What Makes you Grumpy?

Last week I had the opportunity to spend a day at the Holy Wisdom Monastery just outside Madison. This is a unique ecumenical community that shapes its life around the disciplines of Benedictine community. Located on a hill overlooking Lake Mendota it provides a beautiful and spirit-filled retreat from the pace or life.

The elements of Benedictine spirituality include five central practices: Prayer, Study, Recreation, Work and Hospitality. It is the last one that I wondered about as I joined the sisters for lunch in their newly completed building, with beautiful open spaces for worship, prayer, and reflection. In the Rule of Benedict it is written, “Let all guests who arrive be received as Christ, because He will say: ‘I was a stranger and you took Me in’ (Mt 25:35). And let due honor be shown to all, especially to those ‘of the household of the faith’ (Gal 6:10) and to wayfarers.” I wondered how this new building was affecting the community, and the delightful woman next to me, wise with years, said, “It makes me grumpy!”

It was, of course, the friendliest “grumpy” I’d ever heard, and her partner in community explained more patiently that the new space provided them with the opportunity to truly practice this fifth practice of hospitality. They could greet worshippers who joined them on Sunday mornings, and sponsor things like the art exhibition that was spread in the entry way. More people were finding them, and not surprisingly new potential for programs was constantly bubbling to the surface. But all this change has a definite effect on a small group of people who had lived together in a certain way for several years. Things aren’t where you put them, there are people where there once were spaces, and sounds where there was silence. I thought of the poster that hung in my room as a boy, of Linus, hugging his blanket: “I love mankind…It’s people I can’t stand!” They make you grumpy!

Evangelism is a very popular word in churchy circles these days, usually referring to the need to get more people into the pews on Sunday mornings. Programs abound to attract visitors, and you could attend seminars from now to the end of the year on strategies for getting them to stay. What we too seldom admit is that as much as we may long for more people to share in the work of our congregations, new people are inconvenient. They don’t know when to stand and sit, they don’t realize you want to sit in that pew just behind your best friend, and if you take the time to greet them you just might miss catching up on the latest news.

The fact of the matter is that practicing true hospitality is a challenge to community. Systems theorists wisely note that the entire group is different if a single member is added, and every relationship in the web effected. It’s simply not possible to say that you like things the way they are and that you want to welcome new folk to your table. They will make you grumpy! That, I suppose, is why for Benedict it had to be a Rule, and one, by the way, set well into the other disciplines of community and not the place you start.

I suspect the first real key of “evangelism” is to recognize that we are called to hospitality precisely as a way of challenging the cosy, comfortable ways that we’ve grown into. It is intended to shake us up a little, pushing us to patiently uncover the ways in which the “other” makes God present to us, and no how we make God present to the “other.”

If you’ve been reading here a while you know that Sarah Miles’ book, Take This Bread has played an important part in my journey this past year. She knows something about how real hospitality transforms community, and not always in the most comfortable ways. I leave you with a story from the book…a reminder that the real impetus of being church lies not in how well we insulate ourselves from the world, and welcome others in, but whether we find the courage and openness to let that world make us just a little grumpy as we, and it, are changed by God’s amazing, incalculable love for us all:

From Chapter Four:

One evening in St. Gregory's kitchen, after everyone else had left, I heard a confession from a pantry volunteer, who'd brought me what she said was a 'secret' in a shopping bag. She had a cast on her leg, and kept looking over her shoulder anxiously, and she made me close the kitchen door. Her boyfriend, who beat her up regularly, had been threatening to kill her, she said, swallowing hard.

"I thought, this is a church, it'll be safe here," she said, unwrapping a dirty dishtowel from around a huge .357 Magnum revolver. "I took out the firing pin."

That's what church was for, I realized: a place to bring the ugly, frightening secret you couldn't tell anyone else about. I checked that the gun was disarmed, and stuck it in a cookie tin in a locked closet beneath the pantry shelves. I didn't mention it to anyone from the Sunday congregation. The woman moved away, to stay with a sister in Sacramento. A month later I did tell Steve.

"You must be kidding," he said.

"Isn't this what church is for?" I said.

"Uh, yeah," said Steve. He looked scared, and like he wanted to laugh at the same time. "Whoa, that's a really big gun." We drove down to the local police station, and I walked up to the officer on duty. I was wearing a crucifix and a fairly respectable sweater. "Excuse me, I found this in our churchyard," I lied. "Can you please take it?"

There's nothing like being a middle-aged white lady, I told Steve as we drove back. The cops had gathered around the officer who unwrapped the package. "Holy shit," said of them. "Excuse me, ma'am." They passed it around, gingerly, and let me leave after I insisted I didn't want to make a report or get a receipt. "Can you imagine if we'd been two black teenage guys walking in with that?"

"You just made the high point of my career as a parish administrator," said Steve. "I never imagined I'd show a cop something that could make him say 'holy shit.' "

"Yeah, well," I said. "I guess this is what you call the Christian life."