“Welcoming and being welcomed – the first sign of a call to Hospitality” 

“God welcomes us in his home”: how many times have we heard that hymn in the nave of a church without paying any particular attention to the words.  God welcomes us in his home so that we may in turn feel a desire to welcome Him in our hearts, not just absent-mindedly making a little room for him but giving Him all the space due to Him.

Hospitality incarnate turns us at once into hosts and guests. Everyday life offers us the opportunity of being a “hospitable hearth”, both the person who welcomes and the person being welcomed. I need just as much abnegation to be welcomed by someone as to welcome them. I am just as bothered playing host to a stranger as being his guest – possibly more so.  Either way I have, in all simplicity, to leave my shell, my customs, my routines and my culture so as to make myself available to someone who may be a fellow human being but whom I perceive as being very different.

Jesus showed us the way by welcoming the strangers, the rejects, the outcasts and the nonentities; he hosted the Pharisee as well as the Publican, whatever people may have thought of His attitude. We must meditate on the Gospel if we are to translate it into our day-to-day lives. The Gospel is not a novel with touching examples in it, but rather, a guide to life that we should translate into action on a daily basis.

St John of God lived out concretely and perfectly the parable of the Good Samaritan  by giving himself up, body and soul, to the mission God had given him. To welcome the sick and the outcast: such a great gift  does not issue from human will, as St Paul pointed out, but is a gift of the grace of God, which can transform any human being into a messenger of the Kingdom. Any act of Hospitality announces the Kingdom of God.