Making Hospitality Impulsive by Charles Mabee The goal of the Hospitality Initiative is to broaden and deepen what we might

term the ethos of impulsive hospitality. To better understand this, it is helpful to focus on hospitality as a strictly behavioral-oriented activity: more concerned with the propensity to a certain kind of behavior, than with the interior or psychological motivations that provide for or motivate such behavior. In psychological terms, hospitality is behaviorist, not analytical. Because of this, it is outward-looking, rather than inward-looking. It seeks to create an ethos, not an academic study or theory. It does not conjure up a specific theory of mind, or particular theoretical undergirding: a full-scale theory of hospitality is neither called for, nor essential to the act itself. At its nexus point, the act of hospitality is simply that: act. Of course, strictly speaking, all acts have an intellectual component, some sort of understanding that precedes the act itself. In the framework of hospitality, prior to the act comes the knock at the door, and this knock must be recognized and interpreted as the desire of the other to enter ones home before the hospitality can occur. It other words, it needs to be clear that the knock does not signify that our house is on fire, or that an angry neighbor does not want his lawn-mower back that we borrowed last summer. But the important point is the minimizing the component of deliberation in the hospitable actrather than should I allow the other into my home, or not?, we respond to the knock by the simple act of opening the door in a gesture of my house is your house. If the act of hospitality is absolutely pure, that decision is made before the knowledge of the identity of the one knocking fully registers in our thinking. Perhaps the other is unknown, and thus a stranger; or, perhaps not. It may be that the other is known, and thus already construed as friend or enemy. It matters not if the act of hospitality is to be extended. The point is simply this: the invitation to enter is issued before the recognition of identity is intellectually processed by the hostit should be, in other words, an impulsive act. But if the ethos of hospitality is not based on the identity of the one who knocks, upon what basis is the welcoming invitation issued by the host? Should we conclude that the host a risk-taker, a kind of gambler, hoping against hope that the one who knocks will not ramshackle or rob him/her of possessions? Is the message of hospitality: live in the edge: blindly allow the other in and risk personal indignity or injury? Why this is not the ethos is constitutive for appropriating, and ultimately unlocking, the spiritual power of hospitality. In fact, the knock at the door invokes neither risk nor gamble, but rather the ancient memory that the table is the center of human communal experience and at the end of the day all spiritual insight is rooted in it. Allowing the stranger into ones home is equivalent to making a place for spiritual truth, whether this spiritual truth is termed God, Spirit, or Enlightenment. In the practice of hospitality, such linguistic twists and turns are of secondary importance, because the focus is on the table, not cognitively grasping

the full nature or character of the deeper truths that accompany the experience itself. The ethos of hospitality ultimately penetrates to the depths of the meaning of life and death. The early stories in the biblical tradition serves as an insightful case in point. Here we see Genesis referencing a fundamental problematic of human life: just as the soul needs the material body for its own spiritual fulfillment and completion, the body itself needs food for its own life to continue. This is the presupposition of the story of Adam, Eve, and God in the Garden. The key idea of tying morality to food, embodied in God command do not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, ultimately invokes death as the consequence of violation. It is very clear in the Genesis account, that morality, spiritual truth, and food come packaged as a unity. We may say that here we learn that not only does the body perish without the sustenance of food, but the soul itself is greatly impoverished. The spiritual meaning of food, in other words, is to nourish both the soul and the body, to enable the body as the authentic spiritual partner to the soul. We may extend the biblical understanding in these terms: the soul, however it is precisely understand within a specific religious tradition, cannot fulfill its own destiny without this partnership with the body. We are incarnate beings, and in that brute fact of our existence lies the beginnings of spiritual truth. Therefore, the soul in isolation is inherently incomplete; and the failure to recognize it as such represents the fundamental failure of Gnosticism. The beginning point in what we might term the wisdom of death is the recognition that death comes to us as a thief who steals the symbiosis of soul and body, leaving only the soul to continue its journey in whatever ways that a given religious tradition imaginatively portrays. Interestingly, the so-called heresy of Gnosticism lies precisely at this point: it proclaims a fully realized soul outside the body, in spite of the body, rather than as incarnated within the body. The ethos of hospitality is a direct antidote to this Gnostic distortion. In biblical terms, we may say it in these terms: the yes of hospitality precedes the moral knowledge of good and evil. In biblical terms, hospitality is the ethos of Adam in the Garden in Genesis 1-2, before the so-called Fall in Genesis 3. Because Adam is hospitable in Genesis 1-2, he lives in a hospitable universe: thereby able to speak with God face-to-face, living in perfect harmony with nature. Morality is not introduced until Genesis 3, and it is done so as the great challenge of the created order: You may not eat. Unlike moral thought that seeks compliance with a code of behavior, rational constructed and transmitted, hospitality aims at the inculcation of a habitual mode of behavior that aims at reflex and impulse. In that way, we may say that while all modes of behavior have an intellectual component, the trajectory of hospitality tends toward the pre-intellectual, the pre-rational. Thus, in the establishment of a hospitality ethos, the intention is to increasingly minimize the moral component by ever shortening the moment of deliberation: should I, or should I not, open the door? Ideally, the essential moment of hospitality becomes pure reflex, i.e., autonomously generated behavior, accomplished before and without the aid of conscious thought. The role of host is based on who one is, not what one

thinks: I am a person of hospitality, I invite the one who knocks into my home without thought of his/her identity. In this way, within hospitality there is no meaningful distinction between the stranger and the other who is known. Each is treated the samehospitable behavior is based on the knock itself, rather than the identity of the one who knocks, because at the end of the day, the knock at the door is the request to sit at the table, the true source of all human community and spirituality. In this way, the motivation of hospitality is neither morality, nor ethics, but the hunger for spirituality on the part of guest and host alike. For that reason, the ultimate roles of guest and host are really interchangeable: either can easily slide into the identity of the other because beneath all humanly-constructed human differentiations lies the spiritual oneness that is celebrated at the table. In this way, the pure act of hospitality ultimately denies the ultimacy of all social differentiation, political contention, and economic ordering as the drivers of human society, and thereby relegates them to the status of penultimacy. The establishment of the hospitable ethos that enables this to happen is the true beginning of spiritual wisdom.