“All that’s required of us refugees of the broken cosmos is a willingness to come home. To be made welcome by God and to let our belonging transform not only the inward rooms of our hearts but also the outer rooms of our lives, so that where we are we dwell in heaven, though we yet live in the broken earth – our lives a refuge for the sorrowing in hungry search for love.”
Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth
We
have a visitor coming in a couple of weeks. I am excited for her to
stay in our home for the first time and for an opportunity to enjoy
the companionship. What fun it is to prepare for guests, to think of
ways to create an experience that nourishes a person’s body, mind
and spirit. Being a care giver of our home and sharing it with others
is the sweetest hospitality without doing anything extraordinary. The
ordinary simplicity of taking delight in the rhythm of homemaking
naturally creates an environment of hospitality. Welcoming others
into a space you care about is an invitation for them to breathe deep
and allow sore places to be soothed. A spirit can be uplifted by the
opportunity to rest from chores and the little extraordinary details
are icing on the brownie (I like my brownies frosted).
How have I elevated ordinary chores of keeping home so as to bring joy and rest to the two of us living here? This is where I begin, not when I company is coming. This is not a post harping on women to be great home makers but we (men and women) are privileged to be keepers of home – stewarding well the place we’re gifted for sanctuary and the people within. The attitude in which I enter into these tasks can infuse them with a sense of meaning and nurture, or begrudging duty.
As I ponder the preparations for our guest’s arrival I relive a time or two when I felt nurtured by another person’s welcome. There is a story in Sarah Clarkson’s new book This Beautiful Truth: How God’s Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness that expresses the heart of this type of hospitality. Sarah’s book is about her struggle with mental illness, doubts about God, and how beauty brought her to a place of wholeness. Her struggle carries her through oppressive loneliness and deep doubt to hope in God’s redeeming beauty. There are glimpses woven throughout her larger story of beautiful love-filled moments with others who held her through a long journey of hopelessness.
This book is layered with pain, hope, reflections on great literature, God’s redeeming beauty and so much more. My small bit of relating one experience in Sarah’s journey doesn’t do justice to her book and it certainly isn’t the whole purpose of her story. But I do hope this one window of hope will stoke your curiosity to read the book. The redeeming qualities Sarah experienced with a stranger turned friend, and the healing power of being invited into the beautiful simplicity of this woman’s everyday life moved me to tears.
“We are called to courageous creation, for the making of beauty
is our own gentle and holy defiance
of the forces of disintegration and the powers of darkness.”
Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth
I will do my best to share portions of her experience hosting with a healthy rhythm of nurture and nudging – an invitation to receive – a soul toward hope and restoration. Sarah describes herself as wandering from one friends’ house to another while in Scotland doing research. There was a dark shadow of loneliness stalking her when she found herself waiting alongside the road to be picked up by a friend of a friend, a stranger to Sarah.
The wait ended: “. . . a hobbit-sized dark green hatchback jolted to a sudden stop in the front of me, and a slim-faced woman in an old sweater with dark, curling hair rolled down the window. ‘Are you Sarah?’ she said in a gentle melodic Scot’s voice, with just a hint of a smile.” What Sarah thought would be an inconvenience was a nurturing encounter with a stranger. The moments were filled with surprise and beauty.
Sarah writes about her view from the car window as she is whisked off to this stranger’s home. “I looked out and saw the delicate thread of a waterfall glimmering through a meadow starred with purple and yellow flowers.”
“We pulled up to her home at dusk. A painter’s sunset of purple and rose brushed the sky, and the white cottage shone out, friendly, in the coming dark. She showed me to a small, upstairs room . . .”
From the window of her room she looked out at an “inlet from the sea,” “navy hills,” “an old stone Celtic cross” and “laundry flickered on the line in the patch of garden below me.” The cozy amenities included a “thick duvet on the bed, and a tray with china cups, a kettle, and two pieces of shortbread.”
Sarah writes how she was affected by the beauty surrounding the cottage and the welcome of thoughtful home keeping. “I was lulled into the quiet enjoyment of a moment I’d not been able to manage in days.” What a healing gift such simple administrations can have on a person. On one hand it all seems so ordinary, and on another it is compelling and life giving. The visit included little shops and lunch in another village after which she was dropped off at a footpath to walk home – a walk for own good.
“When I got home in the gloaming – and it did feel like coming home with the windows golden and my friend waiting with a wave at the door as she brought in the wind-fresh laundry – I found she’d made a rich, spicy curry, and I ate two bowls before I blinked. There was sticky toffee pudding after . . . I ate two bowls of that too, and we talked, late and long. She was gentle and curious, and met the difficult bits of my story I told her with a soft clucking of the tongue that eased and comforted me.”
As soon as I finished reading Sarah’s lovely experience of staying in this stranger’s home, I thought, “I want people to feel this way when they walk into my life, into my home.” I don’t want to be overwhelmed making everything perfect for a visitor; I want to live my life in such a way that a guest can step into my home as is and feel welcomed and enveloped by love. Am living so those who are hurting find shelter in my home, in my presence?
This Scottish stranger turned friend was thoughtful of Sarah’s needs without hovering. She nudged Sarah towards simple pleasures she needed for her healing: walks in nature, little shops, nourishing food, as well as offering a listening ear. Her new friend interlaced her need to run an errand and do laundry with Sarah’s need for shelter and beauty. This is real hospitality, being with others in their suffering. So often I let my need to be needed, feel important, that I do not consider and encourage a guest to spend time alone. How might we offer hospitality that creates a different kind of experience – that allows a guest/stranger time alone, as well as the gift of entering into the cozy created for your own family?
“I knew that every one of us was a living picture
of the Love who has come among us,
our lives, His portraits, painted in the vivid hues of redemption.”
Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth
As a disciple of Christ I am called to hospitality, to bear a brother’s or sister’s burden, to be with others in their suffering. I am challenged by the relaxed way in which this thoughtful hostess moved through her ordinary task and still managed to offer Sarah hospitality. How many times have I felt too busy to invite a lonely person in? What if I was willing to invite another to join me as I went about my ordinary tasks, offering an encouraging article to read or handing them clippers to cut a bouquet when I needed to take care of something requiring concentration? There is an art to this requiring practice.
“. . . time deliberately set aside for keeping house is never just about
‘making a home for my family.’ Of course housework is about making a home,
but a Christian home, properly understood, is never just for one’s own family.
A Christian home overflows its boundaries; it is an outpost of the kingdom of God,
where the hungry are fed and the naked are clothed and there is room
enough for everyone. . . . housekeeping is about practicing sacred disciplines
and creating sacred space, for the sake of Christ as we encounter him
in our fellow household members and in neighbors, stranger, and guest.”
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Margaret Kim Peterson, Keeping House, A Litany of Everyday Life
With the help of the Holy Spirit I accept the challenge to move toward a more organic hospitality. Anyone else interested? I would love to hear if you have experienced such a stay at someone’s home or if you found yourself able to give someone else such a burden free experience.
