Flunking Sainthood Read online

  Every summer when we meet, our gatherings are marked by great conversations about books, as we watch the kids play on the beach or we all drive to area attractions. And every summer, we clamor for Andrew to make his famous jungle chicken, based on changing ingredients on hand. Whatever he puts in it, it’s always delicious.

  We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

  —THORNTON WILDER

  Gratitude practically tackles me when I’m on vacation with these people. This year, toward the end of a particularly busy summer, our reunion gives me a week simply to stand back and appreciate God—and these friends who have taught me so much about God. One day, a group of us heads out to pick Michigan blueberries. It’s a perfect day, the sun high against a powder-blue sky, the fields stretching forth in promise. We pop the berries, sun-kissed, plump, and sweet, into our mouths and our buckets, chattering all the while. At one point, alone and shielded by the greenery of the high bushes, I raise my arms in gratitude for this most perfect day, for these friends, for the simple joy of fruit and harvest. Blueberry buckle tonight, blueberry pie tomorrow. Thank you, God.

  9

  September

  benedictine hospitality

  All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ,

  for he himself will say: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

  —ST. BENEDICT

  I had an experience of real hospitality some years ago when I was visiting the Badlands for a week with family and friends. My mother’s favorite cousin lives in South Dakota, where he is a brother at a Benedictine abbey. Mom had given me his contact information long before I left on the trip, but between the day trips and vacation plans we’d made with friends (what is an abbey compared to Mount Rushmore and the Wall Drug store?), I’d never called to inform David I was coming.

  I phoned him, guiltily, on our final morning. I expected him to tell me he was busy, justly irritated by my breach of etiquette. Instead, the conversation went like this:

  “Hello, David? I mean, Father John? This is Jana Riess, um, your cousin Phyllis’s daughter.”

  There was a brief silence, and I realized that David may have been preparing himself for sad news. I had never called him before, and he and my mother are now of an age where unexpected phone calls from the younger generation rarely bring good tidings.

  “Mom is just fine,” I rushed to add. “I’m actually calling, because, well, I’m visiting friends about an hour away from you, and we’d love to come and see you if you have some time.”

  “Ah, wonderful!” he cried. “When do you think you’ll be coming?”

  “Well, actually, I’m afraid it would have to be today. We’re flying home tomorrow morning, and I’m sorry I never called before. . . .”

  “Ah, wonderful!” he cried. “Will it be you and your husband?”

  “Yes, the two of us, plus our daughter that you haven’t met yet, plus another couple,” I said awkwardly. “There are five of us in all.”

  “Ah, wonderful!” he cried. “We don’t get nearly enough visitors here. Let me give you directions. Can you be here in time for lunch?”

  Before I hung up the phone, David had made me feel like he had woken up that morning just hoping against hope that a ragtag band of loosely confederated idiots would descend on his monastery that very day, and he simply couldn’t wait to show them around. It was a sensibility that lasted for our entire visit. He gave us a tour, introduced us to fellow monks and parishioners (he is also a parish priest), fed us a handsome feast for lunch, and answered all our questions about monastic life. He bounced my daughter on his knee and chatted with us as though he had all the time in the world.

  And the thing is that David is insanely busy; anyone could see that. The challenge of many monasteries today is that monks are older and their numbers fewer, and yet they still have all the duties of running the monastery and the guest house, and making cheese or fudge or wine or whatever it is they produce to sustain themselves. It gets harder every year to make a go of things. Add to that David’s responsibilities in the parish, and it becomes clear that he has no lack of things to do and places to be. Yet to him, nothing was as important as making visitors feel as welcome as Christ himself.

  If we hadn’t got Christ’s own words for it, it would seem raving lunacy to believe that if I offer a bed and food and hospitality to some man or woman or child, I am replaying the part of Lazarus or Martha or Mary, and that my guest is Christ.

  —DOROTHY DAY

  It’s humbling to be on the receiving end of that kind of hospitality, and I can only imagine how difficult it must be to engineer it. This month, though, I’m going to try.

  THE RULE OF ST. BENEDICT

  David’s hospitality didn’t spring up overnight. As we were leaving the abbey, marveling at the day, one in our group observed that we’d all just experienced Benedictine hospitality in action. “He’s been formed by that for decades,” my companion said.

  “That” turns out to be the Rule of St. Benedict, the basic guideline for any Benedictine monastic community. Written around 540, it’s not very long—about nine thousand words—but covers everything from work (everyone has plenty) to sleep (nobody gets enough) to care packages from home (sorry, but you have to share). The Rule can be surprisingly practical and specific; Benedict seems almost as concerned about the state of his monks’ footwear as he does about the state of their souls. But you can tell that every guideline arose out of specific problems and situations. It’s like with parenting; you don’t create the rule about not eating popsicles in the house until someone has dripped sticky orange goo all over the carpet.

