Spiritual Hospitality

Well, it had to happen one morning or another . . . and today was the day.

I didn't see the sun come up.

I was entirely "tuckered out" after meetings last night, had a very late bite to eat and then hit the sack. I got up at 8:45 this morning. Whoops.

Anyway, I did my morning writing, but it was aimed at a particular use: my monthly newsletter column. You'll forgive me, even as you trust that I did my breathing and said my prayers.

=====

Dear congregation, dear community,

Summer passed so quickly! Is it true that, so soon, we're at the start of a new program year?

I hope you are ready for our Ingathering on September 9. Director of Lifespan Learning Amy Derrick and Music Director Pia Broden-Williams and I are creating a worship service that will be intergenerational, musical and dramatic. We hope that every family will attend; that adults and children together will share brief stories of the summer, and that we will gather together around a vessel into which we will pour water that we have brought with us from our summer's rest and recreation.

We will also float on the water our candles of celebration and concern. We'll take a deep breath together, and meditate for a moment, and sing. Our children will pour the vessels of our water into the Memorial Garden, a recognition of those who have gone before. And we will offer a blessing to one another, even as we bless together our Pot Luck--and the church's new year!
What a new year we will share! We're opening the doors of our church to the community in a special gesture of welcome. Our services, beginning in mid-September and running though Hallowe'en, will aim to be directed to the community and to those who may be unfamiliar with us. With special music, including many special appearances by the talented members of our congregation, and with a spirit-centered musical prelude at the start of each service, we hope to set a tone of diverse spirituality and spiritual hospitality.

There is a challenge in diversity. Political scientist Robert Putnam observes that "in the presence of diversity . . . we act like turtles." In neighborhoods that become more diverse, some connections between people and especially commitments to key institutions may decline in the transformation process. People retreat to the familiar in the face of the foreign.

This is why I call what we are attempting a kind of "spiritual hospitality." Our universalist convictions tell us that there are universal principles that we share; our unitarianism tells us, in our very bones, that we are but one human family, sharing one holy cycle of living, dwelling on one little world.

In my conversations with some of our members this summer, we've shared our thought that the challenge of hospitality that makes it spiritual, makes it more than mundane, is that it presumes that the hosts give to the guests, but that in an open interaction, the host also receives what the guest gives by their presence. In so doing, we become co-creators with one another of a community neither of us yet knows.

Sometimes we call such openness "radical hospitality." This is not just being welcoming of political radicals! It is saying that at the roots of who we are, at the roots of our intentionality, we know that we are not our own for ourselves. We are, in our roots, members of one another, growing from the same turf, even if we do not yet know each other directly.

More information is available at the church, and we will share more about it at the Ingathering; but I hoe that you will want to be in church this fall, bringing friends and family, and being ready to welcome guests into our congregational center.
Let's welcome eachother back!

Fondly,
(Rev.) David Carl Olson
P.S. This article is also available at www.coffeecabinet.blogspot.com

=====

Well, I guess that about does it! Morning is dry, growing sunny. I'm smiling.

Good morning.