The Power of Hospitality!
Hospitality is the ability to pay attention to the guest. Hospitality gives us more insight into the nature of response to the human condition of loneliness. Hospitality is the virtue that allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears and to open our houses (heart & life) to the stranger.
Hospitality makes anxious disciples into powerful witnesses, makes suspicious owners into generous givers, and make close-minded sectarians into interested recipients of new ideas and insights.
Without hospitality, we find it extremely hard to pay attention because of our intentions. As soon as our intentions take over, the question is no longer, “Who is he/she?” but “what can I get from him/her?” – and then we no longer listen to what he is saying but to what we can do with what he is saying. Then the fulfillment of our own unrecognized need for sympathy, friendship, popularity, success, understanding, money, or a career becomes our concern, and instead of paying attention to others we impose ourselves upon them with intrusive curiosity.
Those who want to “pay attention” without intention love to be at home in their house – meaning, they have to discover the center of their identity in their own hearts. Concentration, which leads to meditation and contemplation, is therefore the necessary precondition for true hospitality.
Paradoxically, by withdrawing into ourselves, not out of self-pity but out of humility, we create the space for others to be themselves and to come to us on their own terms.
The key is, when we have finally found the anchor place for our lives within our own center we can be free to let others enter into the space created for them, and allow them to dance their own dance, sing their own song, and speak their own language without fear. Then our presence is no longer threatening and demanding, but inviting and liberating!
#Hospitality is major source of #Healing and #Love for self and others! I pray each of you inner-peace, hospitality, and love!
Do you offer hospitality to those around you? Are you struggling finding your center?