  I need to remind myself of the Rule’s practicality because, like many people, I have a knee-jerk reaction against the word rule. I think I have adult-onset Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Actually, scratch the “adult-onset” part. I’ve always been this way. I don’t like other people telling me what to do, how to behave, how to live my life. Who does? In the family I grew up in, people who followed others blindly were regarded as lemmings. “Imbeciles,” my father called them. I had to look that word up. The messages of childhood were clear: question authority, be a critical thinker, don’t take any wooden nickels. At least in one way I am healthier than my father: he hated institutions and the people in them. I am suspicious of institutions but I love people.

  In Benedict’s time, a monastery was small enough—a dozen monks or so—that it felt more like a family than an institution. So maybe this “rule” of St. Benedict is like those house rules every family has, some written and others unwritten. Put the toilet seat down. Clean up after yourself. Don’t run the lawn mower in the house. (Don’t ask, but that is indeed a rule in our home.)

  Benedict’s Rule is far-ranging, but his most famous statement is probably the one that opens this chapter—that every stranger should be welcomed as Christ. This is the aspect of the Rule I’m zeroing in on this month. Through the centuries, Benedictine monks have lavished hospitality on wayfarers. When the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer visited London in the 1930s, he was blown away by the reception he got when staying at a local monastery. “The natural hospitality, which is evidently something specifically Benedictine, the really Christian respect for strangers for Christ’s sake, almost makes one ashamed,” he wrote to his best friend, Eberhard Bethge. “You should come here some time! It’s a real experience.”

  This month, I’m not joining a monastery, but I’m going to look out for opportunities to practice hospitality. I want to be more like my mother’s cousin David and less like—well, less like me. In one month I can hardly expect to be as formed by the Rule of St. Benedict as David has been, but surely I can venture out of my comfort zone to understudy the role of Christ for a few wayfarers.

  HOSPITALITY DONE RIGHT

  As September begins, I immediately find hospitality being practiced in an unexpected place. One day I undergo my not-quite-annual gyn exam and find, to my
amusement, that the doctor has placed two homemade cozies on the stirrups that hold my feet.

  “Did you make those yourself?” I joke with her.

  “Actually, yes, I did,” she says sheepishly. I am touched by this. Like eleven out of ten other women, getting a gyn exam ranks right up there with a root canal on my list of Happy Things to Do Today, but here is my doctor trying to make my feet warm and comfortable by knitting stirrup cozies. She probably doesn’t even know she’s practicing Benedictine hospitality, but she clearly wants to welcome the stranger as Christ, should our Lord ever need to visit the doctor.

  My friends Ray and Roberta have also taught me about hospitality. They were strangers to me until the 1990s, when I was researching what would become my dissertation. I needed to take a research trip to a far-off city and asked my friend Angela, who came from there, if she knew of a dormitory or cheap motel close to the archives.

  “Don’t stay in a dorm,” she said. “You can stay with my parents.”

  “Oh, no,” I protested. “I’ve never even met your parents, and this is going to be a ten-day trip, maybe even two weeks. Nobody wants to have guests for that long. Guests and fish start to stink after three days. Remember?”

  Angela is stubborn as well as fiercely kind. She insisted that her parents would be thrilled and made all of the arrangements. True to her word, Ray and Roberta were delighted to open their home to me, and we became fast friends. Now I stay at their house whenever I’m in town, which is often, and I always know that I’ll be loved in every detail: that the red fleece robe and hunter green slippers will be hanging in “my” closet, that we’ll enjoy memorable conversations and delicious meals, that I’ll be enthusiastically licked by their Bernese Mountain Dog, the third in a series of Berners they’ve had since I first met them. Walking over the threshold of their peaceful house feels like I’ve come home.

  And isn’t that what we all want, what hospitality is about? It’s being welcomed at the table, with others who are genuinely glad we’re there. The grandeur of the welcome isn’t important; making the effort is. When I was a graduate student, I was always impressed by the meals my friends could conjure out of their Lilliputian Manhattan apartments. One couple had a studio that probably wasn’t even three hundred square feet total, but they were constantly inviting folks over for dinner and to spend the night. They called it their “Stay-Free Mini-Pad” and made jokes about its tiny size even while squeezing eight in for dinner and rolling out the futon for friends of friends looking for a place to crash in the city. I always enjoyed spending time with them.

  NOTE TO SELF: DON’T BE LIKE SODOM

  Sometimes we can’t quite put our finger on what it is that makes us feel welcome, but we’re usually keenly aware of such details in reverse—when we perceive a lack of hospitality, we can identify exactly what went wrong. Once, I arrived in a college town to speak at a summer conference. I was on the last train, and although I had e-mailed my arrival time to the conference organizers in advance, no one came to pick me up, and the organizers weren’t answering the cell phone number I’d been given. After almost two hours, someone finally fetched me from the station, but by this time the cafeteria had closed for the day and no one had thought to save any food for me. The organizers seemed too harried to care. I ordered a pizza, but waited nearly an hour for delivery because the organizers hadn’t told me the name of the dorm where I was staying and, weirdly, that information wasn’t posted anywhere. I had no map of the campus and didn’t know how to give the pizza guy directions, but he finally found the dorm after seeing me standing outside waving my arms like a banshee. Famished, I devoured half a lukewarm pizza and climbed into a hard dorm bed that had sheets but no blanket.

