Customer Reviews

Hospitality-The Sacred Art: Discovering the Hidden Spiritual Power of Invitation and Welcome (Art of Spiritual Living)

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Reverend Sawyer presents her theme of hospitality in a way which is generally unfamiliar to us in the modern context. She reaches back in time to the great ancient spiritual traditions for her understanding. In the Christian tradition we can talk of the Rule of St. Benedict and the tradition of hospitality in the medieval monasteries. Her presentation however extends beyond Christianity and she is able to show that similar traditions are virtually universal. In developing her theme of hospitality as mutual receptivity, reverence, and generosity she is able to achieve a true synthesis of both breadth and depth while showing its relevance for the modern world.
I especially appreciate her integration of the non-violent philosophies (or theologies?) of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Actually the roots of this type of thinking are deeper in Christianity than most people realize. Groups like the Anabaptists, Quakers, and even the Jehovah's Witnesses, are often just considered eccentric by mainstream Christians, but there is true depth to their theology and a greater affinity to biblical thought then is generally recognized. Non-violent theology goes back a long way. In the case of the Anabaptists, it dates to the days of the Reformation. Threads go back to the earliest days of Christianity. Baha'is form another tradition which comes to very similar theological conclusions. Their origins are primarily in Shiite Islam, from which they split in the nineteenth century, showing again the universality of the origins of these strains of thought.
It seems to me that Sawyer is quite correct in pointing to the fact that the great religious traditions converge on the question of hospitality. She has identified a very singular point in their respective theologies. It is precisely at the point of hospitality, broadly and deeply defined in her book, that the tension between community and fairness, a tension which pervades questions of social morality, can begin to be overcome. It is the point at which the community is receptive to others and reaches beyond itself to enlarge itself and its justice. Of course, this is where the great traditions converge. Without similar answers at this point, they would be incapable of bringing about the moral ordering of society and would therefore not be, by definition, great spiritual traditions.
I am not one who believes that, although originating in different cultural and historical circumstances, the great traditions fundamentally come to the same conclusions at the summit of their theological thought. After all Buddhist emptiness and Christian eschatology are very different. However, along the way from their different origins to their theological summits, they do converge at the point of hospitality as explained in Sawyer's enlightening little book.

You may be surprised as you start reading the Rev. Nanette Sawyer's book that you'll be more than a quarter of your way through the entire volume before Sawyer actually leads you toward meeting someone. For more than 50 pages, you'll be getting yourself spiritually ready for that moment. This book really is about what Sawyer calls "deep hospitality," a guide to some of the possible approaches we can take to open our hearts, minds and lives to other people.

Despite what our parents and grandparents may have drilled into us, hospitality is far larger than etiquette and cultural customs of welcoming people or visiting them. Hospitality is a timeless spiritual principle that flows to us from our earliest scriptures, although today we tend to trump the value of hospitality with other values like competition and the desire for self-expression. That's unfortunate, because those more popular values often wind up carving out dangerous divisions in our communities.

In his preface to the book, the Rev. Dirk Ficca, a well-known bridge builder himself through the Parliament of the World's Religions, explains the urgency of freshly exploring this kind of deep hospitality: "In a post-September 11 world, driven by the forces of globalization and religious identity, where communities of often starkly different languages, cultures, and traditions are now living side by side in major urban centers, the stakes have never been higher for a different reading of these traditions, with hospitality as the guiding principle."

Sawyer and Ficca both are from the Presbyterian Church USA, but Sawyer's book takes us far from mainline Protestantism in search of spiritual resources. Along the way, if you explore her book, you'll meet the Cistercian monk Thomas Keating, the Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh and many others.

I especially recommend the final chapters of the book, which reach into the most challenging - and potentially the most transformative -- kinds of hospitality: toward people we perceive as enemies and toward the Creation itself, including the creatures struggling to survive in our threatened natural world.

Consider this for small-group study, because a two-month series of classes easily could be built around this wisdom-filled paperback.