I feel we ought to begin is because there is definitely a feeling of the end of finality about this morning. People are thinking about leaving. Some people have already left and some people are half left. They're one foot out the door and people have been saying to me, if I go early, it won't because of anything you've said, it'll be because. And so our time is really a time for thoughts about thresholds, again about the inner and the outer. The inner being ourselves here on top of the mountain and the outer being that outside world which is waiting to greet us down at the bottom of the hill. So what I want to talk about this morning is hospitality, openness to people, openness to the world.

[01:14]

Hospitality in its widest context. Over the door of a medieval monastery, there would have been written a very nice Latin tag. Fortar potet et core magis. The door stands open and our hearts wider still. Henry Nouwen, who we've been listening to during our midday meal, has written about hospitality and about how important it is And one of the things that he says is, I'd like to propose that the concept of hospitality is one of the richest concepts to deepen our insights into our relationships with our fellow human beings.

[02:16]

So here again, we're going to look at what Benedict does so well, a thoroughly... practical topic which yet has immense ramifications and significance beyond its starting point. At the start of our time together I spoke very briefly of how the rule comes out of a world that is falling apart. and how Benedict responded to that in ways that we still need to hear today, and how he recognised the deep basic need in all of us for framework, for structure, for order. Not simply external order imposed from outside, holding nations together like Yugoslavia, which can collapse. but internal order which comes out of our own deepest inner sense of stability of being at home.

[03:24]

It means the enclosure for us figuratively. Now, hospitality in the monastic community comes out of enclosure and out of stability. It is only if we pay attention to the vow of stability in our lives and only if we respect what enclosure means in terms of being at home that we are to exercise the hospitality of opening ourselves to other people and welcoming them into ourselves. There's a wonderful chapter, which you're probably very familiar with, when Benedict spells out for us how hospitality is to be practiced. And it's a very detailed picture. Great, great care for the reception of the guest, full of warmth and love.

[04:32]

He's to be met with all courtesy of love. Every kindness is to be shown to him. His feet are to be washed by the entire community. And after all, hospitality is a Benedictine, a particular Benedictine grace and virtue. Let all who come be received as Christ. And then suddenly, just as we're going along with this lovely, warm feeling, the mood of the chapter changes. And quite abruptly, we read... No one is to speak or associate with guests unless he's bidden. If a brother meets or sees a guest, he is to greet him humbly, as we have said. He asks for a blessing and continues on his way. So there is a line to be drawn. There is a limit to the amount of giving to the other. There can be no doubt at all, at all about the respect for the guest, the welcome given, the love shown.

[05:41]

But there is also respect for oneself, for one's own way of life. The peace and the silence of the monastery must be protected because otherwise the guests will come and they will find that. There is emptiness and there is exhaustion. They won't actually find at all what they had come to find. And I'm sure we actually also know that in our own lives. I remember a particularly daunting period of my life when my husband was a hospital, a university chaplain, and we had a house on the campus. and students would come at all hours of the night. And of course we would entertain them as well. And I remember one day when we had about 50 students in the large room in the house, but we were in the kitchen propping one another up in a state of total exhaustion saying, well, that's 50 names ticked off the list.

[06:49]

But you see, we weren't there. We come back to this theme. Hospitality really depends on stability and on enclosure. Benedict spells it out for us again in another portrait. And again, these portraits are so good to help us to identify with people. This is the cellarer who is the bursar. He's the man who is in charge of the property and the goods and the possessions of the monastery, if you like. He's the man who can unlock those cupboards and give people what they want. So it's a pretty sensitive place in which to be, and there are endless pressures coming on him, as one can imagine, at all times. Well, he deals gently with all these demands, and he serves people promptly, doesn't keep them waiting. Middle of all this, he remains non-turbulentous, a wonderful phrase, which actually Benedict has taken from 2nd Isaiah, so that the resonance is with the suffering servant.

[08:02]

So here is a man who is sensitive to all the needs and demands of those people coming, making all their insistent demands on him, but he also... sensitive to his own needs. And Benedict tells us in the most practical, typically down to earth way, he's got to delegate if there are too many people, turn to helpers when he needs them, but above all impose limits again. Necessary items to be requested and given at the proper time so that he won't be endlessly available. He knows that there is a line to be drawn and where to draw it. So again, we're faced with this question of space, which has run like a thread through the tapestry of our talks and thinking during these days.

