Skip to main content
Archive

Hospitality of the Heart

by Catherine Doherty

By July 31, 2018November 23rd, 2023No Comments

This content has been archived. It may no longer be relevant

What the world needs most today is the hospitality of the heart, a hospitality that goes beyond giving someone a meal or a bed for the night, good and necessary as these things are.

The hospitality I am talking about is much more deep and profound. The hospitality of the heart means accepting all others as they are, allowing them to make themselves at home in one’s heart.

To be at home in another person’s heart means touching love, the love of a brother or sister in Christ.

Touching the love of another means realizing that God loves us. For it is through the other, our neighbour, our brother or sister, that we can begin to understand the love of God.

Especially is this true in our strange technological loneliness that has separated us so thoroughly, not only from our neighbour, but from our fathers, mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, uncles, aunts, cousins, and other members of our family.

This has, through its high-rise components, resulted in fantastic costs of housing, and it has eliminated the multiple family dwelling, not only of the heart but also of the house.

Our technological age has begotten a terrible loneliness! We must begin to give the hospitality of the heart. In other words, we must open ourselves to a sharing of friendship that is rooted in the very heart of Christ, whom we call (consciously or unconsciously) a friend, even unto this day.

We have to shed our “stiff upper lips.” We have to be open to the other, share with the other, express our love for the other. This can be done only if we open the doors of our hearts.

Let us do that now, before the doors of our hearts are frozen shut by some new technological achievement.

Adapted from Restoration, August 1971

[icons icon=”fa-arrow-circle-o-left” size=”fa-3x” type=”normal” link=”https://madonnahouse.org/restorationnews/” target=”_self” icon_color=”#a3a3a3″ icon_hover_color=”#175f8f”]