  Things only got worse the next day, when the conference program demanded participation in spiritual rituals that made some people uncomfortable, including me. It involved lots of chanting and moving around in circles to release “negative energy.”

  Of course, my whole perspective of the conference was colored by the fact that no one had met me at the train station and I went to sleep shivering. How might my experience have been different if someone had met basic needs and shown an interest in getting to know me? Hospitality is about more than seeing to visitors’ nourishment and comfort, although that’s a hugely important start. It’s about welcoming the stranger so that the stranger is no longer strange. He or she becomes known as a person. When that happens, lives can be changed, friendships formed—even wars averted.

  In the Old Testament, laws of hospitality demanded that guests be given protection, an important consideration in a violent tribal culture where people might just as soon hack you into pieces as open the tent flap to let you in. It’s funny how our modern interpretations of the Bible have downplayed the critical importance of hospitality in some of those stories, especially in the book of Genesis. We think it’s sweet that Abraham entertains angels-in-disguise in Genesis 18, and we give him kudos for killing the fatted calf and all that. But we don’t usually connect that story to the chapter that follows, in which those same angels go to Sodom and almost get drawn and quartered by an angry mob. Lot is spared from the city’s fiery destruction because he’s the only guy in all of Sodom who gives shelter to these angels (who are still traveling incognito) rather than trying to harm them.

  In our time, we tend to interpret the text as focusing on the “sin of Sodom”—a sexual thing. Our forebears even invented the word sodomy to describe this sin, in hushed tones of course. But in the Old Testament, extending into the time of Jesus, these chapters were read in a totally different way. They were about a community’s failure to show hospitality to strangers, and the serious divine wrath that resulted from this neglect.

  Sodom and its neighboring town Gomorrah were destroyed not because men were having sex with cows or with each other—despite the unfortunate fact that the word Gomorrah sounds like a venereal disease—but because their people tried to kill God’s messengers. In the Gospels, Jesus refers to Sodom and Gomorrah when he’s teaching the twelve disciples how to go out into other towns to preach the gospel and heal the sick. If anyone won’t welcome them, he says they should “shake off the dust” from their feet and leave that place, because it will be “more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town” (Matt. 10:14–15).

  Clearly, God cares about hospitality. A lot. Since I’m not hankering to be burned to a crisp like Sodom, I ought to pay attention and practice being more hospitable, more Benedictine. But how?

  WOULD I FRIEND JESUS ON FACEBOOK?

  “Jane Doe wants to friend you on Facebook,” the message announces. All I have to do is click on the link, and presto! Jane and I will suddenly become BFFs. In the past, I have been careful to say no to every one of these requests from people I didn’t know personally or couldn’t identify in a police lineup should that need ever arise. If I had time, I would add a prissy little note: “I am so sorry to have to refuse your kind offer of Facebook friendship. I have a rule that I only friend people I have personally met. Perhaps one day I’ll be lucky enough to meet you in person, and then we can be Facebook friends as well as face-to-face friends.” Subtext: I don’t kiss on the first date, people.

  Now, however, I am going to friend promiscuously. If St. Benedict were online, he’d hardly demand the bona fides of every wayfarer who attempted to scale his Facebook wall, would he? So I start small, by accepting invitations from two people with whom I have friends in common. Really, how different is this than being introduced to them at a party? After a few days of this, the sky has not fallen in, so I accept a few more invitations. Soon I am racking up the Facebook friends.

  On the one hand, this is a good way to force me to literally welcome the stranger. A colleague of mine has pointed out to me that the default mode of Facebook is friendship. You are given the opportunity to confirm a relationship (or ignore a request), but by using the language of confirmation, Facebook already assumes that a relationship
exists. Somehow I think Benedict would approve of this.

  The problem with the Facebook experiment, though, is that I’m still in total control of these “relationships.” I can friend people but then hide them in my news feed so I don’t have to hear about the ten pounds they’ve just lost (only fifteen more to go! they squeal), or the way their toddler threw up on them last night, or how many new crops they’ve just planted in some inane-sounding application called Farmville.

  The truth is that I don’t want to know these things. I don’t want to invest in the lives of perfect strangers—who, incidentally, are called “perfect” strangers precisely because it’s only when we investigate others up close that we’re privy to their many flaws. I can barely assimilate the flood of Facebook information I am already getting from people I care about. Those are people to whom I have an abiding attachment, either because we are friends in adulthood or because, as is the case with one of my Facebook friends, we once had to pee together in a dirt hole in Guatemala when there was no toilet to be found. You can’t help but bond after an experience like that.

  I’m aware that the roots for hospital and hospitality are the same; both come from the Latin root hospes, for foreigner. We get a number of other English words from that same root—host, hostel, hospice, even hotel—but all of them share the core idea of welcoming the stranger into our physical midst. What all this dictionary hunting tells me is that my Facebook experiment is fine insofar as it goes, but I’m not exactly risking anything here. It’s time to open our home to guests.