[09:10]

Because, again to quote Henry Narn, the paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create emptiness, not fearful emptiness, but friendly emptiness. It is a space in which if we are safe in our own space, we can offer to others a space which is open, which is unthreatening. And then there is one more portrait for us spelling this out. This is one of my favourite portraits, and just because it's a small one slipped in, I don't think we should mention its significance. In fact, I'm so fond of the porter that I've talked about him already before. The porter stands on the frontier, as it were, on the threshold of... the world outside.

[10:12]

And when anyone approaches the monastery, there he stands, as it were, with one foot in the enclosure and one in the outer world, and he greets everyone who comes with all gentleness, with all warmth of love, and he exclaims, Deo gracias, thank God that you have come. I welcome you because you are you. And then sometimes in my own mind, I make a parallel. Whether it's justified or not, I don't know, but it's certainly an image that has helped me. When Benedict was living in his cave at Subiaco, living that deep life of prayer, contemplative prayer, which made possible his later life in the outside world, holding himself still before God, which was the foundation upon which everything else later was to be built.

[11:28]

A priest comes... And Benedict greets him, and he is so deep in prayer that he has no idea that it is Easter day. And the priest says to him, greetings, Benedict. Today is Easter. I've come to tell you that it's Easter. And Benedict says, if you say so, it's Easter. It is Easter because you are here. And it is as if he is greeting that man as a statement about Easter. new life, the risen Christ. And so perhaps when we ourselves say, Deo Gracias, not only to the people who come into our lives, but to the events and the circumstances and the happenings, we may also say, Deo Gracias, because this is an Easter person. This is an Easter happening, carrying within themselves the light of the risen Christ and the promise of new life and new things.

[12:48]

gift or charism of hospitality. How much we need it in today's world. I heard a monk of Downside talking about this this summer. He was talking to the group of us that gather each summer at Glastonbury. in order to live out amongst ourselves the Benedictine rhythm of body and mind and spirits that we pray and we study and we work, manual work together for a week. And monks from Downside come to teach us, give us lectures in the morning. And Father Michael was saying... how important hospitality is, even for people who are, it would seem, very well provided for.

[14:07]

And as Downside runs one of the most expensive schools in England and caters for the most expensive Catholics in England, he knows because of the boys who go through his hands, that there is still often something missing. And parents come to him when boys are in trouble or something's going wrong and say, but we've given him everything. The deepest meaning of hospitality is not just the open door and welcoming somebody in to give them a cup of tea or something practical. It is hospitality of the heart. It is offering to them room and space to give them compassion and gentleness and peace.

[15:09]

It simply means really, ultimately, he said, being approachable. It means listening without judging. We're always being asked to be critical. We live in a critical age. What about the people who carry about more acceptance, reception of people so that they trust us and so that we let Christ reach out to them through us so that what we give them is what people in our own age are desperately hungry for and that is... So many people have everything in this comfortable material world except the spiritual.

[16:18]

And very often that gift of hospitality means that we exercise it to those who are most immediately around us. Not to the vagabonds and the strangers and the poor and the destitute and the needy. Because in some ways, ironically, it is almost easier to open our hearts to them. I was forced in great humility to recognize this in myself recently. My mother-in-law had a stroke and was in... An old people's home, very close by where we lived, and I would go and visit her two or three times a week. And it was a typical geriatric home, full of lovely, funny, strange people.

[17:21]

Some of them were really quite crazy. And one day I went in and there was Dorothy sitting at the bottom of the stairs, wrapped up in a huge purple cardigan with only one shoe on. And... She was a very simple person. And so she said, good morning. And then she said, you wealthy? I thought, what a lovely question it is. And it really took me aback. And I said, well, yes and no. I haven't actually got all that number of material things. But yes, I have got, really, I've got everything in the world. And I settled down and had a rather sort of strange conversation with Dorothy. at the foot of the stairs. And I found it a great deal easier to open my heart to her than to my mother-in-law, who remained even into her 90s. Very threatening indeed. It is sometimes being offering hospitality of the heart to our own family and to those who are closest.

[18:35]

that asks of us what is really demanding. Because Benedictine hospitality is hospitality of the heart. Benedict would wish us to have a heart without boundaries. Benedict would want of us all a heart which is overflowing with love. Benedictine spirituality is a spirituality of the heart. It asks of us a return to the heart, which is a really lovely phrase. It all must begin in our heart, in our centre, and flow out from there with great sensitivity, awareness, openness.

[19:49]

I think we need to hold on to that when we are surrounded so much of the time in the institutional church, by the external clamor of programs and projects and evangelism. And I wonder if we really want to start from there. Or if, again, we shouldn't go back to the porter. Standing there on the threshold, not evading, not in any way wanting to escape the people who come and all the pain and the problems of the outside world, but yet not plunging in frenetically.

