Working Together

When I began making the connection between the practices of hospitality and lament and discussing it with others, I quickly realized that I needed to explain those words. Often the word “hospitality” conjured images of a table set with pristine linens, fine china, silver, and candles. Beautiful as that can be, it was a limited image and far from the images I hoped to encourage. Similarly, "lament" recalled images of an unbridled display of grief. I didn’t want either set of images to hinder others who wished to learn more about these practices. I found that some definitions and illustrations were either too terse, lengthy, or vague to be helpful. As providence would have it, Alan Jacobs came to my aid.  Some of his most recent blog posts were extremely helpful not only in providing apt descriptions for these practices but in spurring a meaningful connection between hospitality and lament. 

Jacobs is working on a series titled Invitation and Repair. In one of his recent posts in this series he discusses the use of similes saying, "Maybe that’s what humanistic thought is essentially: a search for new similes, new ways of perceiving the familiar — better to appreciate it when it deserves appreciation and better to change it when it requires changing.“ This was what I was looking for, similes for hospitality and lament. Words flexible enough to give me new ways to explain the practices and allow others new ways to envision and embody those practices. In his next post, I found those similes and meaningful connections between hospitality and lament. 

In his post titled, not giving up, Jacobs explained, "One way to describe the Invitation and Repair project is to say that it’s for people who haven’t given up." He goes on to give examples of various institutions and how they have given up their good purpose. Those good purposes, he says, require the hard, patient work of those who do not give up. This idea is easily connected to both hospitality and lament. Those who practice hospitality and lament commit to hard, patient work, knowing there will be temptations to give up.  Both practices require physical, emotional, and spiritual stamina which are often tested due to the frequency and intensity of the work. 

Jacobs goes on to say in doing the work of inviting and repairing, "we manifest hope: we look towards a future of cooperative endeavor — cooperative discovery, cooperative healing."* There was the connection I had been looking for between hospitality and lament, hope. The two practices work in a cooperative endeavor to manifest hope. When hope is initiated and supported within hospitality, then the practice of lament can work within and toward hope and healing. If the hard, patient works of lament and hospitality don’t collaborate, and if hospitality and lament surrender to the temptation to give up, hope and healing are forfeited. Hospitality and lament must work in collaboration for the discovery of hope and healing.

And what of those similes?  Well, I saw that hospitality offers an invitation of hope to those who seek, in their lament, to repair hope grown tired or lost along the way. So, invitation and repair seem at this point to be apt similes for hospitality and lament. 

*This echoes Andy Crouch's suggestion that lament is the seedbed of creativity, but that is an upcoming post.