By Noelle Mering, Catholic Herald. (Editor’s note: A neglected truth that is needed in our day and age)
Between the feasting of Christmastide and the fasting of Lent lies ordinary life without a clear script. During the holidays, hospitality is expected and expressed in full calendars and busy homes. Once the decorations are packed away and the last guests have gone, a familiar quiet settles in. There is relief in this, since hospitality is work. Yet the sudden retreat into private life also reveals something else: how thin our social fabric has become, and how rarely we practise hospitality as a natural and sustained way of life.
There is an important distinction here. Entertaining tends to be finite and festive. Hospitality should be an ongoing and ordinary way of life. The Catholic tradition has always understood hospitality in this deeper sense. Sacred Scripture speaks of it as non-negotiable. “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers,” the Letter to the Hebrews warns, “for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”
This spiritually charged sense of hospitality in the home would have been instantly recognisable to the ancient world. In The Odyssey, Odysseus’ long journey home is shaped at every turn by how he is received as a stranger. Those who welcome him with generosity are blessed; those who abuse or refuse hospitality descend into chaos. In Homer’s masterpiece, as in Sacred Scripture, the stranger arrives bearing significance, and the home and its inhabitants reveal their moral character in how they respond.
This matters especially now. We are saturated with talk of belonging, identity and the need for safety, yet starved of the very structures that once provided these things. Loneliness is widespread and well documented across much of the world. In the absence of strong domestic and communal bonds, fundamental human needs are easily displaced into politics or ideology. Movements fuelled by shared hatreds thrive in such a climate. But what politics cannot provide, and what ideology cannot combat, is the slow, personal work of being known and loved.