[20:55]

with crusades and pronouncements and assertions, and sometimes that frenetic activity that social activism can carry us into. Rather, engagement with any person or any situation, by seeing that person or that situation through the eyes of love, God's love. from a contemplative centre. So, return to the heart, our deepest and our highest centre, and let it be a heart overflowing with love. We are here exercising hospitality, not only to give but to receive.

[22:04]

And that is why today, when we are thinking of the history, as Brother Nathan put it so sensitively in this morning's homily, of the history of your country and my country, Hospitality means to receive, and sometimes it is easier to give than to receive. Guests are never wanting in the monastery, Benedict tells us. The monastery is not to be a bastion against the outside world. People come, they come of their own accord or they are invited in. All that wonderful ebb and flower that Ellis Peters has caught for us in her novels. The other day I was in the monastic church at Chester. And I was sitting outside their chapter house where they've got a great hall with low stand benches like that in which the local people sat while they waited to meet the monks to go and hear problems and decisions made in chapter.

[23:21]

And I thought, who has sat here where I'm now sitting? Just people from Chester, from the neighbourhood and from the locality. their lives flowing into the life of the monastery itself. And Benedict is very clear that people coming into the monastery, the strangers, may bring an honesty and an insight which we need. Perhaps they may bring some reasonable observations and criticisms. God may have sent them for that very reason. Benedict knows that if we are ourselves to become whole, we must learn to let the other in.

[24:25]

Open door, open mind, open mind. Jane Chichester has a good phrase about this. Benedict always called for an open mind, she says. And I'm very aware of how open Benedict was when he came actually to put the text of the rule together. The monastic life had been around when he was writing the rule for quite some time. And he is open to different and even divergent interpretations of monastic understanding. He turns and he learns on the one hand from the desert fathers who know about the solitary life.

[25:27]

the other hand from community living, from the Cenabitic. He knows about Cassian, who talks about withdrawal and disengagement, Basil, who talks about engagement. He knows about the desert and the city. He's very aware of the whole theological background of nature and grace. And he... is open to all these different streams. And this is a quality in his own mind which he would also want to be true of us. He's saying to us, draw from two streams, listen to lots of people, have a dialectic by which They stimulate one another so that both streams work dynamically.

[26:33]

He is saying, don't juxtapose, but live open to both. Hold on to both at once. And this is an insight which it seems to me we need more. than ever before because I see a world, and I see a church too, which is becoming increasingly polarized. I see extremist wings who do not listen to other people. I see a world which is building walls. This is actually something that I took from a comment, a leader, in an English paper just before I came. There are times when civilizations breathe out, spreading their wares and their values, and there are other times when they build walls to guard what is there and keep out the barbarians.

[27:44]

I don't know about your country, but I do know that Britain... And a great deal of Europe is now building walls. And yet Benedict lived in an age of uncertainty. Benedict lived when all that was familiar and safe was disappearing. He lived with all the fear that goes with uncertainty. but he never turned in on himself. There is nothing in him of that fortress-like attitude. And again, I just want to give an example from South Africa. Perhaps it's easier to look at a place which is not one's own country, where one's distant from it, where one sees what is going on, but where also passes judgment on one's own society.

[28:49]

I was driving, it was in February, with an Anglican monk, one of the Cowley fathers, to visit Helen Joseph, a very amazing woman who had been right to the fore in the struggle against apartheid. I said to him, what am I going to find that's different? It was the morning I'd arrived. What's different? What's new since I last came here? And he said, I shan't say anything. You can see for yourself. And what I saw was more razor wire on the top of walls, more guard dogs. more fortress and bastion-like buildings and new houses turning their backs on the street so they were being built without windows towards the street.

[29:52]

So more than ever, we need that message of the Benedictine The door is open, our hearts are open, and our minds are open. And this is hospitality in its fullest manifestation. Hospitality is the way we come out of ourselves. It is the first step towards the dismantling of the barriers of the world. It is not the ethnic cleansing that we see going on in Yugoslavia, and which in other terms has been written so deeply, so tragically into our own country.

[30:59]

But the Benedictine heart is a place without boundaries. It is of course because we're frightened and fear breeds panic and leads to hate and so we shut our minds, we shut our eyes, we shut our hearts. Because to love is to be open. It's to be big enough to include those who we may fear. It is to believe above all that warmth and trust and acceptance and openness can turn anyone into friends. So all the words for hospitality are about openness and reaching out. How much, again, of what we've been looking at together has been about opening our eyes to see?

