Queer Hospitality

 

I believe there are spiritual practices that are unique to Queer spirituality and probably the most powerful one is hospitality.  Hospitality has been practiced as a spiritual discipline and a means of survival since ancient times.  In the ancient world the practice of hospitality was a necessity.   There was an unwritten code of hospitality that was practiced in these ancient cultures that required everyone to take in a stranger that may need food and shelter or protection from an enemy.

 

How appropriate (and paradoxical) to think of hospitality as a Queer spiritual discipline since most of us have felt like strangers in the hostile environment of heterosexist culture.  One writer has said that the essence of hospitality is “receiving the other from the heart into my own dwelling place. It entails providing for the need, comfort, and delight of the other with all the openness, respect, freedom, tenderness, and joy that love itself embodies.”  Our dwelling place might be our physical home or it might be receiving the other into our inner space.

 

Many of us take pride in our homes, and goodness knows we have lots of folks in the Queer community who know how to renovate and decorate their physical space!  This need to receive the other into our dwelling place has manifested itself in entire neighborhoods of gay and lesbian people.  (What some of us affectionately call “gayborhoods.”)  But there is a difference between entertainment and hospitality.  True hospitality is receiving the other from our heart.  Regardless of how fabulous our home may look, unless we are at home with our selves we cannot extend true hospitality to others.

 

Hospitality from the heart welcomes the stranger.  Who are the strangers of our community?  How do race, class, physical abililty, gender, and age keep us strangers from one another?  When we genuinely welcome those who are different from us we create a community that delights in diversity.  Practicing hospitality can shake us loose from stereotypes and criticism of others.  Stereotypes have been a primary way the Religious Right has demonized our community.  How can we expect the world to extend hospitality to us if we cannot extend it to each other?  In the weeks ahead find ways to be at home with yourself, then extend that inner space to others.