it is also to recognize the image of God in the vivid and personal particularity with which He loves them into existence, life, and relation. It is to participate in this Love. Particularity, then, is important. It means that extending hospitality – and expressing love – for one person won’t exactly match the gestures this might require for another. Just as each vocation and each life witnesses the working of God’s will in specific and intimate ways, receiving another person as Christ depends on striving to see them in their full, created personhood and to respond in personal ways. It’s what makes our friendships and relationships so rich and wonderful. Hospitality goes out...