[32:06]

opening our ears to hear, our hands to handle, and above all, having room, a heart which is wide open. Love your enemy and pray for him. Jesus himself points us to the ultimate act of hospitality, when he asks us to love the enemy. Love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you. Because ultimately, monastic hospitality has a special purpose. Let them be led to

[33:06]

Hospitality that Benedict holds out to us isn't a social affair, to entertain and be entertained. It is so that we may together listen to God, not to ourselves, not to that inner conversation, inward-looking and chatterbox, but to listen to to the word. That means turning away from all the clamor and the clamor inside myself of all its screaming, scheming and dreaming, rather entry into the silence, the deep silence which upholds and makes possible the stability and the space in which I can listen to God.

[34:15]

And so we come full circle. Hospitality, true hospitality, rests on the enclosed space within ourselves, the stability within ourselves, the silence within ourselves. And just as in the slides, we looked in two directions and we saw the images of the desert and the marketplace, the enclosure and hospitality. So, in gratitude for what this time of enclosure has meant here, on the top of the mountain. In gratitude for the hospitality of the monks here who have welcomed us into our lives, can we leave this place with Benedict's vision of hospitality so that our hospitality is

[35:35]

the hospitality of the heart, a heart overflowing with love. And we leave this place with open eyes, open ears, open hands, open mind, and above all, that open heart. Does anybody have any comments?

[37:51]

I thought this all would be dancing. I think he has a point. Do I open up? Do I open up a line? I think that it is respect for oneself. There must be a point at which you actually know if you're of value to yourself and value to others. other people, that comes a point where you feel that you are no longer a full and a creative person, but have become a bedraggled, distracted, exhausted person.

[38:58]

Respect for oneself and one's own self-worth, time for oneself, time for one's own All this is to be taken extremely seriously. It's not to be confused with the worst sort of 60s self-fulfillment and 60s space because it isn't pointing to ourselves. It isn't one more piece of self-indulgent narcissism. We are handling ourselves as a mystery because God has put us together so amazingly, delicately, and uniquely. And it is in his service and to fulfill his potential that we have to handle ourselves with that reverence and respect.

[40:03]

And therefore, I think the question to yourself is, If you feel you've gone over the edge in which that delicate mystery is beginning, you know, get a bit worn out, stand back and take an overview. It's a very good question because we live in a society which really seems to value our worth by our busyness. Because in England, there's a way of, they don't say hello. Well, they say hello, but, you know, you must be so busy all in the same breath. And you're not supposed to answer no, because that's frozen, because that's the wrong answer. That isn't playing the game. But it's very tempting to do that and say no. I'm not so busy.

[41:05]

Perhaps I work hard, but I'm not so busy. Yes. I was quoting the description of the bursar who is one of the most practical characters on whom to model ourselves who has all these impossible demands coming on him because he's got the goods to deliver and you know whatever they may be and people want them and they want them now he doesn't keep people waiting which is a way of cutting people down to size a very subtle way of

[42:06]

No, he doesn't do that. He doesn't demean people. But he does actually say that he's not endlessly available. He does respect himself as much as to say there are limits, there are times that are appropriate, and there are times that are appropriate for me. So that he carries within himself this heart of silence, this contemplative heart. which is a lovely, just a very sensitive way of describing that. I think being endlessly available is also something to look out for, particularly for people who are in ministry or particularly for people who are ordained. It's very, very tempting, as I know, being married to say that they're just endlessly available.

[43:13]

I think it makes them feel better. You see, I see this as a kind of a taking the gospel back a little too far in terms of service. It's the way that I've often seen it. And close to me, and at the end of this in people who You have to be quite humble to actually say, okay, I'm not indispensable. Okay, I can delegate. Okay, somebody else can do it just as well as me. Because it gets very close to all sorts of bad praise, like encouraging dependency, doesn't it? So it's very good to see it as clearly as that.

[44:15]

I'm wondering too, at this point, which is amazing. God, we live for God, where it is, Jesus, or seek us. Amen. So God, we live for God, we live for God. Yes, those are the sort of people who are often, tragically, the most restless. The least able to stop. I think this question of

[45:24]

receiving from the other must be really uppermost in our minds today as the other side of hospitality which isn't always sufficiently emphasized and just if in all humility and I mean who am I to say this but if you know what what we as Christians could receive from Native American understanding from you know their set of values So that there might have been this openness so that as well as, you know, the handouts or whatever is given, one also is prepared to listen and to learn from another people and another culture in all humility. Can anyone say rather more about that than I, having, after all, I only just have a sort of, you know, a vague feeling about that?

