For our weekly Garden of Your Mind session today with *cino volunteer staff, we explored our core value of radical hospitality — a timely conversation as we begin summer lunches and Community Fun Night this week. A past catapult editorial served as pre-reading, along with some relevant daily asterisk quotes about hospitality:
And finally this one from Henri Nouwen, worth quoting in full here because of its deep impact on the wording we chose for the *cino core values:
Hospitality, therefore, means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines.
To frame our discussion, we read part of the chapter on welcome from Community and Growth by Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche communities. As we read the selection paragraph by paragraph, we used a large sheet of paper to record the qualities of radical hospitality, as we were hearing them in this text, as well as the qualities of its opposite, which got summarized as “exclusion,” whether intentional or unintentional.
The conversation allowed us to visit some important themes as we get into gear for summer programming, including the hospitality of setting good boundaries, the need to balance identity and belonging, and how to cultivate relationships of mutual teaching and learning with each other and our neighbors. Enjoy these images of our brainstorm, and come experience and share radical hospitality in person this summer at the Huss Project!
Last modified: March 4, 2020
