Our life at the Gainesville Catholic Worker might be best
summed up by the word hospitality. Our meals often consist of 8, 12, 15, or even
30 or more people. Our doorbell rings a dozen (sometimes two or three times
that) times a day, with friends or visitors looking for a place to sit out of
the sun for awhile, a drink of water, asking to use the phone, and so on. And
we regularly have people who have no other place to go staying with us
overnight—29 different guests stayed with us this past year for a total of
about 450 nights.
Hospitality is often defined by the work of mercy dictate
“welcome the stranger.” But the phrase doesn’t quite capture what I think we
do. For the most part, we “welcome our friends,” or even our “brothers and
sisters.” Maybe you could dismiss it as semantics, but I don’t think that would
be fair.
Perhaps one of the most countercultural and therefore
difficult aspects of “learning to live locally” is the simple task of getting
to know one’s neighbors. Colloquially, we may think of neighbors as those
persons who live in proximity to us. My own faith tradition defines neighbors
as those who treat others, especially those in need, with mercy. But our
society functions to steer us away from the practice of “neighborliness,” which
is just another word for hospitality. We learn to turn primarily inward, to be
concerned for our own needs first, and the needs of those in our immediate
family. As children, we’re taught to be suspicious of the stranger and we continue
to operate out of that mentality even as adults. The most divisive voices among
us—whether in the media or politics or economics or religion or culture—stir up
our fear of each other, and frighten us into a world of “us and them,” with
“us” being whittled down to ever smaller circles.
The truth is that if we are going to live locally, then we
are going to have to learn to start seeing others as being “in the boat” with
us. We’re going to have to learn to lend a hand and then also turn around and
ask for help when needed. We’re going to have to learn to work together,
sharing food and garden space and tools and maybe even our homes. We’re going
to have to meet and talk with and get to know people very different than
ourselves. And we’re going to have to figure out how to share what we do have,
sometimes doing without or making a sacrifice so that what we have will go a
little further to help our neighbor, our friend, our brother or sister in need.
Neighborliness, the practice of hospitality, is something
every single one of us can do right now. We can think of that which we have as
being not simply for us and our families, but, in the most honest sense, for
others. Welcoming a guest to our table; sharing the produce from our garden
with our neighbor next door or someone with whom we work; exploring how that
extra bedroom no one ever sleeps in might be made available to someone who
really needs a place to stay.
If we are to live locally, then we need to re-learn what it means to be a neighbor, as well learning the names and hearing the stories of our neighbors. The antidote for this economic collapse we’re experiencing now (and for the ones sure to come in the future) is not to draw the circle ever tighter and to protect what it is ours. The antidote is to reach out wider, to get to know one another, to care for each other. And to remember that we’re all in this together.
-John
Comments