Hospitality among Quakers
Marian McNichol considers the decline in hospitality
Try to make your home a place of loving friendship and enjoyment…
Advices & queries 26
When did you last invite someone new for a meal in your home? When did you last have an overnight guest you had never met before?
Offering hospitality, both a bed and food, is a core value in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim traditions. The Old Testament provides a variety of examples where virtue is associated with offering hospitality and a failure to offer hospitality is punished. The New Testament starts with the hospitality of a stable and includes many more stories of Jesus and his disciples seeking food and shelter, including criticism because they dined with tax collectors. The parable of the wedding feast, where the initial guests refused the invitations, carries its powerful message because offering and accepting hospitality was perceived as an important social obligation.
The giving of food and shelter was part of a complex social network linking people together and developing and maintaining obligations to each other. It was part of an understanding of shared dependency.
My family, as post-war Irish immigrants, frequently offered lodgings to relatives arriving in England looking for work – it was expected and any refusal would be a serious social infringement.
I like having people to dinner and offering a bed to strangers and friends alike through organisations such as Servas and 5W. My offer of hospitality is seen as my individual choice, it is no longer perceived as a social obligation.
I have noticed over the years that there has been a reduction, in society at large and amongst Quakers, in offering invitations to share a meal in each other’s homes. Requests to find beds, for example, for Trident protesters or Quakers travelling from overseas are also more difficult to meet than they used to be. Exchange programmes in schools are declining because British parents no longer want to welcome exchange students. We have become a consumer society where everything is ‘marketised’, so we meet friends in restaurants and split the bill and we find accommodation on Airbnb rather than risk possible discomfort in a host whose ways are not our ways or a visitor who presents a few challenges.
I believe we have lost something important in this reduction in personal hospitality. We decry our fragmented, isolated society where mental illness is an everyday occurrence but we fail to link it to our own unwillingness to offer hospitality or to feel a sense of obligation when others invite us to share a meal or a celebration in their home. It isn’t sufficient to have shared meals in communal spaces; the invitation into someone’s home is an invitation for connection, an invitation to develop obligations of friendship.
There are some Quakers who offer accommodation within Servas and to asylum seekers and refugees. There is a group of people in Reading who often provide a bed for Trident protesters, but these people are the exceptions. Many just say ‘sorry, but my personal space is important to me’ – and give the excuse of not being a good cook to explain the lack of an invite to a meal.
Can I encourage Friends to invite each other to share a meal in their homes on a regular basis and to consider offering overnight accommodation, perhaps through organisations such a Servas or 5W. In the past year our guests have included Quakers from New Zealand and Australia, Trident Ploughshares protesters, a German woman and her daughter visiting Reading to honour her aunt who lived and died here and an actor in The Trials of Oscar Wilde, a play performed in Reading Gaol. Offering hospitality involves a bit of extra laundry and preparation of extra food but the rewards include an increased sense of wellbeing and connection in the world. Saint Paul tells us in Hebrews 13:1-2: ‘Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’
Perhaps it’s a small step to creating a more peaceful connected world.
Further information: http://servas.org, www.womenwelcomewomen.uk
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