The Need for Hospitality

Underlying the complexities of our many pressing issues--immigration, consumerism, and war, to name a few--is a failure of hospitality. Hospitality means welcoming others as they truly are, and not reducing them to our ideas or projects and responding to them as such. It is a modern vice of ours to treat others as mere things or in ways that are intellectually violent and demeaning. Rather than seeing and treating others as incommunicable persons, we see and treat them in accordance with an incomplete interpretation of who they are. We alienate the immigrant as an aggressor. We treat the person who pours our coffee as a mere means to our staying awake in the early morning. We classify the foreigner in terms of how he fits into our foreign policy, oftentimes reducing him to the enemy, as if the whole of his being were about us and our destruction. Talk about self-centeredness! Yet we are self-centered people, thinking about others in terms of ourselves, seldom taking a break to contemplate the mystery of who others are. If we were hospitable, we would realize that others are always more than what we interpret them to be. We would see in their faces the face of the divine, the infinite. We would recognize others as brothers and sisters in God.