[46:37]

I think, I would, I would conjecture that you're probably looking at it coming to a back view where none, but in the ways, I think the movie The Mission, for me, It's a wonderful picture because it does talk about the Jesuits. pretty much helping them to be productive and then with their products, you know, take their products and then help them to do solstice.

[50:30]

When the powers of the Pope and the political process are pretty much undone, undid, you know, an approach that was heart-filled. And of course you have the tragedy and the drama of different characters. You have the soldier who forgiveness, you know, then those who work with the Indians and gives way of facing, you know, the immediate danger that happens when the soldiers come to destroy it, they get to which they get back to the sovereign powers and stuff. So, I look at something like that and I see where there probably were people, you know, like you said, shouting back to Europe, saying, you know, please, give these people respect, but the ways of the world and the power and the politics and all that stuff, often just simply are so powerful and fortunate that they don't stay in a chance.

[51:33]

And so it's not called out. Even in Britain, I think only just now are we becoming aware particularly of our oppression of the Celtic people and what thereby we lost in terms of what could have deepened our own Christian understanding with their extraordinary sensitivity, their sense of kin, their sense of closeness to the earth, things that come deep, deep out of their tradition. And we just, those people suffered every conceivable sort of social and economic and political oppression. It's quite difficult. Yes, I have. It used to be taken into consideration, and they were very much of what I can do.

[52:42]

Very parallel. The thing that comes to my mind is a number of years ago, during the Charles Kern controversy, a talk given by a bishop who was obviously trying to head off, Kern's been dismissed. who said that there's always a tension in the church between the center, to keep some sort of order going, and what he called the creative margin. It's in contact with things outside the church. And he said that the temptation is always for the center to label the margin as being kooky, crazy, and disloyal. And some of the things that you come into contact with these days are a little bit kooky and crazy.

[53:45]

I mean, there's no sure ways about it. But labels are very dangerous. And I think it's necessary to approach that with great respect. I remember hearing about that institute Matthew Fox had out there. And once someone said, well, you know, Matthew has a witch on his faculty. And this was in a group of seminarians. All those seminarians burst out laughing. The point being that Matthew is obviously crazy. But then I later discovered that this woman named Starhawk is, in fact, actually a highly educated specialist in the field of Native American shamanism. You can call it witchcraft if you want. call it Native American shamanism, it becomes much more respectable. That is a very good example of how labelling means judging, means dismissing that sort of sliding scale, isn't it?

[54:47]

And not being actually open and sensitive to what is the truth of the whole situation. It's a good example. We spoke about South Africa and then came to Bolin and I don't believe I was thinking of this subtlest of oppression and you have something that Brother Nathan said more so that we label the obvious oppression. It's very easy to worry about. I'm concerned with some of these efforts, and I'm trying to recognize what you're saying when we got back to London after being in the hospital, and realizing the class system that we have, that all those are very nice things. Well, I think that's sort of

[55:50]

Yes, a lot of people come back to England after visiting South Africa, particularly before the lifting of apartheid, and do a great run talking about the evil of apartheid and making people feel good. And I've never ever talked in public about South Africa. I've written about it in a sort of succession of vignettes of really the complexity of what I encountered after that. So that people should in some way enter into the complexity of it. But also because I just felt who was I to talk about the evil apartheid? I thought that what I saw in South Africa really passed judgement on London where And because it's not open, but because it's so much more subtle, I think it is the more cruel.

[57:00]

We are, whatever we may say, we are extremely class-ridden in England. And as soon as we open, anyone opens their mouths, we can tell by their accent what class and what background we are. they come from. Then we go on to ask them in a nice social way where they went to school and there's a hierarchy of schools. Downside is very near the top which is one of the most expensive. And then we discover their job and it's acceptable or not acceptable. Then we look at their clothes and all the time What is going on in our mind? There's a little checklist. Okay, so who are you? Where have you come from? This is labeling people, putting people into boxes, and that's a form of oppression.

[58:09]

We don't perhaps always see it as such, but undoubtedly putting somebody into a box is a form of oppression because it isn't allowing them, it isn't allowing me to respect the fact that they are made in the image of God and that they have that mystery which must always, I hope, elude my grasp. And I must respect that innate dignity and that mystery and drawback. I told them in reverence. I don't know, but I can only talk about my own.

[59:16]

It is a most challenging, absolutely challenging thing to say if we follow the way of St. Benedict and if that has any sort of meaning in our life, that everyone who comes be received as Christ.

[59:40]

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