Virtue: Hospitality

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HOSPITALITY

At its basic Indo-European root, hospitality and the guest/host bond is about creating mutual bonds, a reciprocal relationship where gifts are lavishly offered and then returned in order to create balance and harmony. Like many people who are drawn to traditional Indo-European spirituality, I am deeply attracted to the ideal of hospitality, to the virtue of giving the best of yourself to others instead of holding it back, and to the idea that you can be cared for by others in turn.

I find it very difficult to deal with this virtue in the modern world, though. Not in the literal way, in the sense of being a good and generous host; I was raised in a family where "company manners" meant being on your best behavior and being constantly attentive to the needs of guests in your home or deeply respectful of your hosts. But I feel that ideally hospitality is more than just how you act at a party; I think it should be a basic ethos that guides your actions and your choices.

I have to work very hard, though, to separate the ethos of hospitality that my ancestors held sacred from the modern capitalist ethos of transactions. In this society, we're trained to believe that any kind of richness or blessing should be closely linked to what is earned or deserved. We justify all kinds of cruelties by this idea. Schizophrenics and drug addicts live under bridges because they can no longer work for their basic needs, and social programs are castigated as taking money away from the good people who earned it and giving it to such undeserving people who did not. Mexican immigrants receive starvation wages for backbreaking labor, because after all, they don't pay taxes, do they? The rich receive million-dollar signing bonuses and waste money on extravagances that barely interest them and justify it by managing to believe that they are more valuable than, or at least work harder than, their employees. If single mothers need to work, they receive whatever quality child care they can afford and not one inch more, because providing equivalently good care for all children would be socialism run amok. I caught myself being pissed off last Halloween because a kid showed up at my door for candy without wearing a costume. Hell, I thought, if he's not going to put in any effort, why does he expect anything from me?

In part, I'm sure I was feeling a more deep-seated anger at the negation of hospitality, along with every other kind of social and community bond, that's happened in our society. I know that wherever there is someone who wants to live generously, there's someone else willing to take advantage of that without any intention of the reciprocity that hospitality demands, and that's depressing and frustrating. But another part of me, I think, was viewing my Hershey kisses, which I had allegedly bought to give as gifts on a sacred holiday as part of a community ritual tradition, as valuable goods that I wasn't willing to let go of before I'd received their fair-market value. I wanted to be entertained, or somehow given proof that he was willing to earn my candy. Proof, in fact, that he deserved it.

Hospitality is a bond of giving and taking, but that's an ideal and not always a reality. It's a challenge to me to hold up my end without trying to ensure that I'll get my payment. Very often, when you give your best to someone, you can't rely on them to give their best back to you. I'm trying to view it now as a leap of faith, because until you do behave according to your highest principles, you can't know how you'll be repaid. People do surprise us sometimes, and we can't afford to let cynicism prevent us from practicing what we know to be right.

I'm also trying to have a perspective that finds pleasure as well as duty in offering hospitality, because I believe that in any positive religion, virtue ought to be fulfilling rather than onerous. By giving gifts and making people, even strangers, even those you aren't already secure with or invested in, feel welcome in your space, you open up the ability to share wisdom and emotion, to know more about other people, to appreciate something that was previously alien and unloveable for you. By using your "company manners," you also show others that you consider them worthy of your respect, and I think the more people believe they can be respected, the more likely they are to try living up to that.

Ultimately, hospitality is about respect. As either a guest or host, it means believing and behaving as if other people are worthy of what you have to give (and for some people the reverse is a challenge -- believing that what you have, however meager you think it will seem to others, is worthy of being given as a gift). In the dominant culture, it seems like there are a fairly limited number of legitimized ways to earn respect, but the beautiful thing about hospitality is that respect is given to any and all comers, sight unseen, without knowing what good or ill they might bring along with them. At one point in time that may have been a basic foundation of society, but now it's a radical stance.