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 to welcome another, to respond to their need and their particularity, but even this isn’t the whole picture. What sets hospitality apart in its loving action is that this very action invites the other person into one’s own life and space. It accepts vulnerability and sacrifices independence in order to make someone else a place of rest and consolation. Hospitality does, and should, cost us something – though it’s a joyful cost.
We can’t always play the literal host. It may not be possible to hold a game night, host a traveling friend, or invite a colleague home for a meal – though these are beautiful invitations to hospitality, and I’m always grateful to those who extend them. But we can always welcome each other as Christ by accepting into the space of our lives all those we encounter. This might mean making space in our schedules – welcoming an interruption to work, pausing to call a family member, or giving up a free evening to help a friend. It might mean lending or giving away something to someone who needs it. It might even mean having a vulnerable conversation, being present to someone by sharing something of ourselves.
In a sense, there’s an innate hospitality in any act of sacrificial love, which can’t help but disrupt what is “mine” in order to offer another person the space to live more fully in the love God has for them.
So today, wherever we are and whatever else we do, let’s find one way to offer hospitality. The opportunities will differ as much as our loved ones in their particularity – and thanks be to God for the adventure in that! Let’s all welcome someone into the space of our lives today.
Happy Valentine’s Day, all!
